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.

October 13th, 2008

Why MySpace's MyAds won't be the next Google AdWords

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:22 am

Categories: Google, MySpace, Social Networks

Tags: Google Inc., Advertisement, Google AdWords, MySpace, Steve O'Hear

When it comes to online advertising everybody wants to be the next Google, and News Corp-owned MySpace is no exception. Today the company rolled out its latest advertising platform called MyAds, designed to service “individuals and small businesses” rather than the big name brands that the social networking site’s existing ad offerings cater for.

The new self-serve system enables anybody - “from local retailers to musicians and politicians” - to create customized Cost-Per-Click (CPC) banner ads that target specific demographics and interest groups using MySpace’s HyperTargeting technology. A technology that was previously only available to the company’s largest blue-chip brand advertisers.

Placing an ad comprises of “a few easy steps”:

1. Sign-up on advertise.myspace.com
2. Create a display ad using the MyAds Builder Tool
3. Select a variable ad spend anywhere from $25 to $10,000
4. HyperTarget to customers (based on self-expressed interests available on MySpace profiles, along with age, sex and geographical location)
5. Measure ad performance with MyAds analytics reporting

The end result, says MySpace, is to democratize online advertising. Or to borrow another phrase from the Web 2.0 bible, the company is attempting to monetize the Long Tail.

If that all sounds very Google-esque to you, you’re not alone. Read the rest of this entry »

September 25th, 2008

Madison Avenue to Facebook: you'll never be the next Google

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:15 am

Categories: Facebook, Google, MySpace, Social Networks

Tags: Google Inc., Facebook, Advertisement, Valleywag, Karp, Steve O'Hear

In a renewed attempt to woo Madison Avenue, Facebook is “making a huge push” at Advertising Week, an industry-wide series of events for media buyers and publishers, reports Valleywag. The social utility’s “push” includes a full-page ad in the events program, a number of sponsored sessions, and throwing a party tonight in which Ziggy Marley (son of Bob) will be performing.

The motivation: Facebook has yet to turn its 100+ million user-base into a fertile ground for advertisers, with co-founder Mark Zuckerberg reportedly estimating revenue in 2008 to be around the $300 million mark

An unnamed New York ad-executive (via Valleywag) offers Facebook some unsolicited advice: Read the rest of this entry »

September 23rd, 2008

Gphone and Android will fuel the social web

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 6:11 am

Categories: Google, Mobile

Tags: Google Android, Mobile, T-Mobile Sidekick, Social Web, Social Networking, Advertising & Promotion, Online Communications, Marketing, Steve O'Hear

We’ve already seen the iPhone become a fertile ground for social networking applications and other forms of social software, thanks to its public Software Development Kit and modern standards-based web browser, but arguably Google’s Android mobile platform will have an even greater impact on the social web.

See also: Gallery: 25+ social networking apps for iPhone and iPod touch

The first so-called ‘Gphone’ powered by Android will be officially unveiled later today by T-Mobile, and based on leaked photos, combined with what we already know about Android, the handset (called the G1) shares a lot with Apple’s iPhone but also, unsurprisingly, takes a few cues from the T-Mobile Sidekick. The Sidekick is designed by Danger Inc., a company previously co-founded by Android head Andy Rubin, and was one of the first smartphones targeted at the consumer market by pitching Instant Messaging and non-corporate email as the centerpiece of the device. (Hence the slide-out QWERTY keyboard which the Android-powered G1 shares). Read the rest of this entry »

July 3rd, 2008

Viacom vs YouTube exposes Google's data retention policy

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 11:33 am

Categories: Google, YouTube

Tags: Google Inc., YouTube Inc., Video, Viacom Inc., Corporate Communications, Marketing, Steve O'Hear

In the ongoing litigation between Viacom and YouTube (Google) over alleged copyright infringement, a US court has ruled that “Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube”, reports the BBC.

The one thing that bothers me more than the court ruling itself, however, is the fact that Google retains this amount of user data in the first place. Because Google insists on keeping wide-reaching records of the surfing habits of its millions of users - presumably for ad-targeting purposes - in cases like this it’s left open to Google, and Google alone, to defend our privacy. If Google didn’t keep such logs, then Viacom or anybody else, couldn’t access our viewing habits. Read the rest of this entry »

June 26th, 2008

MySpace's "data portability" initiative goes live today - prepare to be locked-in

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 9:40 am

Categories: Facebook, Google, MySpace

Tags: Data, Site, MySpace, Internet, Steve O'Hear

News Corp.-owned MySpace will today officially launch its MySpace Data Availability Project, the company’s previously announced so-called “data portability” initiative in which users will be able to optionally share their public profile data with participating sites, along with their MySpace photos, MySpaceTV videos and friend lists.

“Later in the day all of the external data APIs will go live and the supporting documentation will be posted on the MDP Developer site”, according to the official MySpace Developer Team blog.

As the developer of an independent website you can now enable your users to leverage the power of their social data outside of the MySpace.com domain. Our users spend hours updating and making changes to their profiles, uploading content, and building friend relationships. With your help that data can now be available to MySpace users no matter where they go on the internet.

Sites that signed on early to support MySpace Data Availability include big hitters Yahoo, Twitter and eBay. Read the rest of this entry »

May 29th, 2008

AOL support for OpenSocial; Too many friends?; Gears to power MySpace messaging; Obama prefers Facebook

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 11:44 am

Categories: Facebook, Google, MySpace, Social News Sites, The Social Web weekly, Widgets

Tags: Facebook, Result, America Online Inc., Google OpenSocial, Messaging, MySpace, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, 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…

• AOL announces support for OpenSocial. These days we can no longer talk in terms of ‘company x’ joining Google’s OpenSocial, since the standard for creating socially aware applications/widgets is no longer ‘owned’ by one company. Nonetheless, AOL have announced they’ll be adopting OpenSocial’s family of APIs right across their properties, starting with myAOL adding support for Google’s Gadgets. Writing on the official OpenSocial blog, Eric Staats, Principal Software Engineer, AOL said: “… adopting Gadgets as our widget format within myAOL is the first step in adopting OpenSocial across AOL products and services. Gadgets will allow us to offer developers more opportunities to bring their ideas to myAOL, while keeping our users safer. Additionally, Gadgets will make it easier for application developers to create new tools and widgets for myAOL that will also be available to AOL users across the web at large on any OpenSocial enabled [site].”
• How many friends is too many? That’s the question that RWW’s Josh Catone asks, in reference to social Web sites such as Facebook or Twitter: “Offline, I have a network of under 50 people that I interact on a regular basis as friends. But online, the concept of “friend” is completely different. On Facebook I have nearer to 250 friends, on Twitter I have just over 300 followers. That’s just a blip compared to how many friends some of the true power users on those services have…”. I’m no Scobel either, with a humble 110 “followers” on Twitter (help me move up the league), a humble 63 “friends” on Facebook (where I’m still trying to wrestle with my own privacy concerns) and substantially more contacts on LinkedIn. Each networks’ own terminology: friends, followers and contacts, pretty much sums up how ambiguous the notion of a “friend” can be on the social Web, as each of those groups includes close friends, offline and/or online, as well as people I hardly know.
• Google Gears to power MySpace messaging. MySpace has begun rolling out significant improvements to its messaging system, used by many members as an alternative to email. By leveraging the Google-led “Gears”, an open source framework to support browser-based applications, MySpace is adding search functionality and various ways of sorting messages. TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington is impressed by the results: “I’ve been testing the new feature for a few days on my MySpace page. Instead of scrolling through pages and pages of messages, users can now sort by date, from, status (read/unread) or subject. And, more importantly, users can also search the full text of messages. The results are shown instantly (think Outlook), without page refreshes.”
• Obama’s campaign prefers Facebook to MySpace.  A little tidbit from paidContent’s post on the Obama campaign’s online ad spending: “Obama chose to spend $47,000 on Facebook, versus $11,500 on MySpace.”

May 28th, 2008

Schmidt: Google's social ad strategy is "trial and error"

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:19 am

Categories: Google, MySpace, Social Networks

Tags: Strategy, Google Inc., Eric Schmidt, Advertisement, Mobile, Steve O'Hear

Google’s strategy for monetizing the social web is one of “trial and error”, says CEO Eric Schmidt in a recent interview with German publication FAZ.net. “That’s the way we do it at Google”.

When asked specifically about Google’s arrangement with MySpace in which the search giant has guaranteed ad revenues of $900 million up until 2010 irrespective of how many ads are clicked on, Schmidt echoed earlier comments this year by Google co-founder Sergey Brin saying that the results have been dissapointing:

“MySpace did not monetize as well as we thought. We have a lot of traffic, a lot of page views, but it is harder than we thought to get our ad network to work with social networks. When you are in social network, it is not likely that you’ll buy a washing machine. It is not a long term problem but it is taking us longer than we thought. We are trying new ways, new approaches all the time”, says Schmidt. Read the rest of this entry »

May 27th, 2008

Facebook to open source its developer platform?

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 5:43 am

Categories: Bebo, Facebook, Google, Social Networks

Tags: Facebook, Social Networking, Open Source, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Steve O'Hear

While it’s not yet official, TechCrunch reports that Facebook is planning to open source its Facebook Platform, the means by which third-party developers can build applications for the social networking site.

In a direct response to Google’s ‘combine and conquer strategy‘ with Open Social, Facebook will turn the Facebook Platform into an open source project so that any social website can become Facebook Platform compatible. This result is that application developers will be able to easily port their Facebook applications over to other social networking sites, and in turn help Facebook Platform, which comprises of FMBL (markup language), FQL (query language), FJS (Javascript library) and the Facebook API, to become a standard. Read the rest of this entry »

May 19th, 2008

After Google calls Facebook's bluff, Zuckerberg says "let's see if there's a way to make it work" [data portability]

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 5:24 am

Categories: Facebook, Google, Social Networks

Tags: Google Inc., Facebook, Site, Social Networking, Channel Management, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Steve O'Hear

When Google announced its ‘Friend Connect’ product to deliver social networking features to the ‘long tail’ of the Web, the option “to see, invite, and interact with… existing friends” from competing social networks was bound to raise a few eyebrows. Not least from Facebook, whose inclusion was made possible via the site’s public API not through a formal partnership.

The response: Facebook blocks Google access claiming privacy concerns, while the search giant says it’s done nothing wrong as users have to explicitly opt-in by being re-directed to Facebook’s own log-in screen, and can unlink their Google Friend Connect and Facebook accounts at any time. Read the rest of this entry »