November 13th, 2008

Microsoft gives Windows Live a social networking makeover

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:15 am

Categories: Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Mobile, Social Networks, Twitter, Yahoo

Tags: Network, Microsoft Windows Live, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Social Networking, Operating Systems, Software, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

Microsoft have announced a major overhaul of its Windows Live service that, similar to Yahoo’s ‘Open Strategy’, rewires the company’s suite of consumer web-based products — e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, blogging and more — to turn them into one interconnected social network. To do that, Microsoft is leveraging a user’s existing Windows Live Messenger contacts to create an instant friends list across all Windows Live properties.

And in a feature that borrows directly from Facebook, which Microsoft invested in last year, the new Windows Live includes a a “what’s new” feed that aggregate a user’s activities on Windows Live and third-party site across the web. Initial partners include Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, Twitter, WordPress and Yelp — though no sign of Facebook yet, despite that hefty investment.

See also: Yahoo wants to be your social web ‘control panel’ too

The strategy Microsoft is adopting is simple and a rather familiar one. The company wants to become a user’s one stop shop for all things social on the web. And conceding that it isn’t the market leader, and will probably never be, when it comes to the majority of social web products — aside from IM where Windows Live Messenger is number one — the new Windows Live is also attacking the social networking aggregator space, putting it in direct competition with singly-focused products such as FriendFeed or the social networking aggregator features of monolithic networks e.g. Facebook Connect. Read the rest of this entry »

October 17th, 2008

Yahoo wants to be your social web 'control panel' too

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 9:41 am

Categories: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Social Networks, Yahoo

Tags: Yahoo! Inc., Control Panel, Social Web, Steve O'Hear, Web, Facebook, Channel Management, Marketing

Yahoo has begun rolling out a new profile page for its users as part of its ‘Yahoo! Open Strategy’, a major project to rewire the company’s web properties to make them more “open and social“.

Described by Jim Stoneham, the company’s Vice President Communities, as a “centralized control panel”, the new Yahoo! Profiles will let users manage their “identity, activities, interests, and connections across Yahoo! — and eventually the entire Web”. While a unified user profile and friends list across all of Yahoo’s offerings - Flickr, Yahoo Messenger, Mail etc. - seems like a no-brainer, Stoneham’s reference to a social ‘control panel’ for the entire Web is far more ambitious and sounds very similar to the thinking behind recent products from Facebook (Facebook Connect), MySpace (Data Availabiliy), Microsoft (Mesh) and Google (Friend Connect).

See also: Powering Facebook’s proverbial brain: your Identity, Social Graph, and Lifestream data

Although each company’s implementation differs, the broad concept (often disingenuously dressed up as data-portability) is the same. First, offer users a single place to maintain their profile and manage their social graph (friends list) that can then be synced with third-party sites through a publicly available and secure API. That way any update to your central profile or a new connection added, ripples through to those other social destinations that are linked, and at the same time conveniently locks users into the original source of that data.  Secondly, enable certain data to flow back in - any social activity elsewhere on the Web - so that the central profile also acts as a lifestream or social web aggregator. The end result is a kind of ’social control panel’ for the web OS, a term that Facebook, MySpace, Microsoft and Google don’t actually use, but which Yahoo is actively embracing.

August 19th, 2008

Yahoo Buzz! opens up, let the gaming begin

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:43 am

Categories: Digg, Social News Sites, Yahoo

Tags: Digg, Yahoo! Inc., Games, Personal Technology, Steve O'Hear

Buzz, Yahoo’s social news site and “meme tracker”, has opened its submission process so that any site on the Web can now be ‘buzzed’. Prior to today, only select publishers were allowed into the program, with around 400 sites vying for the top prize of being featured on the Yahoo.com homepage.

Now that the submission process is open, it’s logical to presume that over zealous publishers and social media optimization types will begin to try and game Yahoo Buzz. This is exactly what Digg has faced during its ongoing teething period, and with the potential rewards of Buzz being even greater it’s inevitable that we’ll see the same. Read the rest of this entry »

June 20th, 2008

Young people and social networking services - not another moral panic

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:16 am

Categories: Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, Net culture, Social Networks, Video Sharing, Yahoo, YouTube

Tags: Network, Service, Social Networking Service, Childnet International, Josie Fraser, Social Networking Services, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

A new UK-focussed report published by Childnet International aims to support teachers and lecturers who wish to explore the use of social networking services by young people. In this guest post, Josie Fraser, the report’s author, explains more.

That social networking services have and are continuing to reconfigure the online landscape will come as no surprise to ZDNet readers. Social networking services have become increasingly important to how many children and young people spend and organise their social time, often replacing that previously spent in front of the television. Increasingly, tools and practices that may have been treated with suspicion or seen as a waste of time by schools and local authorities – and subsequently banned or ignored - are being explored within education.

Cyberbullying and e-safety concerns have primarily driven the need for adults with a responsibility of care to get savvy about services, but the potential positive impacts of social media are beginning to sink in. Signaling a more balanced approach which looks beyond the frequent moral-panic inducing stories is Childnet International’s new report, Young People and Social Networking Services, commissioned by Becta, the UK Government’s lead agency for information and communications technology (ICT) in education. Read the rest of this entry »

June 4th, 2008

'Last.fm in a Box', ad-supported music service expands its "offsite community" strategy

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 12:31 pm

Categories: Music, Widgets, Yahoo

Tags: Advertisement, CBS Broadcasting Inc., Last.fm, Box, Corporate Communications, Strategy, Marketing, Management, Steve O'Hear

CBS continues to show signs that it understands the distributed nature of the net — and no, I’m not saying that because it’s in the process of buying ZDNet’s parent company CNET.

Today, Last.fm (which CBS purchased in May 2007) announced a major expansion to its “offsite community” strategy by partnering with a range of social networks and other online destinations to distribute the site’s ad-supported streaming radio service. Read the rest of this entry »

May 8th, 2008

MySpace partners with Yahoo, Twitter and eBay in "data portability" initiative

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 10:57 am

Categories: MySpace, Social Networks, Twitter, Yahoo

Tags: Yahoo! Inc., Data, eBay Inc., Twitter, MySpace, MySpace Data Availability Initiative, Internet, Instant Messaging, Corporate Communications, BIOS

Having previously talked the talk when it comes to data portability, MySpace is beginning to walk the walk: announcing its own ‘data portability’ initiative, supported by partners Yahoo, Twitter and eBay.

Dubbed MySpace ‘Data Availability’, users will be able to optionally share their public profile data with participating sites, along with their MySpace photos, MySpaceTV videos, and friend lists.

From the release: “The walls around the garden are coming down—the implementation of Data Availability injects a new layer of social activity and creates a more dynamic Internet,” said Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace. “We, alongside our Data Availability launch partners, are pioneering a new way for the global community to integrate their social experiences Web-wide.” Read the rest of this entry »

April 25th, 2008

Y!Open: rewiring Yahoo into a macro social network

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 10:02 am

Categories: Yahoo

Tags: Network, Yahoo! Inc., Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Steve O'Hear

At the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday in San Francisco, Yahoo unveiled a new and bold strategy to join up its Internet properties into one giant macro social network. CTO Ari Balogh told attendees: “We are rewiring Yahoo from the inside out with a developer platform that will open up the assets of Yahoo in a way never done before, making the consumer experience social throughout and provide hooks to developers.” Read the rest of this entry »

April 10th, 2008

Fickr user revolt; Why I deleted my twitter account

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 7:50 am

Categories: Blogging, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo

Tags: Flickr, Video, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Steve O'Hear

The social web weekly: a quick-fire roundup of some of the news, announcements and conversations that have occurred throughout the week…

Flickr video feature spurs online revolt. Not all that surprising to see a mini user revolt after Flickr finally added video uploads. A segment of the user base is unhappy for fear that the photosharing site will lose focus and “turn into another YouTube”. A Flickr group has been set up called “NO VIDEO ON FLICKR!!!” and has, at the time of posting, nearly 8,500 members. Additionally, there’s a petition that calls for the video feature to be removed. And, as is usual in these matters, long time Flickr user and CEO of competitor site Zooomr, Thomas Hawk, has chimed in: “With the huge user base that Flickr represents, the opportunity to promote video to this group from a dollars/cents standpoint probably means more to Yahoo! than how a small but vocal group of hardcore Flickr photographers feel about the service.” In many respects I agree with Hawk, adding video is a smart business move for Flickr, and the protesters are a “small but vocal group”. However, I think the restrictions that Flickr have added to video uploads - 90 seconds in length and available to Pro (paying) users only - will prove enough to mitigate the protesters’ fears.

Why I deleted my twitter account. I didn’t close my twitter account but cartoonist, marketer and author Hugh MacLeod has done. He says that he finds it “too easy”, and in a brilliant cartoon depicts how uncreative it is compared to longer form blogging and lots of other things he could be spending his time on. Of course, for the same reason that MacLeod says he’s leaving the service, Twitter has taken off. Neil McIntosh (head of editorial development at Guardian Unlimited) hit the nail on the head in a post titled Twiter may have crossed the chasm, where he described the service as “cheap” in terms of effort required from the user. Combined with the ‘instant gratification’ you get whenever you log-in to Twitter (i.e. updated content), the barriers to entry are much lower compared with many other forms of online publishing.

April 8th, 2008

At last, Flickr adds support for video

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 3:26 pm

Categories: Video Sharing, Yahoo, YouTube

Tags: Flickr, Video, Video Upload, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Steve O'Hear

One of Silicon Valley’s longest running rumors came to an end today: Yahoo-owned photo sharing service Flickr has finally added support for video.

In what many users feared would be a pointless YouTube-clone (Yahoo already has its own video sharing site for that), Flicker users can now upload and share videos as they currently do with photos. However, there’s a catch, and one that keeps the site’s focus as hub for digital photography.

Video uploads are - for the time being at least - limited to ninety seconds in length. Perfect for sharing the kind of short video clips that most digital stills cameras are capable of but nearly useless for anything more ambitious. Additionally, videos are displayed alongside photographs (the user interface makes little distinction) and the ninety second limit should help to discourage copyright infringement too.

Update: Video uploads are limited to ‘Pro’ accounts only (paid-for), although all users can view videos. See Webware’s full hands-on review.

March 25th, 2008

Non-profit OpenSocial Foundation formed as Yahoo jumps onboard

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:40 am

Categories: Google, MySpace, Social Networks, Widgets, Yahoo

Tags: Yahoo! Inc., Google OpenSocial, Social Networking, Intellectual Property, Business Structures, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Research & Development, Business Operations

Yahoo today announced their support for OpenSocial, the Google-led standard for developing applications that work across supporting social networks (e.g. OpenGadget).

Except, technically at least, OpenSocial isn’t the sole property of Google anymore, following the formation of the non-profit OpenSocial Foundation, whose custodiands MySpace, Google (and Yahoo) will “ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web”, according to the press release.

Similar to the community-driven OpenID effort:

The OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform, while also ensuring all stakeholders share influence over its future direction.

More tidbits from the announcement:

• all specifications are available under a Creative Commons copyright license
• public community involvement shapes the specification’s direction
• an open source reference implementation called Shindig is being created and developed as a project in the Apache Software Foundation incubator, available at http://incubator.apache.org/shindig/

In many ways the formation of the OpenSocial Foundation doesn’t really change anything, at least for the consumers of social networking sites that already, or have plans to, support OpenSocial. As for the partnering sites themselves or third-party developers who were wary that Google’s influence over the ’standard’ could be too great, the creation of a non-profit, along with Yahoo’s participation, might go some way to addressing their concerns.