The Blog Business Summit conference is coming up on September 17-19 in Chicago.  The focus of the first day is a workshop, and the next two days is a conference event.  It looks like it will be great – covering topics from blogging for dollars to effective blogger engagement as well as new and social media and corporate blogging.

The speaker line-up also looks strong, with the following presenters:

• Padmasree Warrior, Executive Vice President and CTO, Motorola
• Robert Scoble, VP Media Development, PodTech.net
• Andru Edwards, CEO, Gear Live Media
• Kevin O’Keefe, Principal, LexBlog
• Buzz Bruggeman, CEO, Activewords

Unfortunately, I’m unable to go, but I look forward to hearing how it goes.  If you’re planning to register, type in discount code: P57CHI to receive a $100 discount.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve noticed an unusually large increase in the number of my friends and former colleagues based in the UK that are joining Facebook.  The recent surge in popularity of Facebook among my UK friends has me wondering: What lit a fire under so many people in non-overlapping networks to join Facebook at around the same time?  Is it a fluke, or is the flurry of activity the product of something else?  A particular marketing campaign? Increased mentions in the UK press?  Unusually fast spread via word of mouth?  The announcement of new developer network?

From the outside, I can’t point to a particular cause, but one thing is for sure… Facebook newbies are joining at the right time, as the site continues to get a whole lot cooler thanks to the addition of 3rd party applications to Facebook.com.  The economy of 3rd party Facebook applications is now booming.  Developers are going wild, and as a result, Facebook is becoming a much more interesting place to spend time online.

Opening up the Facebook platform was a GREAT move for several reasons:

1. Creating a 3rd party developer network will bring a whole new segment of users to Facebook – developers and those in their networks.
2. The availability of a larger number of applications gives users more reasons to spend time logged on, which in turn increases Facebook’s attractiveness to both users and advertisers.
3. It creates an economy upon which a larger number of people can benefit.  With Facebook, 3rd party developers have a place to be creative and market their products to a wide and connected audience, without the financial risk associated with going to market on their own.  Facebook users are closely connected to each other, and as a result, good applications have a much greater chance of succeeding quickly through viral marketing.

Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Palm, and others have been benefiting from their investment in Developer Relations for many years.  In most cases, opening up their platforms to developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) increases interest in the said platform, boosts usage scenarios, and generates buzz among press.  In my experience (managing global partnerships with with Windows Mobile Developers for Palm, Inc. for the Treo 700w and Treo 750v launches), besides users, 3rd party developers are some of the best evangelists a company can get.  They’re passionate, fiercely loyal, and incredibly vocal.  When a company invests in Developer Relations/ Partner Alliances, giving developers all of the tools/ documentation/ support they require to innovate and profit from development, the results far outweigh the costs.  In sharp contract, when a company doesn’t invest significantly enough in 3rd party developers or invests in a program that lacks direction or doesn’t provide developers with the basic tools, information, and sales/ marketing channels they need, the results can be disastrous.

So far, it appears that Facebook is doing a great job providing developers with the tools they need.  And, as a result, the market for 3rd party Facebook applications is booming.  A couple of my friends recently developed a Facebook app and based on their experience, development of a Facebook app is easy.  It’s been fun to hear about the success of the application and share it with my friends.  I’ve also enjoyed browsing the Facebook applications catalog.  I recently added a BBC news feed and an app that let’s me track which US states I’ve visited.  What’s great about the catalog is that you can read reviews of apps before installing them, and it’s quick and easy to remove apps you don’t like.   In the future, I’d love to see a Yelp-style star system of reviewing enabled in future generations of the catalog to users help weed through all the apps before making a selection, but the existing catalog is a great 1st generation starting point.

If you’re interested in developing a Facebook app, check out Softwaredeveloper.com, who just published a very useful article for developers called “How To Develop a Hit Facebook App: 29 Essential Tools and Tutorials.”

Today, Nokia announced its acquisition of a small social media and media sharing platform company called Twango, which was founded by former Microsofters.  While expensive (sources report the cost of nearly $100 Million), the acquisition has the potential to be a monumental game changer for Nokia. Regardless, it is a step in the right direction for the mobile industry.

Twango lets users seamlessly and easily share media across devices and software platforms.  Twango provides a good explanation on its website:

Imagine sending a photo to Twango, then having it appear on your blog or Web site in moments and notifying your viewers—automatically. Imagine a group of friends traveling together and creating a shared media experience for those back home with nothing more than their camera phones. We also imagined that, and now those are features on our site. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Anssi Vanjoki, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Multimedia, Nokia sees the acquisition as furthering Nokia’s mission of connecting people:

The Twango acquisition is a concrete step towards our Internet services vision of providing seamless access to information, entertainment, and social networks – at anytime, anywhere, from any connected device, in any way that you choose. We have the most complete suite of connected multimedia experiences including music, navigation, games, and – with the Twango acquisition – photos, videos, and a variety of document types.  When you combine a Nokia Nseries multimedia computer that is always on, always connected, and always with you together with a rich media sharing destination like Twango, people will have exciting new ways to create and enjoy rich media experiences in real time.

Mobile OEMs are looking for innovative ways to integrate mobile handheld and PC experiences, leverage web technologies on the handset, increase wireless data consumption, and improve connections between mobile users.  With 2.5 G and early 3G phones, email was one of the most effective ways to do all of these things, but today, email on mobile phones is ubiquitous, and tech-savvy consumers are and will continue looking for more.  Seamless sharing of media and social networking on phones and PCs is the next frontier.

I suspect that just like the key OEM acquisitions of email technologies earlier this year and in late 2006 (i.e. Nokia’s acquisition of Intellisync, Motorola’s acquisition of Good), there it won’t be long before we see more acquisitions in this space.  By way of example, Sharpcast seems like one of the next likely acquisition targets.  It lacks a social networking facility, but with all of the other mobile and PC-based social networking options out there, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Today, TechCrunch revealed big news in social networking investing: Hi-5 got $20 Million in Financing from Mohr Davidow Ventures and Tagged

Hi-5 I understand, but Tagged?!  Whoa.  That’s a whole lot of mula — especially for a social networking site that no one I know uses (especially given that I blog about Social Networking).  A few friends I know that tried Tagged a while back disparaged it calling it an “agent de spam.”  So, I couldn’t help but laugh when I read some of the comments on TechCrunch with similar observations:

apparently raised $15 Million from an unknown investors on a $102 Million pre-money evaluation.

1. Richard Miller

   July 23rd, 2007 at 3:45 am

   Tagged’s system of invitation resembles that of a virus to me. It automatically checks all your e-mail contacts and sends invitations to a lot of people. But do you really want to tag them all? That is the question.

2. Sunny Kalara

   July 23rd, 2007 at 2:43 am

   How did the spam site get a valuation of $117M? I have gotten more apologies from red-faced friends for inadvertent-spamming from using Tagged service then any other web service.

   Also, can somebody explain to me why, if I click on the “browse” in Tagged, 80%+ of the pictures are of scantily dressed women? And many of them have joined on June 7, 2007; how convenient! When did the demographic of web surfer change? Why didn’t I get a memo?

Having not tried Tagged myself, I figured it wasn’t fair to question the valuation until I learned more and maybe tried it myself.  I started off trying to learn more about Tagged by visiting the website.  However, I couldn’t find a decent explanation of what Tagged is (beyond a social network) on the consumer site.  It took jumping to the “corporate site” to find out anything about it.  Even there, the explanation was basic, if not ambiguous:

Tagged.com is a premier social networking destination and an ideal place for advertisers to reach their target audience.

Tagged provides a fun, safe, and exciting environment for people to showcase their personalities and talents, and to connect with friends and meet new ones.

Tagged is experiencing dramatic growth Advertisers love Tagged because they get clear, uncomplicated access to our audience. Our team is dedicated to making every advertiser successful and can develop and support any type of ad campaign.

I couldn’t get excited about the prospect of joining a social network that none of my friends/ aquaintences participate in, that I’ve heard spam nightmares about, that doesn’t tell me exactly what “features” I’m signing up for, and which, apparently, “Advertisers love.”  Joining a site that admits to giving advertisers “clear, uncomplicated access” to me and my “friends”. (Yeah, I know Google does it, but I also know exactly what I’m getting in return.)  I was floored by the self-reported stats on Tagged, which illustrate that clearly my reservations aren’t shared by everyone:

• 30MM registered members
• 10MM unique visitors every month
• 1B page views per month
• 10MM hours spent/month

With numbers like that I can see why someone was willing to roll the dice with such a big investment.  But, I was still unsure about why anyone would sign up.  Unsatisfied with the explanation on Tagged’s corporate site and unable to find an explanation of features anywhere else, I bit the bullet and started to sign up, hoping that the registration process would tell me more.  It didn’t.

After providing my name, birthday, and email address, Tagged asked me to provide my password for my Gmail account – presumably so that it could suck potential network invitees from my address list.  It wouldn’t let me bypass that step.  Afraid of spamming my entire address book, I terminated the registration process.

It amazes me that a company that doesn’t overtly explain what it does or what features you’ll get by signing up has been able to secure so many users.  It also amazes me that so many people would actually give a company their email address and password and allow them to infiltrate their private address book without knowing what that company is going to do with the information.  I guess this all proves that:

1. On-line consumers aren’t as demanding of on-line privacy as I expected, and
2. The bubble and big risk investment are back to stay… at least for now.

The folks at Activeweave (makers of Stickis, which I’ve written about before), have just introduced a great new website and plug-in called BlogRovr.  BlogRovr is a great little tool aimed at blog enthusiasts.  It allows you to see whatever your favorite bloggers have written about anywhere on-line.

Here’s how it works:

1. Visit Blogrovr.com and sign-up for an account
2. Enter the URLs of your favorite blogs
3. Anytime your favorite blogger mentions something about a site you’re visiting, BlogRovr will deliver the related blog content to you via a Sticki.

• The note is unobtrusive – a small icon in the bottom right hand corner of your browser window.
• You can expand the button into a web overlay by clicking it.  Similarly, you can close it just like any other window.
• You can turn BlogRovr on or off any time.
• No spyware, etc. in the app.

Not only does BlogRovr keep you in touch with what your favorite bloggers are thinking about what you’re looking at, it also presents a great opportunity to learn what products/services/websites those on your blogroll are writing about.  This is especially useful tool for:

• Researching new product/service providers
• Doing market research/ getting to know a new industry or topic
• Investigating what bloggers are saying about you and your competitors
• Etc.

Give it BogRovr a try and post a comment with your thoughts.

Polaris Venture Partners general partner Simeon Simeonov is the latest to suggest that Google is working on a mobile Phone. In his blog, Simeonov divulges that Andy Rubin (who founded Danger and later, Asteroid, which was ultimately sold to Google) is working with a team of about 100 people on a Google phone.   He also sites other Google acquisitions as evidence of a forthcoming Google Phone: mobile applications company, Reqwireless and Skia, who makes a portable graphics engine.

Simenov’s blog is definitely worth a read. It is not the only evidence that a “gPhone” (as I’ve now taken to calling it) is in the works.  Back in December, UK paper, The Observer, reported that Google was in talks with Orange:

[Google’s] plans centre on a branded Google phone, which would probably also carry Orange’s logo. The device would not be revolutionary: manufactured by HTC, a Taiwanese firm specialising in smart phones and Personal Data Assistants (PDAs), it might have a screen similar to a video iPod. But it would have built-in Google software which would dramatically improve on the slow and cumbersome experience of surfing the web from a mobile handset.

In the last year (plus), Google has proven that it wants to be a key player in mobile by innovating in the mobile applications marketplace and making key acquisitions (including Dodgeball, which Simeonov didn’t mention in his blog).  It is easy to see the business reasons why Google is making an investment in mobile.  The mobile marketplace presents an opportunity for Google to expand its search and advertising empire.  According to Ovum Ltd., mobile advertising will become a $1.26 billion market by 2009 (a big jump from the $45 million market it was in 2005). With the social media markets exploding and the lines between social media and targeted advertising becoming increasingly blury, I’m particularly interested in seeing what sort of social media featuers the gPhone incorporates. I’d love to see Google put out a mobile phone with built in GPS and suped-up Dodgeball built-in.  If that happens, it would likely shake-up the mobile industry by encouraging innovation and possibly spelling the death of comanies like Helio and Amp’d.

Even if as the Observer suggests, the gPhone hardware isn’t “revolutionary,” my hope is that the software will be extraordinary.  Having worked for 18 months as a full-time consultant on Palm Inc.‘s Business Development/ Developer Relations team, I can tell you that a phone (hardware) is only as good as the software that runs on it.  Palm’s Treo is popular in large part because of the 3rd party software applications available for the device.  Palm isn’t the only company that appreciates the value that software brings to mobile hardware.  Motorola and Nokia both have impressive 3rd party alliance programs (MotoDev and Forum Nokia).  If Google puts out a phone, I suspect that it’s strategic advantage will be in the availability of as yet, unreleased, proprietary social and productivity-related software.  I hope that that the gPhone comes fully loaded with social features that help advance the mobile ecosystem and that any on-phone advertising is both tasteful and non-invasive.

The Guardian reports that Reuters will soon be launching it’s own financial social networking site, aimed at fund managers, traders and analysts.  Reuters has some 70,000 subscribers to it’s messaging service, which is the first social feature of its site.  Given this large number of existing subscribers, I suspect that Reuter’s forthcoming social network has strong potential to influence the financial community.

Reuter’s Chief Executive, Tom Glocer says that the site will only be open to subscribers and it will enable “financial services users the ability to post their research or if they are traders, their trading models.” I’m curious about why fund managers/traders would want to share strategic information with potential competitors, but I can see how this social network would be useful for discussing market trends, etc.  I’ll be interested to see whether members of the financial community use this tool for genuine sharing, or whether they use it in an attempt to influence the stock markets and financial markets to their advantage.

Italy-based social networking company, Dada S.p.A., is partnering with Google AdSense to pay users for allowing ads on their space.  Dada’s new Friend$ is an opt-in revenue sharing program that rewards users for adding friends and updating the content of their Dada space.  According to Dada, Friend$ is, “the only program that rewards you both for keeping your personal space updated (blog, video, profile, etc.) and for spreading the word by inviting friends to do the same.” The idea is that users keep their Dada space updated and invite friends to participate in Friend$.  In exchange, Google posts ads on their site/friends site, and pays users and their friends a percentage of the money generated by click-through on those ads.

I wonder how advertisers feel about this? It seems like an easy system for Dada users and their friends to exploit for revenue purposes.  If I were an advertiser, I’m not sure how excited I’d be by having people click on my ad with the express purpose of extorting me for their own/ friends’ financial well being.

Similarly, I find this whole concept a little disconcerting in that it encourages social networkers to talk about specific topics for the express purpose of generating revenue.  I feel perfectly okay about the idea of hiring paid spokespeople to talk about companies, so long as the public knows that they’re being paid.  However, I take issue with situations like this, where there are blurred lines of distinction between people talking about what they’re genuinely interested in versus talking about things they’re being paid to discuss.  It’s not Dada and Google are talking about sponsoring corporate blogs…  In a way, they’re steering kids (and adults) towards discussing specific topics their conversations, blogs, profiles, etc.  If a social networker wants to make money through Friend$, and they know which companies use Google AdSense, I suspect that it will be very easy for them to exploit the system.

What do you think?

Today, on Webpronews, Steven Bradley addresses some interesting questions raised in a couple of other blogs – namely:

• Is there an optimal post length?
• Will shorter posts help to retain readers and even lead to more links?
• What makes you unsubscribe from a blog’s RSS feed?

Bradley’s ultimate conclusion is that the best blogs have a mix of long, medium, and short posts.  He’d “prefer to focus on quality and let the length of the post be what it is… to find [his] blogging voice than consciously attempt to stifle it.”

I struggle with the same questions when writing my own blog.  Plenty of my readers tell me that they appreciate my more in-depth (translation: really long) posts.  But, I seem to get just as many comments (if not more) on short posts as I do on long posts.  Bradley’s blog made me realize that we still have a lot to learn about social media and web 2.0 optimization:

• What are the best ways for companies to engage customers through social media?
• How should individual bloggers and social media mavens (i.e. those who set up social networks/ groups on sites like Ning, Vox, Gather, etc.) structure their content to best engage with their peers around areas of mutual interest?

There are certainly a lot of assumptions to test.  So far, it seems that marketers and bloggers are throwing ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks. In time, there will more scientific ways to answer these questions.  Marketers are only beginning to understand the “science” behind web 2.0, social media, and targeted delivery of information to customers.  As web 2.0 and social media evolve, there is a growing buzz about:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
• Social Media Optimization (SMO), and
• Website Analytics/ Testing/ Website Optimization, which includes things like A/B Split Testing and Multivariate Promotion Testing, Targeted Content Delivery based on the profile of a specific visitor, Landing Page Optimization, and Predictive Delivery / Cross Selling, etc.

These three topics are closely intertwined…  When a company spends money on SEO to ensure that their websites and/or corporate blogs/ social media properties are well placed in search results pages, their efforts won’t result in customer conversion if the person who lands on their site can’t immediately find relevant information they’re looking for.  Similarly, if corporations are writing blogs that are too long or too short for their desired audience, they’ll lose that audience.  With that in mind, I think that concept testing, website optimization and analytics are the key to answering the key questions about the value of social media.  These topics will be of growing importance in the coming years as marketers strive to better understand and target customers to capture greater returns on web-based investments.

There are a some interesting players in the testing and optimization spaces (Offermatica – which, in the interests of full blogging disclosure, is a company that I recently interviewed with; Optimost; Touch Clarity, which was recently purchased by Omniture; Kefta; to some extent Google; and others).  If you are a marketer with experience working the products/services of any of these (and similar) companies, I’d love to hear your thoughts on their usefulness.  In my opinion, web marketers are only just starting to realize the value of testing and web optimization.  It will be very interesting to watch this space as web 2.0 and social media continue to grow.

If you’re interested in web optimization and testing, the following are links to blogs that you might like: Optimize & Prophesize, This Site Is Dead, Out of My Gord, Thinking Aloud.