Gina Bianchini is an appealing spokesperson for social networking. The Stanford MBA and former financial analyst at Goldman, Sachs is now working with Netscape founder Marc Andreessen on Ning, a service provider that enables one to build soc nets around any interest.
So far, 170,000 people or groups have chosen to do so.
Here’s the one that motivated me to join.
Motley Fool wants to know how much Facebook is worth. So they posed the question to Anders Bylund, Rick Aristotle Munarriz, and Tim Beyers.
This is what Bylund says:
Since some of the finest marketing minds in the world have tried and largely failed to monetize social networking already, I see many years of losses and negative cash flows ahead for Facebook.
The other two are more optimistic.
Social media consultant, Brian Oberkirch, doesn’t want brands to waste resources by building their own social networks.
Here’s what he does want to see:
What would save you money and me time, is for you to be like the Web. Made up of small pieces that connect just about everywhere. Just add bandwidth & remix. Make use of my friend lists. Make use of my profile. Make use of my verified identity. Make use of my tastes expressed through all manner of metadata. Show me value before you ask me to cough up time & data. Make it simple for your content to roam to where I want to go. Let me remix it and showcase it to my tribe in ways that work for me.
Social media consultants ask a lot of brands.
For those of us living out on the bleeding edge of social media, Facebook is so 2007. But that’s not true for millions of our less-hyperlinked peers.
Take Mary Mitchell of the Chicago Sun-Times, for instance. She has a new Facebook profile, but she’s not happy about it.
That journalists have to put themselves in this virtual marketplace makes me a little sad. It just seems phony.
It feels like we are scuffling Baby Boomers trying to keep up with Generations X, Y and Z.
I’m still one of those people who looks a person in the eye when I’m talking. Really, it irks me to no end to have a conversation with someone who is fiddling with his or her BlackBerry.
The truth is, we should savor the moment we feel a connection with someone that leads to a genuine friendship.
Those moments don’t come around too often.
Frankly, what I’ve learned over the years is that a couple of true friends can help you get through anything.
It won’t be easy jumping into this new world of make-believe.
After signing up for CityTrex, Dopplr and GoodReads this weekend (and sprucing up my Upcoming.org page), I have to ask, how many freaking soc nets can one person join before the utility wears off? Despite the clear value in each individual offering, there has to be a limit, right?
Of course, it’s a big part of my job to know what’s happening out there in social media land, but still. And the thing is, I’m not even close to being on all of the “important” soc nets. I’m not on Pownce, for instance.
Anil Dash is on MySpace, but not he’s not active there, nor supportive. Here’s the headline he’s running on his page:
I keep thinking someone’s going to create one place where all this functionality and content can co-exist in perpetuity. Facebook is the closest thing we have at the moment, thanks to their open source widgets which allow users to import some of their outside soc net data, like photos from Flickr or bookmarks from del.icio.us.
According to The New York Times, the Facebook group “How to permanently delete your facebook account” has almost 4,300 members and is steadily growing.
“It’s like the Hotel California,†said Nipon Das, 34, a director at a biotechnology consulting firm in Manhattan, who tried unsuccessfully to delete his account this fall. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.â€
“The thing they offer advertisers is that they can connect to groups of people. I can see why they wouldn’t want to throw away anyone’s information, but there’s a conflict with privacy,†said Alan Burlison, 46, a British software engineer who succeeded in deleting his account only after he complained in the British press.
BONUS LINK: On a dark desert highway, circa ’76
Until I saw it on TV last night, I didn’t know there was an iPhone specific version of Facebook. But there is and Apple wants the MyFaceSpacers to know about it.
MySpace is now “open” for business.
According to The Wall Street Journal, MySpace will formally launch the MySpace Developer Platform next Tuesday with a kickoff event and workshop at its new San Francisco office.
The company said the program should result in innovations in how friends connect and communicate.
MySpace already has informally allowed developers to create interactive applications known as “widgets.” The photo-sharing service Photobucket became so popular that MySpace’s parent company bought it for about $300 million.
By creating a formal developers program, MySpace plans to give programmers “deeper access” to the site and the ability to “build richer applications as part of it,” said Amit Kapur, 26, named Tuesday as MySpace’s chief operating officer.
I remember that whenever I had to do some ‘casual seeding’ for a promo video for an agency, I had a document with all the usernames and passwords of the sites I would dump the file to. It would take me up to a day to drill down that list, surf to the site and log in, upload the video, wait for the encoding and then bookmark the url of the clip to track the number of views afterwards. I know seeding promotonial clips has taken a downfall a bit, since not all communities are that keen on ‘being abused’ by ‘yet another agency that wants to score’ with a clip in the hopes it goes viral. So. Here is a solution that can make some people very pissed, but at the same time would come in very handy for an agency to start the seeding and save a lot of time.
In comes Hey!Spread…
First thing to do the ‘undercover work’ is to have some sleeping accounts. Just go to the sites listed below and register for an account. You better start making those on beforehand, even when you don’t have a clip to seed. You can put some ‘general’ funny clips on the account and pretend to be a regular user. It’s good to have a history on a site. The longer the better. It’s good to have some activity on that account as well, it will add up to your credibility. Write down all the usernames and passwords and then head over to the Hey!Spread website.
With a simple login, you get access to their service, name your movie, tag it and start the uploading. Hey!Spread will upload your movie to:
All the links above go directly to the registration page of the sites, so in case you don’t have a username/password on that site yet, you don’t have to look for the signup page.
Hey!Spread also allows you to add a watermark to the video file, in case you want to brand it for an official release or something. As soon as you start uploading your file, all you have to do is sit back and relax. The only thing you have to wait for is the processing time of each individual video site. When everything is uploaded, you get the URL to the location of the uploaded clip. Just copy-paste that list, put it in an e-mail or a Word document, and go check the views if you need to harvest the results.
As a bonus, you can use the Hey!Spread API which allows you to propose Hey!Spread in white label as a innovative and addictive feature to your users or clients. Allow them to mass-distribute video content over the best video platforms at any time, but still be the solution provider that came up with this brilliant plan for your customer!
Have fun.
Paul Martecchini, formerly of Yahoo, appears in a video on Brandweek to help brands understand how to play on soc nets.
There’s a lot of what NOT to do, but then Martecchini points to how Addidas rolls.
Martecchini says, “Nobody one wants to join the social network of a corporation. It’s too impersonal.” He believes brands need to let real people do their social networking for them; hence the appeal of Addidas’ approach.
The New York Times is running an interesting piece on MySpace, which receives more than 1.3 billion page views a day and has 110 million members.
For instance, I now know that Chris DeWolfe, the business face of the company, and co-founder Tom Anderson, 37, the product specialist, both recently signed new contracts reported to be worth $7.5 million a year.
But the thing that stands out for me is the realization that soc nets like MyFaceSpace ostensibly function as portals today.
“Some people still perceive MySpace like it was in early 2004, as a niche place for scenesters in New York and Los Angeles. That’s how it started, but it’s become very mainstream,†Mr. DeWolfe, 41, said. “It’s about consuming content and discovering pop culture.â€
As a result, the MySpace site resembles a portal like Yahoo or AOL as much as a social networking site. Peter F. Chernin, the president and chief operating officer of the News Corporation, called MySpace a “contemporary media platform†and said the site existed to “create content and connect people to one another.â€
Fox Interactive “clearly envisioned them as a portal,†said Alan Rambam, a senior vice president at the ad agency Fleishman Hillard.
Hugh Macleod is not part of the Facebook-hating mob (or is it a clique?) but he does like this critical Guardian piece on the politics behind the company.
Investigative journalist, Tom Hodgkinson, says he hates Facebook in his lead. He then delves into a deep background check on the money men behind the soc net.
Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners. Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook’s current valuation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn.
Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him “one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country”.
But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the “multiculture” led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review – motto: Fiat Lux (“Let there be light”). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself “way libertarian”.
I like what Marshall Kirkpatrick has to say about launching a social network in today’s media environment.
Social networks have caught on for a reason – they offer functionality that’s very useful for a lot of people in many different communities of interest. That said, everyone is wary of copy-cat, roach-motel, me-too social networks. Why not have your cake and eat it too? By framing the extension of your existing site as just that, an extension of your existing users’ profile capabilities, instead of as a social network launch – you can make everyone happy and maintain your dignity.
He also has some interesting things to offer on while labeling a soc net.
You could build your own social networking functionality for your site, but chances are that’s not your area of expertise. In that case, you may want to let someone else do that for you. Check out KickApps, CollectiveX, Elgg, PeopleAggregator and the TechCrunch list of white label social network vendors.
There are enough white label social network options on the market that it should be a buyer’s market and vendors should be innovating rapidly to serve user needs and differentiate themselves.
I’m likin’ what I’m hearing because I’m intent on building a soc net for bars and those who frequent bars. If you have any advise for me concerning this project, or want to contribute in some way, please let me know.
George, you can be a charter member!
Jonah Bloom of Ad Age sees falling debris on the MyFaceSpace horizon.
Facebook and MySpace will have the longest lines of advertisers looking to get into their clubs in 2008. Of course, as those advertisers pay their admission fees and filter in, there’ll be more Beacon-backlash-type tales and plenty of grumbling from the natives. Gated communities, with subscription or premium-service business models, will pop up offering better online living without the nasty ad riff-raff. Still, the leading social networks already have the scale to record rapid ad revenue growth this year. The question is whether they’ll grow fast enough to persuade all the VCs to stand by the thousands of Web 2.0 businesses that are also seeking ads as their major source of income. They can’t all be winners — marketing money moves more slowly than venture capital, if it moves at all — and there’ll be a host of implosions.
It seems the bone of contention over Facebook’s Beacon application was but the tip of the iceberg. Now Wired is exploring the company’s “Social Ad” platform and raising more questions about consent and privacy.
Have you used Facebook to give a shout-out to businesses you like? Best make sure your profile picture catches your best side, because you might be an unwitting star in those businesses’ next Facebook ad campaigns.
These ads, bought by participating businesses, insert your name and profile picture directly into their pitches. Based on anecdotal evidence, the ads started to roll out right before the holidays.
According to Facebook, a user has to take a “social action” in order to trigger the appearance of their name and picture in an advertisement.
Egg is hard to get off one’s face. Especially when it dries.
I can just hear the Facebookies explaining the concept to the ad buyers. UGC is all that, blah blah blah…But the problem is none of this matches up to user generated content. It’s all Facebook generated content riding on the backs of mostly unwitting users.
BusinessWeek has a new video program called Digital Dish. Fred Wilson, aka “A VC,” stopped by for a chat, which turned to soc nets and how some of them are bound to falter, if not disappear from the web altogether.
Here’s Wilson’s response to that charge…
“I think that you’re missing one thing, which is that the web itself is becoming social. And the large social networks—whether it be MySpace or Facebook, Bebo, Meebo, Friendster even—will have a second life as providers of this social graph, data, into web services that are built on top of them. Social networking is a piece of every website that’s out there. There will be social networking on BusinessWeek.com, provided through Facebook. Social networking is an infrastructure.”
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
