Tuesday, December 09, 2008

SocialTimes.com

SocialTimes.com

Sometrics Experiences Continued Growth on Social Platforms

Posted: 09 Dec 2008 10:41 AM PST

-Sometrics Logo-As the first investment for recently formed capital group The Mailroom Fund, Sometrics launched last year in hopes of leveraging the increasing cross-network presence of user applications on the web. Over a year later, Sometrics is reporting 1,800 publishers of social applications and communities now using its social advertising and measurement solutions, with 1 billion ads served across its participating sites and networks.

The purpose of these solutions from Sometrics? To increase traffic and revenue. These are two very important aspects for any social media application that relies on traffic and traction for income, whether the application or network gains this income from advertising or the sale of services or products. What Sometrics does is provide analytics and advertisement metrics for social applications. Its niche, however, could be considered its cross-platform solution that takes advantage of the multi-network experience often seen by end users.

Thanks to opening platforms and other forms of data-sharing, Sometrics’ service may become all the more necessary. Especially in light of Facebook, Google and MySpace initiatives for data-sharing, all of which result in efforts to be the standard platform for conducing social activity on the web, developers and third party applications will need an outside organization to gain comprehensive perspective on their activity and permeation across all these networks.

While Facebook and Google have been steadily increasing the amount of metrics offered to developers, it doesn’t help as much to offer a glance at the overall success of a given distributed, cross-network application. The same goes for advertising, in the distributive sense. From ad aggregation to publishing solutions, Sometrics is planting its roots on two ends of the spectrum in terms of its ability to offer analytics for publishers and advertisers, which could help its own efforts cooperatively.

MySpace Renames Data Availability to MySpace ID

Posted: 09 Dec 2008 08:22 AM PST

-MySpaceID Logo-Last night MySpace announced that they would be renaming their Data Availability service to MySpace ID in addition to supporting Google’s Friend Connect. The announcement comes as both Google and Facebook roll out their single sign in services which attempt to help sites by giving them an easy way to integrate communities and with Facebook have access to user feeds.

Aside from announcing that the service has been renamed, there is really little new with this announcement. The company has decided to support Friend Connect, most likely because the Data Availability service has little support. Even Twitter has announced that they would be supporting Facebook Connect before what’s now called MySpace ID.

The battle for user identities and their social graphs is on but the current leaders appear to be Facebook and Google who now has the support of MySpace. For developers, supporting the multiple services now available will prove to be challenging. Facebook for instance has not seen the type of developer enthusiasm seen when they first announced the general Facebook platform.

Right now all this press is most likely confusing consumers more than anything else. While Google has attracted numerous blogs to install their Friend Connect widget, Facebook got a large New York Times article last week which helped build the buzz. Ultimately it will be months before we can determine how successful the service has become but it’s clear MySpace doesn’t want to be discounted as a potential competitor.

We’ll have to wait and see what the statistics end up showing a few weeks and months from now.

-MySpace Platform Screenshot-

Friendster Patents “Social Matching”

Posted: 09 Dec 2008 12:00 AM PST

-Friendster Logo-After three patents relating to social networking, Friendster is at it again. The fourth patent for Friendster, called “Compatibility Scoring of Users in a Social Network,” seemingly pertains to matching users within the Friendster network for various purposes.

So far, Friendster is being pretty tight-lipped about its intended use of its new patent, and there’s only so much we can conjecture based on the patent’s name and the brief description of “scoring the compatibility between two members of a social network based on their interests and scoring the correlation between two interests for a given member of a social network.”

When asked for more details as to how the compatibility score will work, a Friendster representative indicated that this fourth patent is a key asset to its patent portfolio, which also includes a patent for “social networking,” the process of adding content to other users’ profiles, and a system for users organizing media and content on a social network.

Given the expectations of cooperative networks and services that have been swelling for the past year or so, it comes as no surprise that Friendster has gone after a fourth patent related to user scoring and compatibility. If this scoring system is used for recommendations, matching purposes for easier network-building or a commerce-based marketplace, there’s a number of ways in which something like a user scoring and compatibility function could work within an established network like Frienster.

What would be interesting to learn from Friendster is how the actual scoring system works, based on information users already have or are probed to offer up. And it would also be interesting to see if Friendster will use this patent with open standards in mind, or keep it as a feature strictly used within Friendster for its own purposes. There are other networks that score users to some extent, matching them with each other and with various media recommendations. eSnips, for example, launched a similar program last year for this purpose.

Even though Friendster has another handful of patents still pending, the first-move tactics for patenting various attributes of social networks haven’t deterred other socnets like Facebook from setting standards achieving many of the outcomes that Friendster has achieved or is looking to achieve. Nevertheless, it’s clear that Friendster has a long-term goal in mind with its patents and approach to online social networking and all interactions therein.

Google: Good With Widgets, Not With Feeds

Posted: 08 Dec 2008 01:54 PM PST

-Google Logo-When Google launched their Friend Connect service publicly last week, they one-upped Facebook by providing publishers with an easy to install widget on their site for instantly creating a community. While the features weren’t robust, it made it so that anybody could instantly implement the service on their site. In contrast, Facebook rolled out their service with the a few partners, many of which have still yet to go live.

Why the announcements were made at the same time, most likely due to the two companies’ fierce public relations battle, the battle for developers is still undetermined. There is pretty much one simple reason for using Facebook Connect: access to users’ feeds. Google on the other hand has absolutely no feed to speak of, although I’m sure there will soon be a Google gadget you can get that will display a feed.

The company previously provided screenshots of a feed within iGoogle but as far as I know, no progress has been made on that. Until Google has the eyeballs of hundreds of millions of people that are actively updating their feeds, it will be difficult to compete with Facebook Connect. In the short-term the company has succeeded at building a substantial amount of buzz about their product.

On Twitter, Friend Connect continues to generate more buzz than Facebook Connect which is expected considering that bloggers can instantly integrate with Google’s service. Developers are probably rapidly developing integration with Facebook Connect though. I know I spent the weekend programming a Facebook Connect service and a few people I’ve spoken to have been doing the same thing.

Just as Twitter has become a place for brands to distribute messages, so to has Facebook’s news feed and users’ mini-feeds. Unfortunately for Google, there is currently nothing comparable. That is Google’s current weakness and something that I’m confident they are racing to resolve.

Obama’s Policy Changes Now Open for Discussion

Posted: 08 Dec 2008 01:16 PM PST

-Obama Progress Poster-New policies announced by the incoming Obama administration highlight how social technology will be used to shape policy making. While Obama’s administration is clearly playing it safe when it comes to appointee online participation, for fear of embarrassing the new President-elect, it doesn’t mean that Obama doesn’t support leveraging the online medium for connecting with the people.

According to CNet, Obama’s transition team will be posting policy documents from official meetings with outside organizations publicly on the team’s site Change.gov. The site itself is intended to be a transitional website, aimed at forming a conduit for ongoing discussions between the administration and the people. So in a way, Change.gov becomes a socially-driven forum for conversing about policies and related questions and concerns having to do with the organizations meeting with the Obama administration.

To that end, visitors will be able to download PDF versions of he documents, or upload their own materials to the transition team for review purposes, under the section called Your Seat at the Table. Comments are also encouraged–just visiting the Change.gov website makes it quite evident that Obama’s transition team is still interested in hearing from individuals that would like to contribute to the site.

What makes this stance different from previous President-elect transition teams is that the meetings with outside organizations typically took place behind closed doors. By becoming more transparent than others have in the past, Obama’s administration is further establishing that it will be taking a completely different approach in many aspects of Obama’s term, and including the comments and concerns of the people.

As far as the actual site goes, the Your Seat at the Table section of Change.gov brakes the larger agenda down into various categories, such as the economy, the war in Iraq, and health care. For each PDF that’s uploaded to the site by the transition team, visitors are invited to leave a comment or submit additional ideas and documents to accompany the available files. So far, documents are searchable by keyword, though if such a format of transparent and discussion-laden file sharing is to be used by the administration I hope that additional filtering methods are employed for better search, filter and organization options.

I imagine this sort of crowd-sourced outreach will continue through Obama’s presidential term. The format has worked very well so far, and there’s no reason to stop while the going is good.

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