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Let’s Disqus the Social Times Posted: 18 Aug 2008 11:59 AM CDT At the beginning of June I announced that Disqus had “out opened” my comments. While the service made a lot of sense, I still refrained from adding the service for one primary reason: I couldn’t keep a local backup of my comments. In their most recent version, Disqus has resolved the problem and now users can maintain a local copy of comments while taking advantage of the Disqus tool. I previously suggested that one of the primary reasons that I liked Disqus was that comments posted by users showed up in FriendFeed. Theoretically, I could import a feed of comments on my site but this way, the comment will show up twice: once from my site and once in the user’s feed. Is there any other benefit to using Disqus? Well, one other feature that I find to be useful is threaded comments. Additionally there is supposedly better spam filters. I have yet to test the system for long enough to know but I’m guessing the company can back up their claims. Finally, being able to reply to the comments via mobile makes things a heck of a lot easier for me. While I could have logged into wordpress and then commented on my site previously, this service makes things quick and easy. Aside from that I have yet to figure out any other reasons to add Disqus. It has a nice design and it has worked so far so I’m sticking with it for now. Have you used Disqus? Is there any disadvantages of the service? Are there any benefits that I’m missing here?

Twitter’s Path to Monetization: Copy Meebo Posted: 18 Aug 2008 10:30 AM CDT This morning there was a post in BusinessWeek which discusses Twitter’s lacking monetization model and the possible ways the company could generate revenue. No matter which way you look at it, the most obvious way for Twitter to generate revenue is through some sort of advertising. Whether it’s banner advertising or in message advertising, advertising appears to be the quickest path to monetization. So what type of advertising will be effective for Twitter? If you look at other social media destinations on the web, each service provides custom advertising solutions. For example, Facebook provides news feed advertisements (which typically have some sort of social relevance) that significantly contrast traditional banner advertisements. Meebo also provides an interesting solution and it’s one that I think Twitter should copy. The advertisements are rich-media advertisements with the addition of user personalization. For example, Meebo’s advertising demo displays the Incredible Hulk advertisement. Users can easily switch their buddy icon to an Incredible Hulk branded icon as well as the site wallpaper. Users can also view video trailers and share those trailers with friends. Meebo then reports back to the advertiser what sort of impact the advertisement had on conversations taking place across the service. Given that Twitter’s closest technology is chat, this form of advertising seems like a perfect solution. So far advertisers seem happy with Meebo’s offering so why wouldn’t they be happy with a similar offering on Twitter? They would! The quickest path to monetization is to duplicate the monetization offerings of similar solutions. The only thing preventing Twitter from providing such a solution is the lack of a sales team. I’d be willing to bet that the company isn’t far from hiring one! Can you think of any other monetization solutions for Twitter?

No Place to Hide Online Soon? Posted: 18 Aug 2008 09:15 AM CDT Yesterday I watched an interesting show produced by Peter Jennings about the future of digital privacy sparked by a book, “No Place to Hide”, written by Robert O’Harrow, Jr., a reporter at the Washington Post. I was driven to Ted Leonsis’ Snag Films site thanks to an article in the Washbiz Blog. The film focuses on the future of digital privacy and is an informative piece which opened my eyes. Over the past few months my focus on digital privacy has increased as I’ve begun to realize the flaws with the existing systems and that we are in the process of defining privacy standards. For the past few months my digital privacy exploration has been relatively limited to social networks and when I saw the video embedded below, I realized how big of a deal this really is. The thing that struck me the most is how the same dynamic in which the private sector is able to act without interference from the public sector for the most part exists across most technology organizations within the U.S. I’m not sure that this is completely shocking but it is substantial. One of my personal goals over the coming months is to continue exploring the impact of social technology on privacy. In the process, I hope that we can interact with and that readers of this site can learn from some of the policy makers who are helping to shape the future of digital privacy. As the film below highlights, the government remains to be ill-suited to handle the oversight of companies that oversee the management of our digital identities. For the past few months I have expressed the need for the creation of a formal organization that oversees digital privacy. Whether or not this is a sufficient solution, it is important that this publication as well as others continue to explore this area. Without continuing coverage I fear that social technology could soon become as infamous as credit card companies when it comes to the trading of our digital identities without our explicit consent. This could be an unwarranted fear but without exploration of the issue I believe that we risk having our digital identities compromised further. What do you believe the implications of social technology to be on digital privacy? Do you think an organization that oversees digital privacy is justifiable?

Wordpress & Moveable Type to Throw Social Graph for a Loop Posted: 18 Aug 2008 08:00 AM CDT Over the past few years, there has been increasing tension among the owners of social networks and the users that interact with their friends via the sites. The primary tension resulted from the disconnected set of relationships across multiple sites and the inability to have a central location to manage our multiple identities. Hundreds if not thousands of solutions have popped up. Some have come in the form of branded products while others have been categorized as new standards. One thing that hasn’t changed throughout all of the discussion about resolving the problem? A solution. While some of these offerings have a clear advantage over others, none of them have succeeded at attracting mainstream adoption. Social Networks as the Hub The best attempt at centralizing the social graph has been Facebook who arguably has the most accurate mapping of the social graph of any of the social networks to date. With their Facebook Connect offering as well as MySpace’s Data Availability product, both companies now have a chance to own our online identities. It is not as simple as releasing the products though. MySpace released their Data Availability product back in June. As far as I can tell, the service has seen little adoption by developers. While I’m not completely sure about the slow adoption, based on the developers I’ve spoken with, it appears as though Facebook Connect could experience much quicker adoption. The potential for centralized identities is significant and given their position as the largest global social network, Facebook has a shot at centralizing the majority of users’ identities online. For once, it seems as though there is a company that may actually have the ability to centralize registrations as well as identities and also has the adoption to back it up. The digital landscape is glorious and simply when you keep everything else constant. Unfortunately things are not that simple. Let’s Mess Things Up Some More There are a lot of products on the web that would benefit from having their own social networks integrated into their sites. There are also a lot of brands that would benefit from having their own social networks. It’s for this exact reason that a whole slew of white label social network solutions were launched. Jeremiah Owyang has done the work of compiling a list of white label social networking platforms. The problem with all of these different solutions is that they each have their own login and their own closed off versions of the social graph. I shouldn’t be letting Facebook and MySpace off the hook though because even their new services result in large, closed-off versions of the social graph as well. The difference is that they actually have a chance at becoming the central location of users’ identities online due to their broad reach. Last week a large discussion ensued about the soon to be ubiquitous, blog-based social networks. Sarah Perez of Read/Write/Web suggested that the new version of Moveable Type and the upcoming launch of BuddyPress would mark a new era for blogs. Mainly that a large number of blogs will begin launching their own social networks. Duncan Riley provided the counter-argument, suggesting that people don’t have the time to join multiple social networks. Whether or not people have time, it is clear that the launch of new services by Moveable Type and Wordpress will most definitely complicated central identities further. Moveable Type will claim support of OpenID and Wordpress could theoretically centralize users across all the blogs users become members of. This makes it easy for both to claim that they really aren’t complicating things that much. Conclusion The web is still a cluster f*ck. With a bunch of disconnected groups trying to provide centralized identity services and a bunch of disconnected sites and services looking to connect users, digital identities have become even more complex. All the while Silicon Valley thought leaders are struggling to make sense of it all. While there are big players that have a chance at making centralized identities mainstream, we are still at the early stages of these things becoming a reality. Thankfully both Wordpress and Moveable Type are open-source and as such, it will be trivial to integrate existing services into the site. With the average blogger finding it complicated to modify the code of their site though these things could further complicate our online social graphs. We now have communication among our numerous contacts spread across email, messages on Facebook and MySpace, instant messaging and multiple other locations. There’s about to be yet another place for those communications to happen: blog-based social networks. How do you think all of these things will fit together? Do you thing blog-based social networks really complicates things?

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