Posts Tagged ‘technology’

Yesterday, Ann Handley posted an article on The Huffington Post about how it’s rapidly becoming too much work to maintain all the contacts that she amassed on Facebook. This is become a serious problem for many of us as we now have social tools that enable us to stay connected with a much larger number of contacts than ever before. We end up with hundreds if not thousands of contacts spread across our email, social networks, instant message clients and countless websites.

On Friday I discussed how social media is overwhelming. This has become a serious problem. This isn’t really a new problem but is instead a problem that more people face thanks to the new technologies that make it easier to stay connected with others. A simple wall post on Facebook, tweet reply to someone on Twitter or web based purchase of a gift package for that special client can be all it takes to maintain a relationship.

Now multiply that activity by hundreds and you suddenly end up with a lot of time being spent in order to stay connected. There are definite trade-offs for staying connected. On one end you can stay connected with people that you care about as well as those that will bring you future business. On the other you now have a visualization of relational opportunity (a phrase I’ve made up to represent the added value of maintaining a connection) and decide that it’s better to maintain hundreds or thousands of connections to avoid the missed opportunity by not keeping in touch.

So how do we handle the overload after overbuilding our personal networks (which is inevitable on social networks)? I personally haven’t come up with a perfect solution but here are a few ideas I’ve come up with:

• Understand your personal threshold – Rather than obsessively commenting on everything that any of your friends or family post be selective about what you take the time to discuss. Ultimately the discussion has only begun once you make a statement in response to any of your contacts’ actions.
• Limit your social network activity – Rather than spending hours a day on Facebook or another social network, limit the amount of time you spend on them and specify the times of day that you will surf through your contacts.
• Outsource your life – Personally, I don’t like this option but Tim Ferris claims to have been successful at it. If you want to try this route there is really no limit on how large your network can get. The alternative to this is hiring your own personal assistant but I’d assume most of us cannot afford such a luxury.
• Leverage the newsfeed – Rather than browsing across all of the sites you have activity on, personal newsfeeds such as FriendFeed and Facebook’s newsfeed will help us to filter out what is important and what isn’t. While we aren’t there yet it is coming soon.

Have any other useful tools for managing social networking activity? Do you think it’s possible to maintain a large digital identity? I surely haven’t figured out an effective way yet. I’d love to get any advice you have.

Peter Kafka has posted the January comScore statistics for Facebook and MySpace and last month wasn’t too great. A quick look at Compete.com statistics for Facebook.com shows a pattern of decreased activity during the months of December and January as a seasonal problem. As I will be covering in my post early tomorrow morning users are becoming fatigued from social networks though making it increasingly important for these sites to come up with effective monetization strategies.

As the user base increases on sites like Facebook and MySpace we are also witnessing a decrease in general activity. This is expected though. Early users on social networks are typically more active then the late-comers. Also reading too deep into monthly comScore statistics is never to useful. It is much better instead to look at year over year growth of page views and time spent on the site.

Facebook experienced 23 percent growth in page views over the past year and an 80.5 percent growth the total number of minutes spent on the site. MySpace on the other hand experienced an 8.6 percent growth in page views over the past year and was flat for the total number of minutes spent on the site compared to last year. Honestly, I think January numbers a less effective gauge for future growth. Wait for February statistics to see if there is a pattern of decreased traffic.

One surprising note in the comScore data was a 13.7 percent gain in the number of minutes spent by each user on MySpace. That’s a significant gain for the social networking behemoth.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down with Ann Bernard the Founder and CEO of WhyGoSolo.com. Why Go Solo, a D.C. based startup, provides users with the opportunity to find people to attend events with. I kept trying to allude to the fact that this site would be best suited for dating but Ann insists that this is a site for platonic relationships. However WhyGoSolo.com ends up being used, it was launched last month and has been gaining users since. Ann is probably one of the most entrepreneurial people I have ever met. Her company is currently seeking a round of funding so if you are looking for a company to invest in, you should talk to her!

2008 is the year that OpenID is laying it on strong. They started out the year with Yahoo announcing their support and then today OpenID announced that Google, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign will become their first corporate board members. All of this ultimately adds up to a lot of hype but provides a lot of hope for those that want to see the use of single source logins become an industry standard.

I haven’t seen this much momentum since one year ago when there was a series of OpenID announcements that made some of us begin to wonder if OpenID would finally become a widely accepted standard. Well one month later the movement lost momentum and it has taken one year to revive it. OpenID has blasted out of the gates and is running at full speed. I can’t help but be a little bit cynical though.

OpenID is definitely the best solution for having a single login for all sites but it still fails at managing your personal social graph. This is what the DataPortability Group attempts to solve and it too has received a lot of momentum since the start of the year. It appears as though 2008 could shape up to be an instrumental year in transforming the social web into a place that utilizes web standards to enable users to manage their identities.

The acceptance OpenID is simply one component that will help jump start the acceptance of standards across the social web. Do you think the movement will gain traction this year?

Techcrunch is spreading rumors and just as Alley Insider says, it’s always fun to play games. According to Erick Schonfeld, Bebo may be sold to Google for between $1 and $1.5 billion. If there was a social networking fund to invest in, shares of it would be up a ton over the past few years following the MySpace acquisition by News Corp. and Facebook’s $15 billion valuation.

If this is true, it appears that it has now become common knowledge that social networks are the future of media. Rupert Murdoch saw it coming years ago and now has the largest social network on the planet with over 107 million active global users. Erick Schonfeld points out that this would be great expansion for News Corp. into countries where they are currently weak. For Google consolidation of Orkut and Bebo would create the third largest social network following just behind Facebook who now has approximately 70 million active users.

For Google this appears to be a funny acquisition considering their recent statement about poor social networking performance being one of their primary causes for missing earnings. Then again, that’s a pretty good strategy to use right before you acquire a company in the space. At this point this is all speculation as Erick Pegged this at 50% odds meaning that this is a coin-flip. Do you choose heads or tails? Does a Google acquisition appear likely?

MySpace announced that their platform is now open for developers last night and by the end of the month, Google will be launching the Orkut platform. Suddenly within a couple months the social platform landscape has transformed from a single platform environment to multiple platforms all with different standards. You could have seen this coming long ago and that’s exactly the reason that Google announced OpenSocial in the first place.

OpenSocial Has No Standard Implementation
MySpace is the first major implementation of OpenSocial and it has only been a few days since it launched. Much of the conversation in the blogosphere so far has been focused on the benefits of the MySpace platform. One conversation in the OpenSocial group on Google Groups is fairly critical of the new MySpace platform:

This is setting a very dangerous precedent for the future of OpenSocial and Google needs to step in right now and force MySpace to comply with the spec. As it stands now, MySpace is the least common denominator among the OpenSocial implementations. This means that in order to write cross-platform apps, developers have to limit themselves to only using features that MySpace chooses to support. If you let every site pick and choose their own pieces of OpenSocial, you will soon end up with a pretty small common denominator.

Apparently OpenSocial is now a victim of the same problem they were trying to resolve. In theory it would be great if developers could build one application and it would immediately work across all platforms. This is the same problem that companies like Clearspring solved for the widget industry. Unfortunately OpenSocial needs to be adapted for each website that it interacts with. For those looking to learn OpenSocial as a development platform, MySpace is a great start but don’t expect it to be easy to simply port your application into Orkut and other social networks.

Applications Easily Get Lost in the Noise
Have you taken a look at the Facebook application directory recently? There are approximately 15,400 applications and there are over one hundred being added daily. By the end of the year there will be over 30,000 applications and it is going to be practically impossible to find anything that is useful. The application directory reminds me of Yahoo when it was a directory for the web instead of a search engine. Finally search came along and solved most of our problems.

Soon enough the platforms are going to need to come up with more effective search algorithms for their application directories. Also, as users began receiving a mass influx of application requests, they rapidly became less effective and now they practically have no effect at all. On the social web whether it is within social platforms or whether it is social media, things spread via word of mouth. That will continue to be the most effective form of marketing which also means that it will become increasingly challenging for applications to stand out from the rest.

Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research has a great post about why social applications will thrive in a recession. This is definitely encouraging new for me considering that I make my living from this industry. One of the primary reasons for this space’s continued growth is the low budget required for application development. Significant ad campaigns cost millions whereas social applications range from $10K to $200K depending on complexity.

The other primary driver of social applications is that they are measurable. Companies can track the number of users interacting with their application and can track the number of conversions to their existing web properties. According to Procter & Gamble, beinggirl.com is four times as effective as TV ads. That’s impressive news and that means that social applications will be one of the primary advertisement channels of choice during a downturn.

I can speak from someone who interacts daily with clients looking for applications in this space, I have only seen growth over the past few months. My guess is that most of the readers of this site are experiencing the same thing. Even as the economy perks up over the next couple years I would guess that we will see a continued movement toward online advertising since it is much more effectively measured than traditional advertising. If you work in the digital space, have you seen any slowing in spending by businesses?

One of the biggest complaints of both the Bebo and MySpace platforms was that they gave an unfair advantage to early participants. This time around it won’t be the case according to Mashable. Instead, developers are going to have a fair shot at competing against each other. Do you have a widget or application that you think is too good to pass up? Now is your chance. Developers will have to try and learn the platform as fast as possible to get their applications launched on the platform.

As opposed to leveraging FBML or SNML, the new MySpace platform is going to use OpenSocial with MySpace extensions called “Action Scripts.” Not really creative for a development language but this is what will enable developers to access social information such as friends lists and profile data. There also be a REST API that enables applications to interface with third-party websites.

One of the additional feature sets of the platform is detailed privacy features. Applications will only be visible to those that have been approved to see other applications such as photos and profile data. Given the security risks of enabling JavaScript for applications, MySpace has developed a JavaScript sanitizer that prevents malicious code from being approved. I initially suggested that applications would be more like widgets but it appears that there will be application canvas pages that developers can build on.

For developers these new features are great but for users the applications will not be available until March. That means developers will have one month until they get their applications published. This means that on the day that the platform launches there will most likely be hundreds if not thousands of applications immediately available to users.

One other interesting feature to note is that MySpace is launching a new development resource in conjunction with Google called Caja. “Caja’s purpose is to make Javascript safer for use on sites like MySpace, so that developers can create rich, full-featured applications in a way that is secure and trusted for our members.” Developers now have the next month to test out in the sandbox and launch in one month.

I have a feeling that this model is going to be more successful as there will be immediate discussion among a multitude of developers. Conversely, you will also get a lot of novice developers trying to build applications an cluttering the message boards with useless inquiries. Either way, this is a big day for social platform development. If you are a developer you can at least get a good night’s rest knowing that you have one month to build out your apps. Good luck!

There is much discussion taking place about the privacy implications of the new Social Graph API. Given the current state of the API the discussion may be premature but then again it’s never to early to protect against a future disaster. There are a number of discussion points brought about by Danah Boyd, Joshua Porter and Marshall Kirkpatrick.

What is taking place?
As I have been discussing over the past couple days, Google announced the new Social Graph API last Friday. In theory, the point of the technology is to ultimately construct our own digital identities by leveraging Google’s index of the web. It’s as simple as that. The technologies being used (XFN and FOAF) are really a moot point in this conversation. It is even more so a moot point now that Marshall Kirkpatrick has pointed out that Google will begin indexing MySpace pages as well to include in their index of the Social Graph.

Who is making the decision?
Part of the contention is that as Danah Boyd points out, this is not the masses that are choosing how their information gets organized and distributed, it is the technocrats. Danah states, “Being socially exposed is AOK when you hold a lot of privilege, when people cannot hold meaningful power over you, or when you can route around such efforts. Such is the life of most of the tech geeks living in Silicon Valley.”

The only comparison I can come up with is elected politicians making life changing decisions for a population except that the geeks have not been chosen by the people to make privacy decisions for them. Danah Boyd suggests that we’ll all end up like hermits to cope with the exposure created by these new technologies. I would argue that you can choose not to display your information on the web to protect your privacy. Then again what happens when you are eventually punished indirectly for not sharing your information with the public?

What is at stake?
As I alluded to in my last sentence, our right to privacy is at stake. When suddenly everyone begins sharing their information online (as is happening now), eventually we will be punished for not participating. Imagine students in a high school that are all active on MySpace. If a student chooses not to participate, they are going to be the outcast from the rest. Ultimately, we are currently headed down that path and now we are developing technologies that link all of our associations together.

The Social Graph API creates an image of your identity on the social web by crawling through Google’s index of billions of pages. Facebook creates an image of your identity based on the people you approve as friends and by the details that you choose to place on your profile. Currently Facebook’s version may be more accurate and may be protected from indexing by Google but ultimately Google has access to both MySpace and Orkut. If you were ever on MySpace chances are Google now has a fairly accurate representation of your identity at one point it time.

Having all of my friends connected to me currently enables me to have random chats with others over twitter. It will also one day enable me to walk into a store and pull out my phone and see what items my friends recommend from that store. Perhaps I will also be able to automatically control which friends can enter through my security system even when I’m not at home. Law enforcement will also be able to fight crime more effectively thanks to the new social graph. There are benefits but for many there could be adverse effects of these new technologies.

Can we have it all?
So we want the cool toys but we don’t want to give up our privacy. I am saddened to say that I think we gave up much of our privacy the moment we logged on. Suddenly logging onto the internet has become synonymous with being in public. We can participate in whatever we want online but don’t be surprised when your information ends up publicly available. As Joshua Porter writes, “I’m reminded again by the age-old saying: ‘the best way to prevent secrets from getting out is to not have any in the first place.’ As technology makes it easier to share information, it becomes harder and harder to keep any of that information secret.”

The bloggers will tell you to “Get naked” because transparency is ultimately in the best interest of organizations and professionals. In reality you might want to put on some socks, or maybe even gloves. While your at it, throw on some underwear because ultimately everybody can see you. Marshall Kirkpatrick sums it up perfectly, “It’s a matter of free will and sometimes personal safety. Web users should not be asked to give these things up in exchange for participation in all that the internet is making possible.”

Do you think we can have the cool new technologies while also protecting our individual privacy?

Last week I reported about tomorrow’s platform launch. Today Myspace sent an email out to developers that registered for the platform to state that the developer sandbox will launch tonight at midnight. MySpace is historically slow with launching new services though so I’m sure we should expect delays tonight. This is the most significant launch since the launch of the Facebook platform last May. The only question that remains is if MySpace will have the same viral growth for developers that Facebook provided.

As I discussed this morning on AllFacebook, social platforms need to provide developers with significant incentives if they want an influx of new developers. MySpace will need to provide the same thing and given their user base of around 90 million members there are great odds that MySpace can accomplish something massive.

MySpace has launched profile newsfeeds and now has a number of other features similar to the Facebook platform. It has been rumored that MySpace was going to duplicate a lot of the features that Facebook uses but that initially it would simply be a widget platform. I have a feeling that tomorrow we will see a more widget based type of platform and an evolution over the coming months.

Whatever ends up tomorrow, it is still monumental as platforms slowly begin to open up. Are you going to be developing applications for MySpace? Do you think users will even care?