Wednesday, June 18, 2008

SocialTimes.com

SocialTimes.com

YouTube Launching Long-Form Video

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 12:52 PM CDT

Michael Learmonth at AlleyInsider has the scoop about YouTube adding long-form video to their site. Apparently the company has decided that 10-minute videos were simply not enough among increasing competition from sites like Hulu which are providing entire episodes of television shows. Here’s what Michael Learmonth had to say:

YouTube’s 10-minute limit has served a couple of purposes to date: It keeps bandwidth costs down, and it makes it harder for copyright owners to complain about unauthorized streams: Technically, you could cut up “300″ into 10-minute chunks and distribute it through the site (and we assume some people have). But who wants to watch that? And short clips also work for YouTube because, well, it’s the Web, and there’s a limited appetite for anything that lingers on for more than a couple of minutes.

So what’s Google thinking about here? One obvious answer: Advertising. YouTube sells ads against videos uploaded by its content partners, but there are only so many ads you can sell against a short, under clip. Presumably YouTube wants to figure out if it can sell more of them against longer clips.

Changes to the Social Times

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 11:07 AM CDT

Everyday I read through hundreds if not thousands of articles trying to figure out what is important to display on this blog as well as AllFacebook. I end up with easily 30 or more tabs opened in two of my browsers and occasionally I decide to post about an article that I feel is particularly compelling. There is a problem with this system though: the inherent lack of information dissemination.

If The Social Times really is the supposed to cover everything that’s social on the web (whether social media or social networks), we aren’t doing our job well enough. While I aim to get up 8 articles a day across my two sites, I occasionally miss a few or don’t have time to write a substantially insightful piece. That doesn’t mean that I’m not reading about the issues, it just means I don’t have enough time to put together all of my thoughts.

As such I am going to start experimenting with a different style. While I’ll continue to post the same number of editorial pieces as usual, I’d like to also include summaries of other articles covering issues that I simply don’t have time to write about. This way, the readers can stay up to date with what’s going on and still have my take on what it all means.

If the amount of content is overwhelming, I will be providing a weekly newsletter with only the editorial content and links to all of the news items. Go subscribe to our newsletter and you’ll begin receiving it in the coming weeks. I will also soon provide a daily newsletter which highlights the most important content and occasionally additional information which isn’t included on this site.

My goal is to provide as thorough coverage as possible of this space and simply limiting it to “Nick O’Neill’s opinion” is simply not sufficient. I am going to try out this new model and see how it works. If you have any feedback, comments or suggestions, please let me know because I want to do what’s best for the readers.

New York Times Goes Social With TimesPeople

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 10:08 AM CDT

Caroline McCarthy just posted about a new Firefox plugin which the New York Times launched today. The service enables users to share the articles that they’ve been reading with other friends. The articles you read show up in a newsfeed-like manner comparable to Facebook’s newsfeed or your dugg articles on social news site, Digg.

The tool identifies users via their browser, not via their normal user login. To find your friends, you can simply search by name and location. The functionality is nearly identical to Google’s shared feed items tool found in Google Reader. The only difference is that the shared items only work for New York Times articles.

I gave the tool a test run on my newly updated Firefox browser and it worked smoothly. The only problem was that the toolbar which sits at the top of the page and is supposed to show “Recent Activity” didn’t display any of my recently shared items. That appears to be the only bug but aside from that, everything worked well.

I think the concept makes a lot of sense but I’m not sure that I’d ever use this tool again. Ultimately I consume the majority of my content through RSS feeds and sharing that content in other locations doesn’t make a lot of sense. Then again, I could import my New York Times shared feed directly into FriendFeed and now all of my shared New York Times articles will be seen by all my digital friends.

It’s nice to see the New York Times adding more social features but adding other contacts from this tool doesn’t make a lot of sense. This tool is yet another place for me to manage part of my digital identity and honestly I’m tired of doing that from other places on the web. Would you use this tool or do you already have enough places to share your favorite content?

People Search Screenshot
People Search Screenshot

Shared Feed Screenshot
Shared Feed Screenshot

Death of the Personal Homepage

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 08:30 AM CDT

As far back as I can remember, it has been a “cool” thing to have your own personal homepage. A site where anybody can drop by and get to know a little more about you. At one point having your own personal website was a unique thing but eventually the novelty wore off. While it’s still important to have a place where people can go to learn about you, filling your site with “widgets” and other random trinkets is more about self expression instead of providing valuable insight into your personality.

Fred Wilson thinks that “we need to move to a model where the content is all in the same flow.” He uses Tumblr as an example but the first thing that popped into my head was FriendFeed. The reality is that most peoples’ blogs and personal websites are only interesting to their family and close friends and that’s the extent of it.

Recently though, sites like Facebook have made it easier to connect and keep people up to date without the thoughts expressed through a personal journal. Snippets of our thought processes pop-up on our friends’ home pages thanks to status updates. That’s ultimately all we want to know when it comes to written content from most of our connections. For instance, most of my friends don’t read any of my blogs even though I have thousands of blog posts.

They simply want to see the pictures of things I’ve been up to and information about my recent activities. It’s the voyeur in all of us but most of us will never go so far as to reading every single article that our friends’ have written. I believe that self expression is important but I’m not so sure that it needs to come in the form of an incredible looking website. We can share our creativity through images whether they are photographs or paintings.

We can also express our creativity through the music we create, listen to and share. Personal web pages have been about creativity and self expression but they haven’t been as focused on connecting and ultimately connecting is the most powerful component of the internet. While widgets enable creativity and personal expression I think that there are already plenty of tools that enable creative expression. It’s more about connecting that expression through a continuous stream of content.

As such, I think the average person no longer needs a “personal homepage” which exists on a separate domain. If you are really in need of a domain name, throw a CNAME on it and have it display your FriendFeed. While this is somewhat of a tangent from Fred Wilson’s suggestion that we need to move past widgets, I think it means the same thing.

Ultimately we are moving beyond the standard personal homepage and moving toward streams of our digital identity. Do you think there is still a need for a “personal homepage”?

AP Puts Up Ridiculous Blogger Toll Booth

Posted: 18 Jun 2008 07:00 AM CDT

Yesterday the AP wrote about the new LinkedIn valuation:

It’s one of the richest appraisals for a Silicon Valley startup since Microsoft Corp. paid $240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook Inc. late last year. That deal valued Palo Alto-based Facebook and its online hangout at $15 billion.

The Facebook financing in turn helped several other startups that promote online socializing to promote themselves.

Ning Inc. and Slide Inc. wrangled implied valuations ranging between $500 million and $560 million when investors poured more money into them earlier this year, while RockYou was valued between $200 million and $300 million in a deal completed last week.

That quote should have cost $25. Hope you enjoyed it! The new policy set forth by the Associated Press is that bloggers should pay to quote their articles. If I had a $15 for every time I was quoted I’d be doing pretty well. Unfortunately nobody would quote me at that point. That’s the same thing that will happen to the Associated Press who will be meeting with the head of the Media Bloggers Association on Thursday according to Tim Conneally of the BetaNews.

While policing for continuous misuse of content is a similar strategy used by leaders in the music industry, attacking individual bloggers one at a time will fail miserably. Then again, paraphrasing articles is just as easy and makes linking back to paraphrased articles unnecessary. Do you think the new strategy being used by the Associated press will work?

AP Toll Booth Screenshot
Screenshot of the AP Toll Both … Perhaps I should have paid for lifting a screenshot

LinkedIn Gets Its Billion Dollar Valuation

Posted: 17 Jun 2008 09:44 PM CDT

LinkedIn has raised $53 million from Bain Capital Ventures giving the company a $1 billion valuation. The company has experienced massive growth over the past year. 319 percent to be exact according to statistics released in April. While the company is a fraction of the size of Facebook, the company has an extremely targeted user base with high average household incomes and a higher median age then most of the large social networks.

A good analogy would be that LinkedIn is the Wall Street Journal of social networks. There’s no clear path for LinkedIn from here but there is a lot of buzz surrounding their soon to be released platform which is expected to attract the attention of premium brands. LinkedIn has now raised a total of $80 million. Don’t expect them to start selling virtual goods anytime soon though.

LinkedIn appears to be focused on building out their rapidly expanding user base. There had been substantial speculation that the company would get acquired by News Corp to integrate into the Wall Street Journal. Based on the recent round of financing any partnership between the two companies will most likely be delayed.

The social networking space continues to heat up with new rounds of financing by the industry leaders. It will be interesting to see how this all transforms over the next 6 to 12 months as the focus shifts to cross-platform communication and integration. Oh and lets not forget monetization.

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