Main takeaways: Be authentic, get your feet wet, tone of voice is of great importance. Opportunities for service, travel, export and companies wanting to hit it off with the twitter crowd.

Here is the video from this storify post…

Disclamer: Hef unnið fyrir Íslandsbanka, Símann og Frú Laugu (eftir að hafa kynnst þeim gegnum twitter)

I was a bit surprised to see them let go of their full control and proprietary FBML and JavaScript apps. Now you can build a facebook tab using bog standard HTML, JS and CSS. No magic, just a page within a page. They even give you a couple of hooks to detect if the user is a fan of your page and a few extra variables.

A couple of weeks ago, a nice little project landed in my lap which I managed to turn into an exercise in facebook development. The plan was to create a short quiz to promote a trade show. My suggestion for everything now is to turn it into a facebook thing and the people involved let me run with it. This resulted in over 1200 likes in a week without tossing shiny gifts and prizes to the fans.

It was a pretty straight forward implementation aside from trying to post the results to a facebook stream. The documentation from facebook is getting quite confusing as they keep changing their approach for this sort of implementation. Facebook connect, social graph, FBML, javascript vs PHP it was all a bit too much.

So this post is just a way to share what I learnt from this exercise and provide a bare bones working example of a PHP facebook iframe app with stream publish functionality.

I assume you have basic PHP, HTML and JS knowledge and some experience of the facebook developer app.

Step one

Set up a new ap on http://www.facebook.com/developers/

Step two

You need to have a server to host your PHP code.
Download the facebook.php API and put it in a folder with the following code (save it as index.php). Take care to insert your own Application ID and Secret.

Step 3

Configure your app like so:

Step 4

Visit the Application page and put it on one of your own pages. You need to add it as a page in the Apps section of your own page settings as well.

This is just provided as is and you can see a demo of it on my FB dev page.

Foursquare and Google latitude are reaching medium adoption with higher smartphone penetration in Iceland and cheaper data rates (still silly prices though).

When I first heard of SCVNGR I was instantly sold on the idea. Their approach is more open than Foursquare and Gowalla. They use the Google Map places and provide the tools for the community to build more meaningful check-ins. Their plan is to create a gaming layer on top of the dull offline world.

This video explains how you play (app has been updated since this recording)

I set up a facebook page for Icelandic social media geeks and organized a meetup during social media week. This provided for an excellent test bed for a scvngr trial run. All the early adopters in one room.

I convinced the owners of Faktorý to fork over a pint of beer for 6 scvngr points, set up a few challenges on SCVNGR.com and just in the nick of time intended to activate the reward. Boom, turns out you need a signoff from the HQ to activate it. With 4 hours to go, I was sure it would not pass through the vetting process across the pond. But to my surprise, a quick email with the word URGENT and a couple of exclamation marks got a quick positive response and we where in business.

We had a total of 19 people with their Android or iPhones install the app, complete at least 3 challenges, including one where you have to physically bump phones and then finally flash your reward to the bartender to receive a free pint of beer. The geeks where thrilled and completed a total of 55 challenges and put Faktorý firmly on the SCVNGR map.

Tonight I created my first trek; Reykjavik pub crawl – so if you have a fancy phone and enjoy a sneaky pint, head down town and try it out.

I’m still waiting for a popular pub or restaurant in Iceland to actually embrace Foursquare or SCVNGR but we’ll get there soon enough.

I hope SCVNGR catches on quickly. There is room for improvement in the social aspect and online profile as it might be a bit complicated for your first time GEO user. I also hope they add more building credits for the people that actually build challenges and treks using their service.

Here is another video from an intern that gives good insight into the culture of SCVNGR

Conclusion; Icelandic sausages are not ideal for 10min+ in boling water. Take care when removing from pot.

Let’s kick this off by summarizing the work bits. I have noticed that people have kind of given up on asking what I do for a living cause of many hats and pots on the go at any given time.

Sauma technologies went belly up end of last year. It was a great place to work but unfortunately we did not manage to turn the game into a profitable venture before we ran out of funds. Learned heaps from this project, loved the introduction to the world of gaming and plenty of experience from running a company with offices in multiple locations. I took part in forming IGI and put the spotlight on the Icelandic Gaming Industry, also managed to get my face in the widely distributed EDGE magazine.

Being an unemployed father at the beginning of the year was slightly unnerving and I had to find some projects fast to pay for the salt in the porridge as we say here in Iceland. A quick post on Twitter landed me a couple of freelance projects and my worries where behind me as I plunged into fun projects for LazyTown, Sterkara Ísland, MindGames, Íslandsbanki and more. I also took part in launching Hugmyndaraduneytid.is and on the back of that started chatting to Guðjón Már about forming a company based on our experience from the National Assembly and crowdsourcing applications. We approached Nonni and Fannar of IO.is to take on the development role and soon after, the four of us founded Agora around crowdsourcing applications and assemblies.

We organized assemblies for companies and interest groups, including the association of doctors, the pharmaceutical society, 112 (Icelandic 911) and an epic event for CCP in Mexico in partnership with IDEO. When the government decided to organize a national assembly as the foundation for a new constitution, we offered our expertise and had the privilege to take part in this historical event.

Iceland National Assembly

Turns out we had different ideas about the Agora roadmap and around this time we split up the company and went our separate ways. I did some work with the IO guys and finally had more time to contribute to my other startup Transmit. Geir and Agnar have been doing a fantastic job developing BrandRegard and securing revenues through Smelltu.is. BrandRegard received silver award in the Golden Egg innovation contest and a couple of grants to fund development. BrandRegard reached Beta status and after 18 months of development was finally getting close to launch. We did some dating with the Icelandic New Busines Venture Fund which resulted in a 30% investment. The timing was impeccable and a plan was hatched for me to start working with the guys full time in January. At the same time an extremely exciting position opened up for the CTO role for the Icelandic Constitutional Parliament. It was a logical progression from the National Assembly and something I was very excited about. I did some pow vow with the guys and ended up applying and getting the job. So during the last 4 weeks I have been planning a mini parliament with all the bells and whistles. It’s going to be a very hectic January, but I’m very much looking forward to contributing to the Icelandic Constitution 2.0. I have a blog up and running in Icelandic covering my progress.

Work aside and on to family matters…

When Sauma went bust, me and Gulla decided to go half and half on the parenting vs. earning a living equation. This was a brilliant move as I had no paternity leave rights after moving from London and this gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of quality time with Saga. We tried out working 2.5 days each which was far from ideal and after some trial and error, Gulla worked mornings and I did the afternoons. This meant sleeping in, easy mornings with porridge and babble, walks around Fossvogsdalur and even some power naps before Gulla arrived for the switch. Turns out that both of us where probably working 70% and I don’t recommend doing this for extended periods. It was good while it lasted though and a fun change of pace.

Saga started daycare in August and amazingly got into Kindergarten in November. It means that she is 6 months younger than the next kid in line so she has matured amazingly fast to deal with the jungle laws and big kids. She’s adding words every day and knitting together more and more to form hilarious sentences. She is quite stubborn as well and Gulla blames it on my family genes. I don’t know what she’s talking about, I just give Saga what ever she wants, always and we never have any differences.

With the collapse of our currency we took to traveling around our island this summer. Not that I’m complaining or anything. We are lucky to have access to two brilliant summer houses. My family has a cabin in Skagafjörður and Gulla’s parents have a similar setup in the west fjords. Both with access to trout fishing and great outdoors. Nothing beats standing in a lake with a cold beer in one hand and a fishing rod in the other.

Katla moved back from Akureyri so we’re back to a family of 5 most of the time. Agnes started singing lessons and Katla is training to be a soccer star. This means that the family car is in use almost none stop. As a result, I started biking to work last summer and actually got into some sort of shape. My plan is to increase this form of transport and gear up for all sorts of weather conditions this year.

My friends from abroad often ask how we are doing given the crisis and all. I assure you that all is well. The girls sometimes complain about too much meat on the menu. I have become the master of turning low cost produce to gourmet meals, adjusted my taste buds to appreciate boxed red wine, tricked traveling buddies to bring the odd bottle of Scotch, so on and so forth.

2011 is looking good on the map. Given that both of us are now working full time, we might have a chance to do some traveling this year. Gulla is set on attending the royal wedding in London and we’re planning to spend the summer in Sweden with friends. I will keep documenting Saga’s development on YouTube, Flickr and Facebook. I might also drop a couple of blog posts here in the coming months.

I leave you with this video of Saga dancing in her Christmas dress

http://icelandwantstobeyourfriend.com might not be the friendliest of URLs, but I love everything else about it. Having the actual country represent itself as a quirky old soul discovering the inter-nets, engaging in conversation and answering back really appeals to me. The tone of voice and content is just bloody spot on if you ask me.

This is not your average social media flair campaign with a clear marketing message. Much rather a full on engaging experience for all those who accept and become friends with this island I call home.

Slowly but surely it has built a 52K strong Facebook page with some hearty quotes from friends of Iceland addressing it in the first person. Recent examples:

Also, Iceland being the old island and all, is pretty hands on when it comes to social media. You will find it on Tumblr, Vimeo, Twitter, Flickr and wherever the conversation is happening. It even has a Get Satisfaction page.

One of my eureka moments in social media was when I stumbled upon the facebook page for Iceland and was so impressed that I posted it on twitter and facebook. Soon after I got a rather sturdy email from Valgeir, who seems to be the mentor of Iceland online asking me to please remove my posts as the focus was on recruiting friends that did not actually live on the island. I of course obliged learning an important lesson in community building and focus. Since then I have had tremendous respect for all things that originate from under the wings of Takk Takk.

Let me conclude this with a video of an Icelandic knitting man

How to knit like an Icelandic man from Iceland on Vimeo.

I’m working on a pretty important website and was wondering if it is timely to introduce some CSS3 and fancy fonts. A simple question on twitter turned into a very interesting stats session where many webmasters and tech boffins shared their browser stats. These are numbers from many of the most popular sites in Iceland.

Ingi Gauti stepped up and offered the stats from barnaland.is Icelandic equivalent of Craigslist come Mothers united.

Ingi also shared this brilliant screenshot where he politely points out to IE6 users that their browser is an 8 year old piece of crap.

Hugi followed suit and published data from the government road traffic directorate.

Hannes from TM Software offered stats from a “popular” Icelandic site. They run many of the main screen realestate in Iceland so it’s anyones guess which site he’s referring to.

Siggi Árni joined in with data from Landsbankinn.is one of the main banks in Iceland.

… and finally Rósa Stef gave us insight into two of her sites

All of this gathered on Twitter within a couple of hours.

Scientific summary concludes that we’re hovering around 1% IE6 usage in Iceland except that odd site from Rósa.

So I’m putting a nail in the coffin and stop testing this browser specifically. Of course everything will degrade gracefully and all that jazz, but I’m not wasting any more time on making things pixel perfect for this ancient fiend.

Who needs flying cars when you have an iPhone. I was doing 50km/hr on my bike when I got the idea for this blog.
My phone was dutifully tracking my bike ride home through GPS satellites and modern wizardry. It got me thinking about all the GEO data that I’m pushing through to the inteweb tubes and the drivers behind it.

So here goes…

Runkeeper

Runkeeper is a wonderful multi platform app that has captured the data nerd and is pushing me harder than any gym teacher during my school years. It is a wonderful website with all sorts of maps and stuff, but the key here is the iPhone app that does a brilliant job at tracking my cycling activities. I press go, put the phone in my backpack and cycle like a maniac knowing where I reach max speed and which time I need to beat. Now I know that I burn roughly the equivalent of a Guinness pint cycling to work. My main goal here is to maintain beer consumption while loosing the gut.

Here is an example report from today:

This app does a brilliant job of marrying web and phone and has smooth social features where I can compare my progress to the active geeks in my network.

Foursquare

You won’t get this one until you really try it yourself. Foursquare has cracked the GEO app space and captured an audience like no other company.

This video has some insight:

But for me it’s just a brilliant addictive game. I feel like I’m playing real world Monopoly while engaging in new ways with my network and discovering new places to eat. Heck, I try out new places just to collect badges. You can check out my profile here. But more interestingly, here is a Google map with my latest checkin history:

View Larger Map

I also recommend Fourwhere.com, it’s doing a pretty good job at mapping all the happening places in Reykjavik.

Twitter

A while back Twitter introduced GEO tagging for updates. So any updates I do from my phone are tagged and you can find out where I’m Tweeting from. Using the same trick as with Foursquare, you can take the RSS feed URL and paste it into the Google Maps search field to get something like this:

View Larger Map

Where am I going with all of this? Not sure, but you’ll be able to track me…
I guess the future is now and who needs a flying car when you have a good bike?

This was quite unfortunate cause the first site has been actively promoted in the media. Björk and friends are petitioning to stop the first deal where an Icelandic energy company is acquired by a foreign investor.

The unfortunate bit for Skýrr, a major hosting and IT provider in Iceland was when one of the spokes person for Orkuauðlindir suggested (Icelandic) that this might have been an attack or some sort of security breach.

The company responded (again in Icelandic) in the main online medium where the CEO stated that all computer systems are fragile and it’s not uncommon that they break down. He also left the conspiracy theory hanging, declining to comment on weather this was caused by some Magma hacker group…

It seems like system administrators and PR people where on holiday like the majority of Icelanders in July. The sites are back up, but I think Skýrr missed a trick there to neutralize the situation. You won’t find any explanation as to what happened on their site, facebook page nor twitter. Meanwhile my network of IT friends has been chatting about the potential causes and reasons on Twitter.

My thoughts are in this region as I recently stumbled upon an example where the UK Government had some issues with one of their crowdsourcing sites and this was their approach to keep people informed:

They used Twitter to feed updates as to what was causing the fail and when they expected it to be fixed.

This is what people have come to expect. I have actually been in the same scenario as Skýrr some years ago. A server at Íslenska vefstofan crashed and burned, taking many prominent websites offline for quite some time. Then we had the same approach but today I would have taken a different approach.

People expect more than a press release in cases like this. In addition to the traditional PR responses, I would follow these steps of action:

• Tell it like it is. Involve the techies and explain in layman terms what is causing the issue.
• Communicate the current status and next steps using any form of media available to you. In this case a post to the company site and facebook page and more frequent updates on Twitter might have been in order.
• Engage in conversations on social media channels to prevent guess work and conspiracy theories.