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Bebo Puts SocialThing to Work. Is It Too Late? Posted: 11 Dec 2008 01:06 PM PST Yes, Bebo has joined the ranks of the larger social networks out to take your soul. Yesterday’s announcement from Bebo revealed its new Social Inbox, which not only lets you log in using their AOL and AIM credentials, but will aggregate social feeds, mail and media recommendations from a host of services including witter, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL (of course). Having been acquired by AOL earlier this year, Bebo has been somewhat slow to make any major moves towards revolutionary feature upgrades. But seeing the open standards emerging at a quickening pace from Google, Facebook and MySpace, Bebo is sure to get in on the game, putting its own acquisition of SocialThing to work. So with all of these networks looking to be the center of your online activity (no matter where you are on the web), who’s winning? Facebook still seems to have the first mover advantage, having launched its Open Platform well over a year ago and gaining significant traction despite privacy concerns and an ongoing need to tweak regulations regarding third-party application access to users. With the launching of Facebook Connect, the standards for open cooperation between services and networks became far more integrated. MySpace, on the other hand, still holds onto the highest number of users overall, and could stand to gain a great deal of cross-site and cross-network activity, especially given its recent MySpace Music endeavor which really takes advantage of its partnerships with record labels and the ability to turn MySpace into a better utilized marketplace involving recommendations and purchases. While Google’s Open Social initiative came out with more than a few kinks to work out, the more recent Google Friend Connect seems to be better suited to Google’s existing applications and could work quite well with other platforms. That being said, Bebo’s later entrance into the social activity aggregation realm isn’t taking away from the hope that AOL could become an equally competitive offering. The position Bebo has taken as far as its aggregating Social Inbox is concerned reminds me of an article by Emile Cambry stating that the early 2.0 start pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes should have been the first to capitalize on this current movement. So does the incorporation of such aggregation features for sharing, ease-of-use and recommendation purposes further edge out services like Netvibes or even FriendFeed? Or could these other services somehow be incorporated as SocialThing has been?

Do We Need a MySpace Toolbar? Posted: 11 Dec 2008 11:23 AM PST There’s a lot of connectedness going on lately. And MySpace is looking to stay at the forefront of it all. After announcing MySpaceID along with a new partnership with browser Flock and authentication service, it’s pretty clear that MySpace wants to make its features as easily accessible as possible. Today, the new MySpace toolbar continues these efforts, with a browser add-on that gives you omnipresent access to your MySpace account and quick links to various features. Aside from the auto-login, the MySpace toolbar sends you alerts for new comments, messages and friend requests. You’ll also have quick links for your profile and messages, as well as the main MySpace sections for music and MySpace TV. And let’s not forget the MySpace search bar, which is powered by Google. The good thing about the MySpace toolbar is that it allows MySpace to cast a wider distribution net for its “always present” initiative, given its recent partnership with the Flock browser. And even though Flock already enabled browser-based alerts and activity relating to your MySpace account (among other social networking accounts), MySpace is surely looking for a more direct way of getting users to return to their profiles throughout an Internet session. So far the MySpace toolbar doesn’t have an option for Mac users, but MySpace has stated that the Mac version will be released in the near future. Get the current version of the toolbar here. So do you think that a MySpace toolbar helps MySpace encourage web activity around its service, or is this a moot release in the grand scheme of things?

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