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They Made Us Hyper-Connected, Now What? Posted: 17 Jul 2008 02:05 PM CDT I’ve spent the past few years on Facebook and various social networks. While I had been using the internet daily since middle school, social networks were really what helped me increase my ability to stay in touch with the everyday person I interacted with. In college, you go out to a party and thanks to the brief interaction you have with somebody, they instantly became your Facebook friends. The Path to Hyper Connectivity Then the real world entered and suddenly I had to remove some of the photos and monitor what people were posting. Unfortunately there weren’t any tools developed yet to filter out your contacts’ access to information based on granular privacy settings and friend lists. Within one year of graduating from college though I was already way too plugged in and had more contacts than I could handle. Within a couple years thanks to being “hyper connected” contacts lists became practically unmanageable. That brings us to today where the problem still exists and goes unresolved. It took us less than 15 years to go from the mainstream adoption of email to people being overloaded with communication. Throw in instant messages, phone calls, social network messages, SMS messages with your email and suddenly you feel the pain. The Primary Cause If you ask me, I would say that one of the primary source of hyper-connectivity and information overload stems from my social networks. Email is obviously the 800 pound gorilla in the room but a large number of people wouldn’t have knowledge of my email without being connected to me on Facebook or LinkedIn or one of the many other social networks I am on. Do you think the guys behind Friendster or even Mark Zuckerberg knew what would eventually happen thanks to people being able to contact me so easily? It’s hard to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg would have the foresight to know where Facebook would be today when he was hacking away in his dorm room at Harvard. Whether he or anybody else knew where this was going, the combination of my social networks with all my communication tools have made things difficult to maintain. Occasionally I want to break free from it all. This is my job though so I expect no sympathy from any readers. What I do expect though is that readers of this article and other can relate to the challenges of being hyper connected. What’s the Solution? So the billion dollar question is how do we effectively manage being hyper connected? One way to figure it out is to ask people that spend their lives answering these questions (like Jared Goralnick). I think that the primary people responsible for answering these questions though are the ones that helped make us hyper connected in the first place! Why doesn’t Facebook have a more efficient messaging system? Why don’t they provide tools that enable me to access and sync my contact list everywhere I go? Finally, why don’t they give me a way to store contact information of the people that have not yet accepted my “friend request” yet? While Facebook can’t be everything to everybody, they sure as hell can make life easier for people that are using their system. LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Microsoft Messenger and many others are responsible for the overload that people experience daily. Why aren’t they doing anything about it??? If any of these companies are going to be worth the ridiculous valuations they’ve been hyped up to be, solving the problems of the user should be in there best interest and their number one priority! Conclusion The bottom line is that I don’t need nor do I want to have my contact information in 30 million places. I also don’t want to have all of information exchange with people tracked in 30 billion locations. I want one singular place to track all of my contacts with people. I also want that information to be accessible anywhere. So how can anybody do it and why haven’t these companies solved the problem yet?

AppsSavvy Announces Media Buyer Dashboard Posted: 17 Jul 2008 09:18 AM CDT Today, Appssavvy announced a new dashboard for media buyers which enables them to manage all of their advertising campaigns across the Facebook networks. The application ties directly into Sometrics to provide media buyers with up to the minute demographic profiles for each application. Want to buy ads on an application with 75 percent male in the age group 18-24? Grab an ad on the Total Sports Fan application. The backend also provides media buyers with a way to track all of their active campaigns currently active on the network. The combination of Sometrics data with AppsSavvy’s platform will enable media buyers to have immediate access to demographic targeted campaigns. This is the first ad network that I’m aware of to provide robust back-end services to the advertiser. I’m guessing that this will spark a trend of other ad networks releasing similar offerings. The key here is how this partnership leverages the power of Sometrics. Just last month Sometrics announced their social ad platform which empowers the developer to choose how they would like to optimize the display of advertisements based on demographic information. This is an early step toward the optimization of advertisements on social platform applications. While the platforms continue to be plagued with poor advertisements, these new solutions will most definitely help improve the quality over time.

Userplane Announces More Partnerships Amidst Meebo Hype Posted: 17 Jul 2008 09:05 AM CDT Today, Userplane has announced partnerships with three additional providers, Small Worlds Labs, Magnify and Pringo. Users of the new platforms leverage the power of Userplane’s chat and instant messaging applications. At this point it appears that there is a war of press releases going on in the social platform instant messaging space. While Userplane has been providing solutions to social networks for years, only last week did we learn that the new chat solutions are similar to Facebook chat, integrating directly with a social network’s user base and user connections. Just last night Meebo announced that they too would be offering external web-based chat solutions to third-party websites. While the company already had a widget-based chatroom solution, the new offerings go head to head with Userplane. Will the company be able to take away clients from the company which previously faced little if no competition? Not sure but given Meebo’s rapid growth over the past few years, there will definitely be new found tension between the two companies. Userplane was acquired by AOL back in 2006 and has since continued on an aggressive path, sparking partnerships with many third-party sites to embed their robust chat solution. As I said last night, web-based chat solutions for social platforms has suddenly become an area to keep your eyes on.

Bebo Extends Platform to the Web Posted: 17 Jul 2008 08:30 AM CDT Yesterday Bebo announced that they have extended their API to the web in general as well as desktop applications. What does this mean for developers? Well it now means that a lot of the functionality you previously had within your Bebo applications can be extended to the web in general. How does this compare to the much discussed Facebook Connect and already launched MySpace Data Availability? Ultimately it sounds extremely similar to these platforms. The authentication method for web applications is also similar. When a user logs into your external Bebo application they are simply redirected to Bebo to authorize your website to have access to their information and then they are redirected back to your site. The trend toward opening up APIs to third-parts sites so that your profile information can be leveraged around the web continues with the launch of this new feature on the Bebo platform. Next week Facebook is expected to announce their much anticipated Facebook Connect service. It will be interesting to see how developers leverage these new services.

MySpace Announces TheGame 08 Posted: 17 Jul 2008 01:30 AM CDT >Are you into developing the next wave of social gaming applications? Want to attend the 2008 Tokyo game show? Well if you are a developer of games and live in China, Japan, Korea, or India (e.g. not a reader of this blog), you can have the chance to win a trip! The significant part of this announcement is how heavily MySpace is promoting their platform as a place for games. Social gaming has emerged as a highly competitive and rapidly growing space. Just this week the Social Gaming Network announced a round of funding from Jeff Bezos’ personal venture capital company. Zynga, a competitor to SGN, also announced today the hiring of two new executives as the company continues to expand. This is definitely shaping up to be a fast growing segment on social platforms and possibly the largest segment next to applications which simply extend existing platform functionality. I’m not sure about other user habits of social games but I tend to pick one game and stick to it. Currently my game of choice? Mouse Hunt on Facebook. As the platforms continue to mature, I have a feeling that we will see larger players enter the social gaming space. Another area of growth? The iPhone. With the launch of applications, more people are turning to their mobile devices for simple games and thanks to location aware systems on the iPhone it is now possible to build in social functionality to these games. Social gaming is clearly at an early stage but MySpace’s announcement today makes it clear that social gaming will continue to be one of the most significant segments on social platforms. What’s your favorite “social game” to play?

Meebo Launches Userplane Like Platform Posted: 16 Jul 2008 11:59 PM CDT Tonight Meebo, the web-based instant-messaging company, announced that they are launching an instant messaging platform for third-party communities. This new product appears to go head to head with the new platform announced by Userplane in partnership with Converdge last week and their partnership with KickApps announced this week. The launch partners for this new platform include DanceJam, Flixster, myYearbook, AddictingGames,Piczo, SparkArt, Sugar Publishing and Tagged. This new service will enable live chatting on various online communities around the web and expected to extend to other communities in the near future. This announcement almost perfectly coincides with Userplane’s recent announcements. Meebo appears to be getting more aggressive with their new expansion strategy now extending their chat platform to over 54.8 million users globally and 23.6 million users domestically. Meebo had previously launched a chatroom widget which enabled any website to easily embed a chatroom directly onto any page on their site. From the get go, Meebo will work with their partners to help monetize both instant message chats as well as group chats on their sites. The partners will share in ad revenue generated by Mmeemo’s new inline ads called “SparkAds.” If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because Userplane offers a practically identical service. It appears that there is a fierce battle among instant message providers to strike partnerships with large social networks. Who thought one of the primary battles for the social web would still be instant messaging, years after AIM, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger defined themselves as the leaders in instant messaging. The battle over instant messaging will be an interesting one to watch. If you want more details on how to get Meebo on your own social network visit meebo.com/CommunityIM.

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