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Bebo Announces Winners of “Engage to Succeed” Contest Posted: 19 Feb 2009 07:52 AM PST Bebo has taken a cue from Facebook and has created a competition around the applications on its platform. Today the social network announced the winner of its “Engage to Succeed Today” contest, which sought out the five most engaging new applications on Bebo. These winners will receive promotional status on Bebo. The grand prize winner, however, receives a prize from the contest’s co-sponsor, the Sun Startup Essentials program. That grand prize winner was Bowling Buddies, an app built by Playfish Games. Nick O’Neill claims that he has been addicted to this game for the past week on Facebook. The other top four apps to gain recognition were Solid Sudoku, Robokill Trainer with J2Play, Banangrams and Kick Mania. The response Bebo received for this contest aimed at its developer community was pretty good, with over 2,000 applicants. When Bebo first announced this contest last November, it happened to be on the same day as Facebook’s announcement of the voting round for its second fbFund competition. While Bebo’s application contest didn’t have a comperable cash prize to Facebook’s $250,000 the concept behind Bebo’s own contest was quite specific and was undoubtedly backed by similar goals. In seeking out engaging applications for the Bebo platform, Bebo’s contest was very focused on finding apps that could be of great benefit to the developer, Bebo itself, and end users. Seeing as Bebo is also undergoing some major changes to its layout and design, it’s clear that Bebo is looking to make the best of its native and third party applications. In recent months we’ve seen the integration of AOL’s other acquisition SocialThing into Bebo, and building off this integration we’re also seeing revisions on user profiles for added features such as Bebo Timelines and more. These changes reflect Bebo’s desire to better outline user opportunities to interact with applications on Bebo’s platform and within its network. Additionally, partnerships with services like Motionbox to power user-generated media and subsequent sharing means that Bebo is also looking to turn its network into a highly accessible and interoperable marketplace. This too could circle back to Bebo’s need to find and nurture highly engaging applications, as its platform still competes with Facebook and MySpace.

Wetpaint Adds Premium Features to Drop the Ads Posted: 19 Feb 2009 06:46 AM PST Wetpaint has helped define the wiki for the new era, and a number of feature upgrades reflect the company’s ongoing dedication to media integration in order to offer a comprehensive and customizable environment for collaborators. Some of the new features include video galleries and enhanced discussion forums. These two upgrades are specifically designed to address the two most popular aspects of Wetpaint’s site–viewing videos and discussing topics of interest within Wetpaint. I can honestly say that I’m not surprised to hear this. Of all the Wetpaint communities I’ve joined, the ones with frequent video updates are the ones for which I recieve the most email alerts. In adding video galleries, the ability to collect and organize videos is a supported feature for Wetpaint users. This not only minimizes the steps needed to find and embed a YouTube video on Wetpaint, but it builds out the capabilities of follow-up and return behavior for continued interaction with a given video. For promotional purposes, the best videos are “bubbled up” within a Wetpaint community, with related videos now displaying, as well as the option for making a particular video featured. Improvements made to the discussion forums offer more control for individuals’ posts, with options to feature, lock and edit. This helps keep conversations on topic and in all gives more options to end users, relating to the overall direction of their own content and its context within a Wetpaint community. Additional control options are offered for Wetpaint page layouts, and new content modules. And Wetpaint communities’ shareability has also been extended, with new Wetpaint droplets, which offer the latest site contributions via embeddable widgets that can be shared on other social networking profiles and websites. Also important to note is Wetpaint’s new premium upgrades. While Wetpaint launched enterprise options for media brands like FOX and HBO, the new premium upgrades are now being offered to private groups, small businesses and non-profits in need of an ad-free site. This will cost $19.95 per month, which seems to be a reasonable price point. Wetpaint has also indicated that more premium options will be layered in over the next few months. I wondered if this move to add more premium options to a wider array of users had anything to do with the current economic climate. With ad revenue decreasing, competitors deadpooling and a larger acceptance of charging for services, perhaps the time was right for Wetpaint to charge for its services. Wetpaint CEO Ben Elowitz responded by saying that the company had been testing premium features for some time, stating that “This move has more to do with being responsive to the needs of the community than anything else.” Nevertheless, the need for socially-oriented web services to diversify revenue opportunities is nothing short of smart and expected, so I’m interested in seeing future developments in the coming months for Wetpaint.

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