What is particularly surprising to me is Friendster is still alive and well—in South East Asia. This map does not represent Chinese social network sites though, which I think will likely tip the figures.
Friendfeed came out of private-beta and publicly launched today.
Friendfeed integrates with your friends' popular social destinations (e.g. del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter) and aggregates them in a single feed. It's all the things that you make Facebook addictive without the splur of application requests that annoys you.
One really cool feature of FriendFeed is the idea of imaginary friends. When you add an imaginary friend and hook up their user profile on other networks, their activities will get added to your friends' feed and you can enjoy the ambient voyeuristic addiction of your social sphere without the added guilt of spamming your friends to join yet-another network where you can be dumb-founded for explaining the networks' immediate benefits (think Twitter).
You can comment on any of your friends' items across all the sites. The comments you make are only visible to your friends, making it possible to discuss things among your own circle of friends on even the most popular items without the noise of the public Web that most won't want. I do wish however that FriendFeed would also post comments on the public web (particularly for Flickr).
I have been beta-testing this site since last year and I am very happy with it. Create your account and try it out!
At a time when you are getting bored with yet another social networking site with a professional twist following LinkedIn's success, Notchup joined the game with a truly innovative twist to the game: get paid of interview for jobs.
That's right folks: Notchup asks the companies to pay up for a time of you sitting in for an interview.
How much is your time worth? Apparently a whole lot. In fact, it looks like that I can possibly make a living out of going to job interviews.
Here's more: the company gives its users incentive to invite their friends who might be interested in other jobs: for each friend you invite, they'll pay you a bonus equal to 10% of what your friend earns on every interview they do for a year.
It sounds kind of like a pyramid scheme to me but I signed up anyway. We'll see what happens. Like Ziki, Notchup has a LinkedIn profile import option, which is very handy because who wants to enter yet another profile these days?
In my opinion, all network data ought to be stored on the user's end and an open API ought to be made available to import user data instead.
There's no direct profile linking yet and the site is fairly barebones--the news of its availability also appears to be causing some server load issues, but the idea is sound and I look forward to seeing how well it goes.
How do you make money off of social networking sites? Besides selling AdSense ads, here's another way to do it: open up a store and sell branded materials. Professional social networking site LinkedIn is doing just that. As I hook up with my 380th connection today on this popular site, I noticed this banner ad on the page:
which links you to the LinkedIn store. Right now the items are not very imaginative: but one can just imagine the magic of it all if they would allow customization. Something like See-ming Lee, proud LinkedIn user. Connect with me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/seeminglee would attract customers like never before.
Truth be told, you don't even need a high-tech solution to do the job: You can do as as simple as giving people the option to write their URL or their name on a designated area with a water-proof marker (which can come with the shipped package) and people can create customize content by drawing directly on the t-shirt. That'd be fun!
Folks from CommonCraft did it again. This time, they aim at explaining social networking to peeps in plain English:
The main focus of the video is the exploration of the core idea in network theory: "your weak links are your strong connection." The video suggests that social networks make these weak relationship apparent. Unless these applications allow an easier way to explore your friends' friends, I don't think that it is that apparent.
It does point out an important feature that most social network lacks: a way to explore your 2nd degree of separation, and perhaps your third. LinkedIn tries to do that by allowing users to only see profiles from people within your cluster. Most people don't realize that: of the 375 connections I have had on LinkedIn, that has only happened to me once, which felt really awkward to me at first, but after a while it was apparent what they were trying to do. Still a bit awkward.
SML Thank You I would like to thank Olivia Lin, a video extraordinaire that I've only met on Facebook for sending me this wonderful video. When I finally meet Olivia in person, she would become a few handful of people who belong in my Life 2.0 circles--something which I have been drafting in my mind but never got my acts together to write about!
So I was tweeting yesterday about the game called Orange Box and antikewl picked up my tweet and sent me to The Escapist, adding that Portal is worth the price alone. I was not surprised, given that I pretty much looked into buying this game based on the Gamespot review of it alone.
But this post is not about the Orange Box, because I haven't gotten it yet. This post is about this absolutely insane amount of information fired by Zero Punctuation:
This guy is funny + to the point + sarcastic + information-stuffed + crazy which equates to fantabulous in my dictionary. I don't think that I have yet experienced information-overload in this capacity before.
SML Thank You I would like to thank antikewl for being a fantastic Internet news correspondent from the UK. You rock! Much love :)
SML Friends I met antikewl aka Trevor May when he was "shipped over" from London from IconMedialab (now LBi) to work on a global B2B content portal. Because of Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn / Flickr and all these social networking goodies, we stayed in touch after almost 7 years now!
If you are one of those people who simply don't see the point of tagging, here's a true story from a friend of mine who has become a recent Flickr-tagging convert.
I recently got Gregory Hull (Blog / Flickr / SML Wiki) into getting his Flickr account, and shortly after I noted that his photos are not tagged. A couple of emails later, he started tagging.
Greg posted this photo on 2007-10-28 onto Flickr and tagged it with dog, halloween, costume, tompkins-square and iPhone.
Two days later, he received an email from a newspaper from Chicago asking to see if they can publish his photograph, and the rest is history.
Now this little known artist from New York, who used to garden for Jasper Johns (Google), went from an unknown to being covered by hundreds of iPhone-related Web site:
The photo was posted 7 days ago, and so far it has already received 3,758 views and 12 favorites. It stunned him and most definitely stunned me! (While I have photos on Flickr that has received 15,000+ views, this photograph's views-accumulation rate is still a record I cannot possibly beat!)
Hopefully this will provide a glimpse into the magic of tagging to the next avid tagger. :)
More information + Skyrails Blog: official blog by the author + Download Skyrails beta: PC only, one generation before the current release, published on 2007-10-10
Highlights (SML transcription in semi-SML.SML syntax):
Maka-Maka encompasses Google’s grand plan to build a social layer across all of its applications.
Google to "out open" Facebook with new APIs for developers to build apps for Orkut, iGoogle and eventually other applications as well.
Google new APIs for social network expected announcement = November 8 or 9th
Number of partners that have created apps on top of the APIs = 50
Of the 24.6 million monthly visitors to Orkut, only 500,000 of those are in the U.S.
Google should bring everything (Contacts in Gmail + Feeds in Google Reader + IM buddy list in Gtalk + Events in Google Calendar + Widgets in iGoogle) into a social application without your realization that you just joined another network.
Wall Street Journal reports moments ago that Microsoft just agreed to invest $240 million for a minority stake at Facebook (Google). The companies have discussed a valuation for Facebook as high as $15 billion.
Google Vice President Tim Armstrong declined to comment on any Google discussions with Facebook.
User distribution for social networking sites by the end of 2007 - Research Data Source: DataMonitor (Google)
Advertisers and agencies in New York are invited to an event held on 2007-11-06 with Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook executive team as they unveil a "new way of advertising online."
The exact details are not disclosed, but Advertising Age speculates that it may have something to do with "SocialAds", a term which Facebook traemarked on 2007-09-24, which is described as "advertising and information distribution services, namely, providing advertising space via the global computer network [and] promoting the goods and services of others over the internet."
Advertising Age recently did its annual survey on college students and found that there is a significant split in social-networking activities between sexes.
Gender behavior split on social networks Stylistic edits are mine
Facebook ranked as the most popular website among the 18-to-24 set
Social networking was twice as popular with young women as young men
MySpace, which was No. 1 last year, ranked No. 2 with females but dropped out of the top five for young men
That means marketers using social-networking sites to target young people are reaching far more females than males
Men are far more likely to use social-networking sites for business purposes such as LinkedIn
Male college students + UGC / Community
While their tech savvy showed, particualrly among men who ranked Digg and Engadget among their top 10 websites, they didn't make the leap to consumer-generated media.
Only 8% said they had uploaded videos to YouTube
64% don't make videos at all
14% don't share them with anyone
75% surf social-networking sites
71% read news online
Only 14% write blogs
Popularity Contest College students' favorite brands
The Water Cooler Is Now on the Web: With a nod to Facebook, large companies are starting in-house social networks / 2007-01-01 / Business Week / pp.78-79
Statistics
Share of employees at large companies who say they contribute regularly to blogs, social networks, wikis and other Web 2.0 Services = 20%
Number of users on KPMG Alumni network = 10,000 former and current employees
KPMG (Google) credits 14% of total hires to their alumni network
Estimated time saved by the Film Foundation (Google) to create educational materials for schools = 50%
Benefits of social networks
Efficient way to mine for in-house expertise
Discover new recruits
Share information within businesses' own walls
Reduce time spent mailing documents and e-mailing comments
The Fear of being open
CIOs from large companies, especially financial institutions such as Citigroup (NYSE:C) and Lehman Brothers (NYSE:LEH), block employee access to public social networks for fear of losing control of information in response to the “open” ethos of the social Net
Accounting firms ensure members don't provide tax or accounting advice through their networks in order to comply to regulatory / disclosure issues
Awareness tracks network posts and sends potentially inflammatory words into “moderation boxes” to be reviewed by a manager.
[AIDS] must have followed the route already spotted in the spread of innovation and computer viruses: Hubs are among the first infected thanks to their numerous sexual contacts.
...The scale-free topology at AIDS’s disposal allowed the virus to spread and persist.
...Whereas the early spread of AIDS was attributed primarily to homosexual sex, today heterosexual sex is the leading means of transmission. As we’ve established, hubs play a key role in these processes. Their unique role suggests a bold but cruel solution: As long as resources are finite we should treat only the hubs. That is, when a treatment exists but there is not enough money to offer it to everybody who needs it, we should primarily gives it to the hubs.
...The problem is that we do not know for sure who the hubs are.
SML Reference: Barabasi. Linked: how everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science and everyday life. pp 138-139 (Google Books)
Analyzing the sex web is a huge undertaking.
Whereas most will be happy to disclose their personal or professional relationships using sites like Facebook, Friendster or LinkedIn, few would be readily compelled to disclose personal information about their sex life.
Finding out the topology of sex is important in the ever-changing web of human existence, however. So it is not at all surprising that a scientific research tool called Sexual Relationship Database was created.
According to the Website, the World Health Optimization Management created the project “in an effort to better understand society’s interconnected nature.” For this project, a sexual partner is defined “as a human with whom a person has had oral, anal or vaginal sexual contact.”
Like the Wikipedia, anyone may edit the sexual histories. To ensure accuracy of the study, the organization requires that users log in with a valid email address. They also reserve the right to ban users who knowingly provide false information.
Here is a map of the sex web of a few celebrities to get you started:
Essentially, it's an analytics application that visualizes the raw data from your Facebook profile as readable charts. Mashable has a write-up on this, but I felt that their illustration does not do a very good job in showing the power of this application.
I took some screenshots of the application using my Facebook data and this is what it looks like:
