Friday, April 24, 2009

SocialTimes.com

SocialTimes.com

Meebo Teams with myYearbook to Expand IM

Posted: 23 Apr 2009 04:11 PM PDT

Meebo’s latest partnership is with myYearbook, the social networking site started by teenagers for fellow high schoolers. The partnership includes myYearbook using Meebo chat as a prominent feature on every page of its site, providing chat tools for Meebo users and guests alike.

The partnership should be a win-win for both Meebo and myYearbook, as instant messaging is a highly requested feature from myYearbook users. myYearbook is one of the largest networks dedicated to the high school age demographic. This specific user base is also quite active when it comes to online activity, making it a good fit for Meebo’s chat and media-sharing tools.

With a reported 9.7 million unique monthly users on myYearbook, the partnership with Meebo may seem like a drop in the bucket when compared to the reported 45 million people Meebo reaches overall on a monthly basis. Yet Meebo relies greatly on partner sites for this overall reach, reporting 4.3 million unique users accessed through the new Meebo service through such partnerships for the month of March alone.

Teaming up with third party sites, whether they’re social networks or media hubs, has been a successful way for Meebo to grow. It’s simplistic widget format and ease of use for end users has made it an appealing and mobile chat tool for web use, but direct partnerships enable more robust feature integration from an interface standpoint. Meebo has also taken advantage of its wide distribution to grow its advertising potential.

The past two years have seen a number of new feature and product offerings from Meebo that are rather focused on the marketing potential of Meebo as an interactive chat and media-sharing tool. Things like Meebo Rooms and Meebo’s platform have proven attractive to marketers and developers for enabling users to discuss various products, or for brands to discuss products directly with consumers, etc.

MySpace Execs Gone. Next Steps for MySpace?

Posted: 23 Apr 2009 10:55 AM PDT

MySpace has lost two of its most important executives, CEO Chris DeWolfe and co-founder and President Tom Anderson. With their departure we’re reminded of MySpace’s impending decline, but we wonder what MySpace’s next steps will be. Many complain that MySpace departed from its core competency of offering an online tool for musicians seeking a free place to build their brands.

But that often happens when a web 2.0 company is overtaken by a traditional media sector. And in the face of Facebook’s rapid growth these past two years, MySpace has also jumped on the open platform bandwagon after initially resisting integration from third parties. So what can MySpace do at this point? I’ve jotted down a few basic ideas, but it boils down to some semblance of reinvention, which i actually thing requires an introspective return to MySpace’s beginnings.

Continue to build out its application platform

This is an approach currently being employed by Facebook, which is probably better suited to the task. But turning to the developer community and providing a place for third parties to plug into MySpace’s large user base is beneficial to nearly all parties involved.

Converting this application platform into a self-sustaining marketplace would be the natural next step, but none of the major social networking platforms have achieved this quite yet. But being able to charge to some degree for the use of the platform and access to aggregate data and other metrics is just one way in which MySpace could continue to build incremental revenue while providing value to developers and retaining users.

Rely more heavily on integration with third party sites

-MySpaceID Icon-Something MySpace dove into with the partnership with OpenID and MySpaceID. Allowing deeper integration with third party sites is yet another way in which others can take advantage of the MySpace user base, while more readily building out their own service without having to create a “competing” destination site or even immediate support for a large database of users.

Facebook Connect has taken the lead on this one, but offering cooperative support from multiple services won’t hurt MySpace, and will place MySpace in a better position to leverage its existing data and the connections users have already made on MySpace.

Break up the bulk of its native apps

So far it seems as though MySpace should merely continue to take cues from Facebook, but there are other things MySpace could do with some of its own native applications and sub-sites. Since being acquired by News Corp. MySpace has taken on a distinctive traditional media feel, which could be used to MySpace’s benefit in some aspects. Spinning off MySpace Music and MySpace TV could be useful ways in which to more efficiently direct targeted advertising and enable continued integration of traditional and new media concepts for the purpose of future media consumption.

As cheesy as some of MySpace’s sub-sites appear to be, they still generate a great deal of traffic, and their design and user integration is superior to the features and interface of the main MySpace site. Chopping up MySpace into semi-independent entities under the larger MySpace umbrella could be useful and better for MySpace’s sustainability.

Create a self-sustaining marketplace for all things media

As MySpace began as a site where artists could create their own presence for free, the long-awaited next step was for MySpace to layer in more features to help these artists promote their work. The majority of these expectations never came to fruition, but it’s not too late for MySpace. The social network still dominates, especially for those musicians who need to establish an online presence.

Creating a marketplace around this, with integrated selling and purchasing features, mobile applications, extensive and automated media sharing and cross-network compatibility would generate revenue for MySpace and provide value to developers and musicians by way of offering them the ability to generate their own revenue as well. I know this is still something MySpace is working towards (for several years), but now is the time for MySpace to execute.

Do you think MySpace will survive, after losing traffic and users to Facebook and Twitter? Where would you like to see MySpace go in the future?

Interview: Tmeet Makes Twitter Mapping Matter

Posted: 23 Apr 2009 09:01 AM PDT

Twitter seems like the perfect tool to combine with mapping and GPS locations, and the killer combo is something many developers have created applications around. So what makes tmeet, the latest to combine Twitter with mapping, different from the rest?

Tmeet’s approach to tweeting about your location. With a mobile and a web component, tmeet is hoping to bring more context to your real time location and activity, making the question “What are you doing?” more relevant to both individuals and businesses. Tmeet is hoping to really build on the business potential of its application, adding real value to industries such as real estate and other retailers. Below is an excerpt of an interview I had with tmeet co-founder Sudha Jamthe.

Kristen Nicole: Does tmeet work on mobile phones? If so, have you limited your app to the iPhone and will you follow through on user requests to create an app for Android?

Sudha Jamthe: Yes, please try the iPhone app available in app store called tmeet (not tmeet.me) You can click and send the current location with a tweet message. You can enter “d username” to send a private message, i.e.

“d kristennicole2 running late”

Also the GPS location is not most accurate so we show the degree of error on the lower left side.

So if you use tmeet to mark where you parked your car which many users do, you should note if the error is 14m or 300m from the actual tweeted location.

The most common use case on the iPhone particularly is for users to send a tmeet of an address using tmeet.me and looking at the tweet on iPhone clicking and start routing to that address. Otherwise there is no cut and paste on the iPhone and its a pain to enter the address again.

We have requests to add tmeet for Android and also for the new Blackberry App World. We are looking into it.

Kristen Nicole: Do you see tmeet as being a useful feature add-on through other applications, such as travel planners or itinerary builders?

Sudha Jamthe: We currently have made the consumer app available and real estate agents and general users are using it to share locations as a tweet. We do an api to allow any app to add location tweets. We have some iPhone apps trying it out in private beta.

Kristen Nicole: When will you add additional language support to aid in your global growth?

Sudha Jamthe: We have add requests to add Spanish support and are looking into it. We are fanatically focused on users to guide our product map.

Kristen Nicole: What are your plans for adding Facebook Connect to tmeet?

Sudha Jamthe: That’s a tricky one. I am a huge Facebook fan. I wanted to do Facebook first in Dec and Facebook didn’t have the Connect Library for iPhone. We figured out we can add Connect support and tried some hacks, but decided to wait for the official Connect for iPhone. Now its available, we want to add it.

But we just don’t want to add a simple status update. We have users already adding tmeets which show up on twitter and are linked to their Facebook status. We have had lot of requests on our API side to use tmeet for corporate apps. So that seems a big area and we want to bring the power of connect to Facebook in a meaningful and unique way, again to match our user’s needs.

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