Extreme social networking

No longer will you have to rely on Shirley McLaine to find out that you have an Egyptian princess or a Russian nobleman in your past. You can find out for sure and maybe they’ll come pay you a visit. 6 degrees of separation? No longer is it just a party game ending in Kevin Bacon, it’s going to be on the web, searchable, representing the web of humanity via the latest web 2.0 technology. You’ll have cousins showing up by RSS in your genome/blog reader.

The process begins, disgustingly enough, with spit. You purchase a $999 “spit kit” and you supply the requisite DNA. The company, 23andMe, tests your saliva and posts the results on their site, where you can use “…our interactive tools to shed new light on your distant ancestors, your close family and most of all, yourself.

http://blog.genyes.com/index.php/2007/11/21/extreme-social-networking/

Top 100 Social Media and Social Networking Blogs

this is an excellent way to get started on social networking research:

Social media and social networking sites aren’t just about making new friends. These concepts have introduced a whole new way of communicating and managing information with the help of Web-based communities, software and tools to build business contacts, and design marketing and branding strategies. These tools help users to share information in innovative and creative ways. This list of the top 100 social media and social networking blogs (in no particular order) are full of tips, news, and analyses about today’s social media outlets.

http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2007/top-100-social-media-and-social-networking-blogs/

Paltalk Pioneers "Socialcasting"

Hey, online video fans--tired of watching alone? Ever miss hanging out with your friends? Well, good news: Paltalk has taken Web 2.0 and introduced TV 2.0. Specifically, Paltalk has married online video with elements of traditional broadcasting, interactive community, and social networking.

Facebook Beacon's a flop? and funding news

Flush with cash, allied with Microsoft, growing exponentially, and positively humming with buzz, Facebook is definitely the "it" site on the Internet. Now what?

At the annual Foursquare Conference today, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave some hints about the future of the social networking phenomenon. He described its new advertising initiative, spoke of its relationship with Microsoft, and alluded to its budding rivalry with Google.
First, financing. C.F.O. Gideon Yu told Portfolio.com today that the company is preparing to raise an additional $260 million to close its Series D financing round.

During a question and answer session, Zuckerberg described the company's new advertising initiative, which he announced yesterday.

Among other things, it will allow businesses to set up their own Facebook pages and then reach out to real, live users -- that is, potential customers -- based on the interests they have described in their profiles.

If those interests include not seeing advertising, that is too bad. "There is no opting out of advertising," Zuckerberg said.

If it is any consolation, he added: "The ads are going to feel like content to a lot of people."
He also alluded to a budding rivalry with Google. Asked why Facebook chose not to participate in Google's new social networking consortium Open Social, Zuckerberg replied, "Who says we didn't choose to be a part of it?"

In fact, he added, "We didn't really find out about it until an hour after it launched."
Zuckerberg said it is "conceivable" that Facebook could seek to join Open Social in the future, but the company has no such plans at present.
"If it does really well, we may want to participate in it," he said.

At one point, Google co-founder Sergey Brin emerged from a side room at the conference, which was held at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, and headed straight for Zuckerberg. Bystanders held their breath, waiting for some kind of showdown.

But like a couple of championship boxers at a pre-fight weigh-in, they didn't so much as acknowledge one another. Brin just smiled as he walked straight past Zuckerberg, who kept his gaze straight ahead.

Describing Facebook's $240 million partnership with Microsoft, which includes an advertising component, the famously terse, frequently monosyllabic Zuckerberg said, "Microsoft does a lot of things that just make sense for us."

He said Facebook chose Microsoft as its advertising partner instead of Google, which has been much more successful at online advertising, for a simple reason:
"Not having done something before -- we don't see that as a disadvantage," he said, prompting laughter from the assembled media moguls.

Indeed, the lack of a track record has not hampered Facebook. Zuckerberg said the web site currently has 52 million active users, and is growing at 3 percent per week -- essentially doubling in size every six months. At that rate, he said, Facebook could have 200 million users by the end of 2008.

and....

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/11/facebooks-beaco.html :

Facebook's "social ads" so far appear to be a flop. Not only was the "once in a hundred years" announcement largely a yawn, the complaints of Facebook users and MoveOn about the primal annoying-ness of "Beacon" are right on the money. Although we can't imagine why MoveOn can't find something better to do than complain about Facebook, we do note the speed with which 1) Facebook responded to MoveOn's complaint, and 2) 2,000 Facebook users signed up to support MoveOn. And we don't blame them. We already hate the idea of bombarding friends with lists of the crap we buy.

The fact that Facebook will only let us opt-out of that bombardment on a case-by-case basis (at the virtual cash register at third-party sites) is infuriating.Facebook should immediately make Beacon 100% opt-in. Not because MoveOn is complaining--because the current system will drive users right out the door.

The tiny minority of Facebookers who want to bombard friends with lists of the crap they buy--and friends who are actually interested in hearing about this--can elect to do so. The vast majority who don't should never have to hear about this ridiculous concept again. (And if this embarrassing backtrack hurts Facebook's ability to raise more money at a $15 billion valuation, so be it: This is the right thing to do for the long-term health of the company, and the fund-raising effort seems to be in trouble anyway).

MoveOn.org takes on Facebook's 'Beacon' ads

Online activist group MoveOn.org is poised to announce a campaign targeting Facebook's "Beacon" advertisements, which post information about users' activity on partner sites (movie rentals, purchases from online retailers) onto their friends' News Feeds. According to MoveOn representatives, the organization considers this to be a "glaring violation of (Facebook's) users' privacy," and has launched a paid ad campaign on Facebook, a "protest group" on the social-networking site, and an online petition to encourage the company to allow users to opt into the program at their own volition.

"The bottom line," MoveOn spokesman Adam Green said in an interview with CNET News.com, "is that no Facebook user should have their private purchases online posted for the entire world to see without their explicit opted-in permission."

It's true that Beacon advertisements are limited to the news feeds of the people on a user's friends list, but Green said that doesn't make a difference. He cited Facebook user testimonials that ranged from members who said their entire Christmas lists had been published on their News Feeds (spoiling many a surprise in the process) to student activists who were concerned that sensitive purchases might show up and result in serious consequences--"If a college kid rents Brokeback Mountain and some homophobic person on his campus sees that, that could be a real problem," he explained.

http://www.news.com/8301-13577_3-9821170-36.html

What Facebook Learned from Search

Imagine if Picasso painted a search engine results page from Google. It would probably wind up looking like Facebook, which continually draws inspiration from search engines as it rolls out its services for marketers.

What Facebook did was take the classic search channels of paid search, natural search, and paid inclusion and adapt them to its own platform. Compared to search, Facebook’s ad targeting isn’t quite as precise as advertising to people who explicitly express interest with their queries. Yet compared to contextual advertising, Facebook offers the proposition of targeting to explicitly expressed interests on members’ profiles, and marketing is further amplified with the web of member connections often described as the “social graph.”

>> http://blogs.mediapost.com/search_insider/?p=663

Websites Look to Shine with Facebook Beacon

go description of Facebook's Beacon:

Facebook’s importance as a platform that facilitates business rather than just socializing has been growing day by day. Recently, it has announced that 44 websites are using Facebook Beacon, which allows users to share information from other websites for distribution to their friends on Facebook.

Beacon is the targeted advertising system of the Facebook. Very soon when Beacon is linked to eBay , the business horizons of Fecebook users will further expand to unimaginable levels.

Facebook suggests that reaching millions of people is just 3 lines of code away. With Facebook Beacon, Web site owners can simply determine which user actions they would like publish to Facebook. Beacon supports actions including purchasing a product, signing up for a service, adding an item to a wish list, and more.

>> more: http://internetcommunications.tmcnet.com/..es/15075-websites-look-shine-with-facebook-beacon.htm

Social network for sportsmen launched in Runet

Runet opened the portal www.SpurtUp.com, which is the first web-resource in Russia offering a new approach to popularization and support of amateur spot in Russia.

The portal is focused on uniting sport and active live amateurs, who live in one city, neighboring districts or across the country.

On SpurtUp.com each user might place the latest news related to the future or already past sports events.

On SpurtUp.com the portal creators intend to use modern internet technology, social network elements and specialized services, such as coaching and competition calendar, team management, tournament organization, holding lots, single base of sports facilities in Russia.

One student's intrepretation of Facebook

check this out:

As per this homework assignment, I have actually joined facebook…if you look my status should say that I’m currently looking for my dignity while you read this blog entry……


http://tbgolden.wordpress.com/2007/11/13/major-studio-the-death-of-me/

YooGuu.com - Social Network Just Like the Rest

If you’re looking for yet another social network to add yourself to, try YooGuu. YooGuu has taken the micro-blogging route—every message you send is limited to a cool 140 characters. As with most other social networks, YooGuu has a strong focus on media, especially photos.

more>>

http://www.killerstartups.com/...--Social-Network-Just-Like-the-Rest/

directly to:

http://yooguu.com

Book Review: Practical Rails Social Networking Sites

Rails Social Networking Sites walks you through the process of building a Web 2.0 social networking site (something like MySpace), called Rails Coders that includes the features you would expect in that sort of site:

• User signup and management (based on restful_authentication)
• Content management
• Blogging (with web services)
• Markup languages like Textile and Liquid
• Mashups using Google Maps and Flickr
• photo management (attachment_fu and RMagick)
• Tagging

http://www.approachingnormal.com/2007/11/20/book-review-practical-rails-social-networking-sites

Facebook To Drop 'Is' From Status Updates

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." Bill Clinton can rest easy knowing that he will soon have more verb options when updating his status on Facebook. Facebook announced to developers last night that it will soon be dropping the word "is" from status message updates.

The developer platform has already been updated so that external applications that update user status can avoid prepending the word "is." For now, status updates on Facebook still include the "is," but Facebook platform engineers promise that the change will be pushed to Facebook at large soon and make the lack of verb a default behavior rather than something you have to specify. "In a few, we will delete that parameter and change the default behavior to be that you must include your own verb," they wrote.

E07 Podcast: Social Networking Technologies: A "Poke" for Campus Services | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

This 27-minute podcast recorded during the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference features Joanne E. Berg, Vice Provost and Registrar, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lori Berquam, Dean of Students, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Kathleen Christoph, Director, Academic Technology, University of Wisconsin-Madison speaking on Social Networking Technologies: A "Poke" for Campus Services.

The session abstract:

Social networking software like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube has become a way of life for today's students. In this session, we will explore whether and how we might use these technologies, or ideas they generate, to create better and more effective student and academic services at our institutions.

E07 Podcast: Social Networking Technologies: A "Poke" for Campus Services | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

Sexy Widget: RockYou Revenue - $100K per Month

Check out the numbers:

Sexy Widget: RockYou Revenue - $100K per Month

Since RockYou’s founding two years ago, 90 million social networkers have downloaded its applications. For this, RockYou is making more than $100,000 a month in revenues showing ads alongside its mini-applications for brands like AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ) and Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ), as well as by plugging other developers’ mini-apps (for a fee).

AND the comment:

I don't know - this gels with what Lance Tokuda was saying at the Widget Summit. It might be a disinformation strategy, but that panel more or less agreed that the ENTIRE widget/apps market was only about $12 million a year, as lowball as that might seem.

Heads are turning to Facebook - Los Angeles Times

the social website started by a Harvard dropout is stealing the spotlight from Google.

By Jessica Guynn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 18, 2007

PALO ALTO -- -- Google Inc. is used to being the center of attention, the giant that executives at other Internet companies wish Silicon Valley would shut up about already.

For the moment, they've got their wish. People here can't stop talking about Facebook Inc.

Heads are turning to Facebook - Los Angeles Times

Will social network sites transform ads?

Depending on your age and memory, last week was a week of radically new or reassuringly old developments in the advertising industry.

To Mark Zuckerberg, who is 23 and the boss of Facebook, a popular social-networking Web site, it was the former. Standing in front of about 250 mostly middle-aged advertising executives on Nov. 6, he announced Facebook was offering them a new deal.

"For the last hundred years media has been pushed out to people," he said, "but now marketers are going to be a part of the conversation." Using his firm's new approach, he claimed, advertisers will be able to piggyback on the "social actions" of Facebook users, since "people influence people."

Zuckerberg's language was strikingly similar to that of Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz in their book "Personal Influence," a media-studies classic from 1955.

They argued that marketers do not simply broadcast messages to a passive mass audience, but rather that they target certain individuals, called "opinion leaders." These individuals then spread, confirm or negate the messages of advertisers through their own "social relationships," by word of mouth or personal example.

Lazarsfeld and Katz, of course, assumed that most of these conversations and their implicit marketing messages would remain inaudible. That firms might be able to eavesdrop on this chatter first became conceivable in the 1990s, with the rise of the Internet. Thus the main thesis of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," written in 1999, was that "markets are conversations" which the Web can make transparent.

Zuckerberg's underlying idea is therefore hardly new. But, says Randall Rothenberg, the boss of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association, the announcements this week by Facebook and its larger rival, MySpace, which has a similar ad system, could amount to a big step forward in conversational marketing.

>> http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/339799_networkonline16.html

Google Confirms Facebook Violation, No Personal Data Stored

via
allfacebook - the unofficial facebook blog

Earlier this week I reported that applications were secretly transferring personal data to Google via their AdWords system and this was a clear violation of Facebook’s terms of service (TOS). It turns out that no personal data was being stored but some of the AdWords integration was in violation of Facebook’s TOS. Eric Eldon received a response from a Google spokesperson:

“We recently allowed some application partners to send us additional keywords to improve ad performance. A limited number of the keywords sent to Google did not comply with the developer’s agreement with Facebook. When we realized this conflict, we asked the partners to discontinue sending those keywords. We are no longer using those keywords. No personally identifiable information was exchanged between Google and the application developers.”

http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/11/google-confirms-facebook-violation-no-personal-data-stored/

All About: Facebook

Facebook Videos You Should Watch

The first is a video by Fred Stutzman that was presented to Googlers on the subject of a study of Facebook that Fred did. It's 40 minutes long, but if you have any interest in the social networking space, this is a must see: ...

Have You Ever Considered FaceBook Analytics?
So you know what Facebook is, and you've probably used Google Analytics, but have you ever considered Facebook Analytics? In a world where Facebook is often more popular with users than the 'all powerful' (sic) Google, it's your best ...

Facebook at work?
Are you spending time on Facebook.com during work-time? Then be careful in most cases this is not allowed and can have bad consequences for you. A new calculation based on figures from 65 institutes, in the UK, including government ...

All About: Facebook

MySpace redesign to match Facebook feature for feature [Rumormonger]

By Nicholas Carlson
Why does Facebook seem to have more momentum now than MySpace? Some might tell you it's Facebook's vastly superior user interface. Oh, and that the site actually works most of the time. While they... [[ This is a content summary only. ...
Valleywag - http://valleywag.com

More On the Law Blog's Facebook Foray
By Peter Lattman
Earlier this month we posted on the legal privacy issues raised by Facebook's new "Facebook Ads" strategy, in which it will attach names and photos of Facebook users to ads for products they like. Click here for a sample ad. ...
WSJ.com: Law Blog - WSJ.com - http://blogs.wsj.com/law

New U2 Song Exclusively On Facebook, Not MySpace
By Tim Stevens
Instead, head on over to Facebook, which, together with its hugely popular iLike application, has scored the exclusive rights to broadcast the song ahead of its release next week. The song will be included on a re-release of the band's

Today in Social Networking

I'm going to try to do a daily update on the latest social networking news, here's the first one:

Social networking needs identity delegation strategies
ZDNet - USA
Ever since Facebook opened its platform to outside developers, thousands of applications have been built on top of Facebook. Some have tens of thousands of ...

The Lure of Social Networking
Enterprise Networks & Servers - USA
However, before anyone goes running to the CEO asking for a total block on all access to social networking sites (including LinkedIn by my definition), ...

Study Finds Luxury Consumers Use Social Networking Sites
Furniture World Magazine (press release) - USA
Think social networking sites are just for teens and tweens who post party photos and lists of favorite bands? Think again. A new generation is flocking to ...

Social-networking oversight a slap in the face, group says
Staten Island Advance - SILive.com - Staten Island,NY,USA
by Staten Island Advance First in video games, then on the congestion pricing panel and now on social-networking Web sites, it appears as though Staten ...