Flight To Open Source
June 3, 2008
Weather it’s attributable to a fear of Google Open Social or increasingly savvy executives there is a real movement to open up social network platforms. Facebook has been the hottest network of late but is also once of the most closed and restricted. Not anymore as Facebook announces an open platform. Not to be outdone, Myspace also has plans to open it’s code. What the open platforms will do is enable outside developers to create extensions and addons to these services. New features will not be solely at the mercy of the original developer.
Within five years it’s going to be hard to run any kind of web service or application that is not open source, or at least provide a strong set of open API’s. This is part of the new paradigm of Internet business. Open Source has been around for years, but only now it is really starting to take hold. This is partly why Google has the strategic advantage over Microsoft as we move into the future. Open Source is built into the Google DNA. Microsoft has been built on the concept of proprietary systems and control. Buying Yahoo makes sense for Microsoft not just for their search advertising program, but for the Yahoo culture and philosophy. Yahoo also has Open Source built in. If Microsoft would allow some of that to seep in, it could benefit them emencly.
Social Media Morning 5/16/08
May 16, 2008
Penthouse Magazine embraces new media and becomes a social network company.
I Dig Sprout
April 27, 2008
Web widgets are one of the hot topics of 2008. Sprout is a company I found recently that makes creating and publishing widgets super easy. Everything is based on Flash technology which gives your widget a lot of power and flexibility. The interface for creating sprouts couldn’t be easier and there are built in components that make adding things like rss feeds, Twitter and audio files easy. The program also does everything needed to prepare the widget for publishing on a wide variety of web sites. I love tools that empower the common person to harness the Internet in more powerful ways and Sprout certainly fits that bill in the widget category.
Seesmic Video WordPress Plugin
April 23, 2008
Seesmic is already an interesting video platform but this new WordPress plugin takes things to the next level. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/YDCHJRXiqP_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Seesmic Video WordPress Plugin ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/53MaznvsaV”}}}
Will Second Life Go The Way Of Friendster?
April 21, 2008
Social networks are among the hottest technologies in 2008, but one of the early pioneers is only a distant memory. Friendster is one the first social networks and in it’s day it was the hottest thing since sliced bread. But as social networking matured and more services come online, Friendster failed to keep up and faded into insignificance. Part of the problem for Friendster was the fact that it was a general purpose social network in the midst of ever more niche social networks. MySpace focused on music, LinkedIn on business professionals. Now with Ning, individuals can create their own social network on any topic they wish. Facebook could be called an exception to this rule as it is a general purpose network, but they began life and created momentum as a focused social network for the college crowd. Facebook as also been very good at aggressively innovating their platform, especially with the addition of Facebook Applications.
Something similar is happening in the virtual world space. Second Life has been the dominating leader up to now, but the bloom may be coming off the rose. There is lots of competition in the virtual world space and much of it is of the niche variety. Disney purchased Club Penguin. Webkinz is incredibly hot, and now Nickelodeon is experimenting with a virtual world. There are also virtual world platform companies that will allow anyone to create their own virtual world. Sound familiar? Second Life is the general purpose virtual world with no real focus. It also seems to have lived out its 15 minutes of fame. I think if Second Life doesn’t do something dramatic they will end up like Friendster, an innovator that became insignificant.
Facebook Fights Back
December 12, 2007
Punch and counter punch. As I have pointed out already, 2008 is going to be the battle of the social platforms. Google Open Social fired the first real shot toward Facebook and now Facebook fires back by making their API platform available to any other social network that wants to use it. Of course, this is a double whammy for Facebook because they are not only spreading their technology wider, but collecting a licensing fee as well. This all assumes other networks take them up on the offer. Bebo already has, being the first.
The Facebook advantage: Open Social is a dream, but the Facebook API is real and here now. Thousands of apps have already been created and by adopting the API, you gain access to them all instantly. That’s a powerful proposition.
Two smart, aggressive companies going at it toe to toe; This should be fun to watch. And once again, Microsoft is asleep at the wheel.
Technorati Tags: facebook, google, OpenSocial
Social Networks to Social Platforms
December 12, 2007
The hot buzzword in 2008 will be social platform. Rising social network star Facebook got the ball rolling this year when they announced their open development platform which allowed software developers to create custom applications to run inside Facebook. This has turned out to be wildly popular and other social network sites are following the leader. Myspace has been working on a platform and more recently, news that LinkedIn, the popular social network for business professionals is also creating an application platform.
Social networks will become much more than networks in 2008 as more social platforms arrive, allowing users access to more features and marketers access to more of the so-called “social graph“.
Twitterposter and Measuring Influence
November 28, 2007
A few weeks ago, an application called Twitterposter made a splash in the Twitter community. Twitterposter is an interesting Twitter API application that purports to display the relative influence of Twitter users. The problem is that it uses the number of followers as it’s measure of influence.
We need to stop getting caught up in raw numbers as the measure of anything significant. How many followers do you have on Twitter, how many friends on Facebook? Those numbers are not what really matters. It’s not how many people are following you, but more who is following you. What is the real influence power of those following you and are you even saying anything interesting or worthwhile?
Technorati Tags: Influence, Twitter
Won’t You Be My Fanboy?
November 8, 2007
The new Facebook social advertising platform puts forth the concept of “fans”. You can signup to be a fan of a participating brand. Technically, this is a little like a brand forming a Facebook group, as some have already done. But this takes it a step further and allows the brand to distribute to you ads and viral Facebook apps.
It all feels a little forced to me. Usually fanboys evolve organically. A product or company get popular and people of like interest form together to talk about that brand or product and some reach full fanboy status. But it all happens without influence from the brand itself. It’s organic and driven by the customers. The brand just has to stay out of the way.
Here, brands are trying to create fans out of whole cloth. Are there really going to be Clorox fanboys (fangirls)? It’s just not a product that lends itself to that and I don’t think it’s the kind of a thing you can force. It would make more sense to me to indicate your current interest level in certain product areas. If I am in the market for a new car, than I would actually appreciate hearing from car makers and I should be able to open myself up to that. When I am no longer in the market for a car, I can close down that channel. Here, in real new media fashion, the consumer is in control of the advertising pipeline. I decide when and how to open the faucet and for how long. Many ad systems try to guess what your interested in based on your age, demographics or by the content of what you read online. But why guess, why not let me tell you directly?
Social Media Ad Glut
November 8, 2007
Om Malik nails it on his latest blog post about the coming advertising glut in social media. Om asks, how much is too much? Facebook and Myspace have announced new social advertising initiatives as well as a recent forecast that US online ad spending with double between 2007 and 2011.
So indeed, how much is too much and are we going to find ourselves as over advertised and marketed to as we are in the current mainstream media? So far new media has found itself relatively light on advertising and marketing. But as ad banners on websites become ever less effective, online marketers are looking for new and better ways to get to customers.
Maybe the key question is now how much advertising will there be in new and social media because marketers will always beat a path toward customers and more and more of them are showing up on social networks, but how good the advertising will be. How intrusive and impersonal will it be? We talk so much in new media about engagement and conversation. New media marketing is supposed to be different than old media marketing and this is to be our saving grace in the new world. But has the old guard now rushing into new media really learned this lesson? Will these new platforms embrace and encourage the new ideas of new marketing, or are we moving back into the frying pan from whence we came?