SocialTimes.com

Social Ad Summit: Social Ad Network Solutions Posted: 25 Sep 2008 03:04 PM CDT One of the most interesting panels during the day at Social Ad Summit was the Social Ad Networks Solutions panel. The best part was the disagreement among some of the panelists. It was a panel of multiple ad networks (SocialMedia, Lookery, Social Cash, appssavvy, and Offerpal Media) and moderated by Allen Stern of Centernetworks. This made for a pretty insightful panel. Check it out below!

The Low Down on MySpace Music Posted: 25 Sep 2008 11:53 AM CDT Last night MySpace Music went live and I’ve spent the morning playing around with the new service. The most important thing about this new service is that it is built on top of MySpace’s existing music service. There are a number of competing services when it comes to MySpace music and the most obvious are iLike and imeem. MySpace Music aims to be the top social music service. In exchange for granting the music labels ownership in the new venture, MySpace is paying a discounted amount on each song that’s streamed. It’s not a bad model but such a system has never been tested before. Just like all the other leaders in digital music, MySpace is trying to figure out how to successfully navigate the space. With MySpace music comes two new key features: personal playlists and song purchases. Personal Playlists One of the key new features is personal playlists. For the first time, users will be able to create personalized playlists from all the songs in the MySpace Music directory and listen to those playlists on demand. They will play full songs with no limits. This is a huge step forward from what already exists and it’s a large step in what many consider to be the shift toward free on-demand music available everywhere. Whether or not personal playlists accomplish that has yet to be seen. What also has yet to be seen is whether or not the number of songs sold will cover the total cost of playing all the songs for free. Part of the cost is being subsidized by advertisements which are displayed next to the music players but the model remains unproven. Personal Playlist Player Song Downloads Songs will now be available for purchase. While not all songs are currently available (such as the ones included in the screenshot below), many will be immediately accessible via Amazon’s MP3 service. Not only will artists be able to sell their music but they will also be able to sell tickets and merchandise to fans. Amit Kapur was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying “We’re not only going to be their home on the Web, we’re going to be the place they make a living.” Updated Music Player Conclusion It’s unclear as to whether or not this is really going to solve the problems facing the music industry. For the most part it appears that this new service simply highlights the massive problems facing the industry as a whole. For now we will have to wait and see if it works. Thankfully, while we’re waiting we can go listen to as much free music as our hearts desire.

hi5 Launches Answer to Facebook’s Translation App Posted: 25 Sep 2008 09:12 AM CDT Last night hi5 announced the release of a new translations application which is compatible with the OpenSocial standard. The new service is being promoted as the first major translation tool using the OpenSocial standard. I’m not quite sure why the release was phrased this way to be honest. The reality is that this is simply a translations application for hi5. Given hi5’s international reach, it makes it much more easier to find users willing to translate applications abroad. Two companies that are immediately taking advantage of this new service is RockYou and iLike. While it makes all OpenSocial applications more easily translated, it requires the applications to be accessible on hi5 in order to have them translated. This application is currently not available on other platforms. hi5 continues to make announcements regarding them being the first to release specific features related to OpenSocial (including the first to implement version 0.8 of the OpenSocial standard) but developers have been complaining. While features are being released, they aren’t always usable and hi5 has been somewhat delayed in rolling out fixes to any issues on the platform. hi5 continues to roll out new features though and it’s clear that they are taking the platform seriously. If you have an OpenSocial application and are looking to have it translated, you may want to test out hi5’s new translation service.

Social Web Hype Hits a Maxim With Digg’s Latest Round of Funding Posted: 24 Sep 2008 11:39 PM CDT Yesterday afternoon Digg announced that they had secured yet another round of funding. This new round is for $28.7 million. Two things come to everybody’s mind: what are they going to do with all that money and did Kevin and Jay take some cash as part of this round? Is the company prepared to release the latest cure for cancer? Probably not. I’m giving Digg a hard time. I mean Facebook was able to raise almost half a billion after all their rounds of funding right? While the site attracts over 20 million monthly users domestically and even more worldwide, the site isn’t exactly at the early stage of their growth. Are they? The site is preparing to launch support for the Facebook Connect service and they’re hoping that this helps transform the service and attract a broader audience. Perhaps the site will become the social voting site for absolutely everything, not just news. After four years of operations, a lack of profit, and many unsuccessful exit attempts it appears that the next best option was to go for funding. I have to give it to the Digg team, they have some serious cohones! While I love using the site to find the latest tech news, I’m just not sure that the service is transforming the world the way that $40 million in total funding should. Perhaps this is all part of the Web 2.0 mindset though. Give a lot of money to people that are building services that help us organize the nearly infinite information on the web. Do you think this round is justifiable? What do you think they could possibly be using all this money for?

How to Use Social Networks in Custody Battles Posted: 24 Sep 2008 11:16 PM CDT This video is classic. Want to learn more about how to spy on your child’s mother in fighting a custody battle? The lawyer below is giving great advice on how to spy on your loved ones (or ex-loved one) in order to gain an edge in your custody battle. The best part is the beginning of the video. The lawyer starts off with the following statement: “In this video I’m going to talk about what’s called social networking websites.” The way he elongates the “social networking websites” phrase is pretty entertaining. Check out the video below for more entertainment.

Comcast Starts Promoting Plaxo Services Posted: 24 Sep 2008 11:05 PM CDT This evening while watching the television I noticed an interesting advertisement show up: Comcast’s ad for their new “universal address book”. Immediately I thought that this must be part of the recent Plaxo acquisition. Sure enough after looking around I found the new Universal Address Book service site and it does indeed leverage Plaxo. The goal is straight-forward: let everyone access their contacts and calendars from a central location. This is something that data portability is supposed to help accomplish. The one place where they can’t access all my contact information is from Facebook. I wrote about this issue earlier today. Facebook needs to open up their contact lists for this to work. As I’ve been saying for a while now, the real battle for social networks is the race to our contact list. Unfortunately nobody has been able to accomplish this yet but Comcast is going to leverage Plaxo’s services, with the help of Joseph Smarr of course, to try to offer this service. Unfortunately Comcast couldn’t get the service to work for me. Apparently I was one of the users being affected by some sort of email outage that I was unaware of. In the middle of my chat with a Comcast support person, the chat application crashed and my conversation was ended. Thankfully I was able to at least figure out a way to embed the following promotion presentation that was included on their site. We’ll see how long this stays live! Once Comcast can resolve my email issues I will hopefully be able to try out a more thorough demo. It’s interesting to see how quickly Comcast has integrated Plaxo’s services into their own. I wonder how soon we can see these services directly integrated into our televisions rather than having to use the net to take advantage of this.

You are subscribed to email updates from The Social Times To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now.	Email Delivery powered by FeedBurner
Inbox too full? Subscribe to the feed version of The Social Times in a feed reader.
If you prefer to unsubscribe via postal mail, write to: The Social Times, c/o FeedBurner, 20 W Kinzie, 9th Floor, Chicago IL USA 60610