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Gnip Pings the Social Web Posted: 01 Jul 2008 02:42 PM CDT One of the biggest problems with all these new social status and social content services is the delay in viewing the content via aggregators. Even Facebook’s newsfeed has its own delay. Today, Gnip, a company created by Eric Marcoullier, ex-co-founder of MyBlogLog, has officially announced their new service. For those of you that are looking to instantly speed up your social news alerts, there’s no need to sign up. Gnip is completely limited to data producer services and data consumer services. In other words, the end consumer never gets to see GNIP in action. Instead, all this means is that when you view your newsfeed via MyBlogLog or other participating data consumer services, you will have quicker access to the activities your friends are engaged in across the web. This service is ultimately a data interchange for the social web. Marshall Kirkpatrick has pointed out a few services that the company plan on launching in the next 90 days. According to Marshall, Gnip will provide a protocol switching service that translates things like XMPP/Jabber to RSS. This way various services can be interoperable even if they don’t speak the same language. Additionally, Gnip will provide profile discovery services to help interlink user identities across the social web. I think this service sounds pretty sweet but it still doesn’t help me manage one of the largest problem I have on the social web: reading messages from multiple services. Currently I receive Facebook messages, wall posts and mini-feed comments as well as FriendFeed comments, Twitter and Plurk replies and direct messages from users. It has become increasingly challenging for me to manage all my incoming messages since I don’t have a centralized location. Gnip doesn’t solve this problem though, it simply helps provide quicker message distribution. Someone else is going to need to deal with incoming message aggregation.

Giant Interactive Group Buys 25 Percent Stake in 51.com Posted: 01 Jul 2008 11:17 AM CDT Giant Interactive Group Inc announced to that it would purchase a 25 percent stake in 51.com, the popular Chinese based social networking for $51 million dollars. How did they come up with a valuation? Not quite sure but the $51 million appears to be a symbolic number. This values 51.com at just over $200 million, a far cry from the $3-$4 billion that Facebook is estimated to be valued at currently. Giant Interactive is a publicly based gaming company which has been struggling to acquire new users. This new acquisition will help boost their position and get them access to new online game users. Other investors in 51.com currently include Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital China, SIG and Redpoint Ventures. 51.com currently has over 120 million users compared to Facebook’s 70 million users. This illustrates how large of an opportunity currently exists in China. The battle to become the dominant social network in China has been heating up. Less than two months ago, 51.com obtained another $50 million round of funding. Xianoei, a Facebook copycat raised a whopping $430 million back in May. 51.com’s low valuation may be based on their $44 million cash flow which Eric Eldon wrote about back in May. With Facebook’s recent launch in China, it will be interesting to see how the social network landscape changes over the coming months. The large social networks are clearly stacking up their war chests positioning the market for an epic social networking battle abroad.

MySpace Launching Application Invites Posted: 01 Jul 2008 10:16 AM CDT MySpace has been working on a new Application Communications Channel (ACC) which enables application developers to contact users directly. This channel will also help support a more viral distribution of applications. Last night they announced details about the new ACC. Invitations will be displayed in a new folder in the user’s mail center called “Notifications.” While there were previously allowed invitation that were contained within general messages, these new notifications will be announced on the user’s homepage. Users can add an application directly from this notification as it will be displayed in a lightbox on the same page. I’ve included a screenshot of the dialog box which is displayed. The new application invites will take advantage of the OpenSocial requestShareApp method. Initially, MySpace will be limiting invitations to one recipient at a time to avoid spam on the site. Currently there are no specific dates for the launch of these new invitations but it has been suggested that the invitations are coming soon. Hopefully this new feature helps expand the reach of applications on the MySpace platform. Application Invites MySpace Application Install Dialog

FriendFeed Launches for iPhone, Bloggers Rejoice Posted: 01 Jul 2008 09:24 AM CDT Last night FriendFeed announced a new version of their site that is optimized for the iPhone. Immediately there were postings around the web about the update rejoicing that finally the site is easily accessible by all those iPhone addicts. The FriendFeed buzz has been increasing over the past few weeks and based on the Alexa traffic data, it appears that the buzz is paying off for the company. I’ve become more active on the site but I’ve also noticed that it is practically impossible to follow everything that is going on. There is simply too much noise. Facebook has been working to resolved this problem by generating an automated filter. FriendFeed also has a filter which displays the most popular items over a given period of time but it appears to be based on the volume of comments posted on a given item. I’m sure this new version will be extremely popular. After sitting next to Robert Scoble on a train back from New York City and seeing him obsessing over FriendFeed on iPhone, I know at least one person who will be satisfied with this new feature. Are you using FriendFeed regularly? Have you had a chance to check out the new iPhone version of the site?

Announcing the Social Ad Summit Posted: 01 Jul 2008 07:54 AM CDT If you’ve been paying attention over the past few months, there has been a lot of conversation about the monetization of social networks and a discussion about lack of revenue. I figured that this would provide a great opportunity to put together a conference strictly on this topic. We will seek answers to important questions that media buyers and social technology executives face on a daily basis. We will also work to help define how these parties can work together to develop more mutually beneficial relationships which will help drive the industry forward. We have already begun planning and have lined up some excellent speakers which we will begin announcing in the next week or so. The event is currently planned for September 15th in New York City. We picked New York City since it is the center of global advertising and following discussions with some of our sponsors we determined that this would be the best place. This event is invite only so if you are looking to attend but have not received an invite, please let us know of your interest by filling out the invite request form. Also, to keep up to date on what is taking place related to the summit visit the Social Ad Summit website. Over the coming weeks we will begin making some exciting announcements about speakers and sponsors. If there is a speaker that you’d like to see please send an email to socialadsummit@gmail.com.

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