I read a great review of Ning in yesterday’s TechCrunch.  So, today, I thought I’d give it a whirl myself.  Michael Arrington’s review was right on the money… Ning is pretty cool!  It lets you create your own customized social network – complete with RSS feeds, blogs, forums, and more.  Almost everything is customiseable – colors, logos, style, etc.  Check out the Social Media Network I created on Ning to see what I mean, and give it a try yourself!

If I’m being really picky, I’ve only got two complaints about Ning so far:

1. If you pick a username (e.g. “Social Media”) you can’t call your network the same thing.  I joined Ning not knowing that, and so I had to pick an alternate social network name once I’d set up my profile.
2. Once you set it up (which is exceptionally easy), it is difficult to navigate your way around the editing features if you want to change placement or content.  I’m sure this will get easier as I become more familiar with the service, but initially, editing isn’t as intuitive as I expected.

Internet search engines and social networking sites are enabling companies to do their “due diligence” on prospective employees more extensively than ever before.  According to an article I read this morning, Google (and other big companies) are researching prospective recruits by investigating their on-line presence on social networking sites.  But, businesses aren’t the only ones benefiting from the research made possible by on-line social networking sites.  Real people are using social media to their advantage by researching prospective friends, significant others, and even criminals.  With that in mind, I thought you might like the following two real-life social media “research” success stories… I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried!
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A good friend of a friend (“FoaF”) was held-up at gunpoint last month just one block from his house in the Mission / Noe Valley area of San Francisco (AKA: “Baja Noe”). The robber stole his wallet and briefcase, which had his laptop and business cards inside.  Three days after the incident, he got a phone call from a woman who claimed to have his laptop… She said that she was calling from “Microsoft XP” (hilarious) and needed the log-on password to verify that the laptop was his (even more hilarious).  When he said that he wouldn’t give the password out over the phone, the woman on the phone proposed that he email it to her, and she gave him her Yahoo email address (most hilarious!).

From her email address, FoaF was able to guess her MySpace ID.  He looked her up and discovered her full MySpace profile including (gasp) a photo!  He also found that she was linked to a “friend” who FoaF recognized as the man who robbed him.  Best of all, the robber had a photo of his gun on his web page!).  FoaF gave all this info to the police and they recovered the laptop last week.  The woman who the police recovered his laptop from alleged that she bought it from “someone she didn’t know.”  Unsurprisingly, they don’t fully believe her story.
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A group of tech-savvy friends and I recently “saved” a less-tech savvy friend (I’ll call her “Jane”) from a second date with “Jack,” a blind date she was introduced to by an equally non-tech-savvy acquaintance.  Jane went on the first blind date and was captivated enough by Jack’s superficial charm and wit long enough to consider a second date.  Prospects were good for Jack (who is apparently very smooth/sociable in person, once held a senior managerial position at Merrill Lynch and is now an accomplished management consultant) until our “Google Intervention,” which uncovered his personal blog.  Jack’s blog chronicled his last 18 years of “sex-ploits” (including shallow ‘apologies’ to women he claims to have raped in college), on-going misogynistic views about “chicks”, and less than savory (ahem) medical history.  It was so graphic that it made Tucker Max‘s blog read like a children’s bedtime story.  Everyone involved (except maybe Jack) agrees that Jane was lucky to have emerged from her date with Jack unscathed and that date number two never materialized.

In case you were wondering why this blog went from daily to naught this week – One of my best friends was in town this week, visiting from England, so I took a break from blogging to play tour guide.  As of today, I’m back to blogging as usual.

If you’re wondering what’s next in the world of web 2.0, Business 2.0 magazine has some interesting ideas.  Of particular interest, check out their gallery of 25 Startups to Watch.  The following is the list (and some of my thoughts on each company):

• StumbleUpon: Great feature that allows you to find websites and videos you might like on-line based upon the recommendations of friends. Think of it sort of like Digg but for recommending websites and videos.  It enables you to find websites that you’ll like based upon your personal networks and the preferences you set of people with similar tastes.  It is the perfect accompaniment to Stickis, which allows you to see the comments people in your network have posted on various websites.  I’d love to see Stikis and StumbleUpon link-up to offer an integrated service.
• Slide:  I’ve not tried Slide yet, but I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about it in the geek circles in San Francisco. It lets you create slide shows of your personal photos which can be inserted into a blog, MySpace page, Sent out via RSS, or streamed to your desktop as a screensaver.  It is an interesting idea, but I suspect there will be a lot of competition in this space with photo sharing sites like Zooomr and Flickr and companies like SharpCast (computer, mobile and PC sync) and photo everywhere messaging concepts like NowThen.
• Bebo: Social network with 30 million users.  Bebo is especially big in the UK.  Aside from having the conventional greatness of other social networking sites, it takes privacy setting seriously (which I like) and has an on-line whiteboard facility, which is handy for sharing.
• Meebo: Let’s you manage all of your IM clients from one site. I’ll be interested to see how Meebo does against eBuddy, which is a “free web based messenger that enables you to chat with your MSN, Yahoo and AIM buddies” without downloading a separate client. eBuddy also works via mobile.
• Wikia: This site was co-founded by Angela Beesley and Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, who I  recently talked about seeing speak at the Social Media Club meeting in San Francisco.
• Joost: I’m looking forward to seeing how Joost pans out.  It’s an on-line video website which focuses on broadcast quality television – like IPTV on demand.  They’ve just signed a deal with Viacom, the output of which will be interesting to watch.  The on-line video space is getting crowded between Joost, YouTube, Revver, Grouper, BitTorrent and others.
• Dabble: Makes a tool for organizing videos into playlists and favorites.  Hmmm… Not sure how I feel about this one.  Think I’ll stick with video search engines and recommendations I find in blogs until someone convinces me otherwise..
• Metacafe: This site is kind of like YouTube, but it pays users for page views. As I mentioned before, the on-line video space is really crowded. With YouTube saying they’re going to find ways to pay users for involvement, I’m not sure how I feel about Metacafe’s long-term prospects for success.  That said, they do claim 17 million monthly visitors, so they’re off to a good start.
• Revision3: “A production studio for geek-oriented online shows.”… Certainly a growing market full of opportunity!
• blip.tv: Platform for syndicating on-line shows… Looks like a hot market.
• fon.com: Now this looks interesting!  Fon.com is based in Spain and is attempting to build the world’s first worldwide wi-fi network.  They’re selling wireless routers for $30.  According to the description on Business 2.0, consumers “hook it up, register their node, and agree to share their broadband with other “Foneros” for free. Those who want to charge outsiders for access can do so, and Fon gets a cut. Likewise, if someone wants to pay $2 or $3 to use the Fon network for a day, Fon takes a share of that revenue. Just over a year old, Fon’s network boasts more than 70,000

  hotspots.” This could be huge, especially given that wi-fi on mobile phones is a growing feature.

• Loopt: Loopt lets you see where your friends are anytime, using your GPS enabled mobile phone.  Boost Mobile has integrated Loopt into it’s service offerings.  There are many interesting applications to social networking… Check out my previous posts on GPS to see what I mean.
• Mobio:  Mobio makes mobile applications and wigets.  They do quite a bit in the mobile location based service space. Mobio just launched at DEMO in January. I’ve not played with their app, but their demo looks an aweful lot like Microsoft Life’s mobile beta.
• Tiny: Tiny’s Radar service is like Flickr but for mobile phones.  It lets users send photos from their mobile phones and have their friends comment on them. This sounds very similar to NowThen, only it’s restricted to mobile phones.
• SoonR: This company lets you access information on your PC from your mobile phone. I saw a lot of solutions like this when I was at Palm. I’m not sure why Business 2.0 thinks this is such a big deal.  Win-Hand Anywhere, a strong competitor, has been around for years.  I’m not convinced that that remote PC access is the way forward. The problem with software like SoonR and Win-Hand Anywhere is that if your computer is off, you can’t access your data. I prefer “server in the sky” applications like Avvenu, Orb, and GotoMyPC which allow you to access your information from anywhere (including your mobile phone).
• Turn: I don’t know much about this but it looks very cool… According to the site: “Avertisers first enter the prices they’re willing to pay for various results – $5 for a sales lead, say, or $50 to $60 for a completed transaction. Next, they upload their text-or graphics-based display ads. Turn’s software then analyzes the ads using more than 60 variables – including content, brand strength, and keywords – and determines the right publishers to serve up the ads.”
• admob:  Like Turn – Could be very useful to advertisers: “AdMob offers a place to buy ads for delivery to cell phones.” It seems to me that Millennial Advertising, which I talked about in my January 26th blog should also be on this list.
• Spot Runner: This looks like a great resource for small businesses. It’s a “one-stop online shop for low-cost 30-second TV ads. Local businesses can browse a library of premade spots and personalize them for airing in their local markets.”
• ViTrue:  This is a great idea. Though, I think they need to improve the way they explain their service on their website.  It looks a bit like parts of what I proposed as a potential monetization strategy for YouTube.
• SuccessFactors:  I met with these guys when I was working in London as a Management Consultant a few years ago. I evaluated their software and other eHR and performance management systems and found theirs to be the most intelligent and well designed. Definitely a company to watch if you’re into enterprise systems.
• Janrain: Single sign which allows users to juggle multiple passwords for multiple website.  This is the alternative to open ID.
• Logoworks:  I’ve not used this site, which offers the ability to publish business cards, stationary, etc. for less than conventional on-line publishers, but I’m always interested in deals!
• Rearden Commerce:  I’ve been hearing a lot about Rearden recently.  They offer a “web-based “virtual personal assistant” application that smoothly integrates hotel and flight reservations, meetings, and other events into your daily agenda.” They’ve got a strong user base with 150 companies and their 500,000 or so employees using the software.
• SimulScribe: This company has voice recognition software that converts voicemails to text.  Voice transcription software is a growing and hot marketplace. I know of at least one (stealth-mode) start-up working on the next generation of this type of software, which will can be leveraged for all sorts of things you haven’t thought of.

Some other companies that weren’t on the list, but I think are worth watching are:  Shozu (mobile 2.0), IMT Labs (the company behind Spleak, the chatbot), and Kiptronic (advertising platform for podcasters).

On a different note – If you’re interested in technology (especially mobile), you might be interested in this, the new blog from my friend, Derek Snyder, from Microsoft’s Mobile and Embedded team.  So far, he’s talked about Windows Mobile 6, how to cancel your Verizon contract in less than 30 minutes with no penalty, how to get a free extra battery for your Blackjack, and more.

If you’re into Twitter, try Nowthen.  Nowthen is the newest brainchild from the folks at Blinkx.  It’s everywhere messaging like Twitter, but besides written updates/broadcasts, you can also send pictures from your mobile phone using MMS.  You can set up privacy features to use it with specific groups of friends or with the world.  You can also get it to send you notifications via SMS/ MMS on your mobile phone (if you’ve got an unlimited messaging plan) or your Nowthen mailbox. I’m curious to know what Twitter fans think.  If you try it, post a comment and let me know what you think.

One thing I think is particularly cool is that they’re already starting to think globally.  There are separate numbers you can MMS your NowThen photos to depending on whether you’re in the US or UK.

The BBC reports that University of Maryland Lecturers Ben Shneiderman and Jennifer Preece are proposing “community-driven websites to be run by trained volunteers working in conjunction with the 6,100 local 911 services around the US.“ The BBC article is really interesting and points to the potential applications of social networking sites in local and/or national crisis situations.  Shneiderman and Preece’s proposal is apparently outlined in this month’s Science magazine, but I wasn’t able to find the referenced article online.

Today at 3GSM in Barcelona, ShoZu Inc., an emerging leader in the mobile social networking space, announced the addition of some great new LBS feature enhancements for GPS-enabled mobile phonw.  According to the press release:

Share-It one-click image uploading service now offers location tagging for photos and video clips sent from GPS-enabled phones to Flickr and YouTube as well as Buzznet, Dada.net, moblogUK, Pikeo and Textamerica. ShoZu is the only upload service that provides automatic geotagging for cameraphone uploads to more than one Internet destination. It also supports more GPS handsets than any other provider…The new location tag capability applies to all ShoZu web destinations that support tagging. ShoZu also enables users to upload images to sites without tagging including photo sharing communities Kodak EasyShare Gallery, MSN�s Windows Live Spaces and Webshots; personal blogging sites Blogger, TypePad and WordPress; citizen-contributed photojournalism sites CNN, the BBC and Scoopt; and any FTP or email address. ShoZu continues to add new sites on a regular basis.

While I find ShoZu’s announcement exciting, it will be a while before most of us can take advantage of this capability.  Most mobile phones in the US (including my Treo 750) are not GPS enabled.  I hope that this will change in the coming years (GPS enabled phones are certainly becoming more popular).  However, in the meantime, I’ll have to do things the old fashioned way – manually (which is painful).  The good news is that once GPS becomes ubiquitous, automatic geotagging and LBS services will be the norm.  ShoZu’s announcement forshadows some of the exciting things mobile social media enthusiasts have to look forward to.

Web 2.0 is changing the way that people publish, access, and spread news.  Newspaper subscriptions are down, and the number of bloggers is up.  Blurb is changing that.

Blurb is capitalizing on the rising interest in on-line self-publishing (e.g. blogs) and the continuing popularity of books.  In their beta release, they’ve made it simple and inexpensive for people and businesses to self-publish hardback and paperback books in both small and large quantities.  Blurb allows people to self-publish all types of quality books up to 440 pages– blog books, photo books, text and picture books, cookbooks, poetry books (coming soon), personal portfolios, novels and dissertations (coming soon), and more.

My favorite Blurb concept is the “Blog Book“.  Bloggers, who use TypePad and WordPress (and soon Blogger, LiveJournal, and Moveable Type), will find Blurb’s “Blog Slurper” technology particularly useful.   Blog Slurper imports and maps blog text, comments, images, and links into a draft book, which can then be customized. I sent a note to Blurb yesterday asking whether VOX will be a supported platform for their Blog Slurper, and I’ll update this entry if/when I hear back.
and other companies are making it easy for everyday people to self-publish on-line “blogs”.  Gone are the days when journalists and authors were the only ones who could voice their opinion.  Now, anyone can do it.  At the same time that conventional newspapers are struggling to keep up subscriptions and bloggers are growing in numbers, the book market remains stable.  There’s something special about books beyond the words printed on their pages and the stories they tell.  For me, it’s the way that they look together on a shelf, their unique smell, their simplicity and tangibility. Laptops and Sony Readers haven’t replaced coffee table books.  Bookshelves still sell well, and bookstores are still profitable.  The problem with books is that until now, it has been difficult and expensive to self-publish books.  San Francisco-based start-up

Blurb-blog-book

I also like how easy it is for everyday people (non-bloggers) to easily create books with full-color pictures using Blurb’s BookSmart application (compatible on both Mac an PC).  Blurb offers templates for a variety of different types of “ready made” books – baby, dog, cat, and more.  Imagine what the ease of self-publishing means for families, friends, students, professors, small businesses, and more!

The best part about Blurb from a Social Media perspective is that it offers users the ability to promote and sell their books to others via Blurb’s on-line bookstore. Blurb is making it possible for aspiring authors to leverage the Internet to start their own publishing empires – just like musicians Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and others did on MySpace.   I wish there was more of a community aspect to Blurb, where users could join “groups” like Vox and Gather and talk about their favorite “blurb” books written on specific topics.  Who knows, since the current version of Blurb is a beta, that functioanlity may come in time. In the meantime, I like how easy Blurb makes it for everyday people almost anywhere in the world to self-publish books, inexpensively.  Pricing starts as follows, with 10% discounts for 25-199 books, 15% discount for 200-400 books and larger discounts for even bigger quantities:

Blurb-pricing

Barack Obama just launched a social media/ social networking website to further his presidential campaign in 2008: my.barackobama.com. While I haven’t made any decisions about who I will support in the 2008 presidential election, I signed up for a “test account” on My.Barackobama.com to test the social media functionality of Obama’s website.  The features/functionality of the site are robust. Users can:

• Write a blog
• Help Barack fundraise
• Discover events nearby/ Create events
• Network with other supporters
• Invite friends
• Write messages to “friends” (e.g. fellow Barack Obama supporters)
• Join groups/ start groups (just like VOX or Gather)

If you’re a Barack Obama supporter, the site looks like a great way to interact with other supporters.  If you don’t support Obama, the site looks like a good way to get the inside scoop on what his supporters are saying.  I didn’t find any noticeable bugs, which is a good sign.  It looks like the site uses a customiseable white label social media platform – ala Five Across or Social Platform, though I couldn’t find any sign of which solution was used.  I did notice that the blogging feature disables adding  hyperlinks, which is a little frustrating, though it’s not difficult to understand why disabling hyperlinking would make the site easier to administer.

I’m looking forward to seeing what role social media plays in the 2008 presidential election.  So far, Barack is the first candidate to launch his own on-line social network.  Hillary Clinton launched her campaign using an on-line video to announce her candidacy and has a blog.  Her campaign supporters are also using 3rd party social networking sites like MySpace to make waves.  However, at the time of writing this blog, Clinton has yet to launch her own social network.  Two different strategies from two different democratic candidates.  One thing is clear – the forthcoming election campains will provide interesting case studies for anyone interested in social media marketing.  I expect that by 2008, social media marketers will discover a lot more about how to properly target and ignite a winning word of mouth campaign fueled by social media.

As many fellow VOXers know, there is no way to tell how many hits your blog gets (or how many people read or talk about it)… Six Apart doesn’t provide a counting utility to bloggers. (If they did, the bloggers generating the most traffic on VOX might be tempted to leave to start revenue generating blogs of their own.)  I often wonder how many people actually read my blog, besides those that add me to their VOX “neighborhood” or leave comments.  As far as I’m aware, no one has developed a way to accurately automate the combined measurement of blog traffic, quality of content, links from other blogs, etc.  Technorati does a good job of identifying who is talking about which bloggers, so for now, it is what I use to gage how I’m doing in the blogging universe.  But, Technorati only tells part of the story.

This morning, I took a look at the rating of my blog on Technorati.  When I first checked the rating score several months ago, my blog was ranked somewhere around 900,000th. The next time I checked it (weeks later), it jumped to around 300,000th.  This morning when I looked (gasp) it jumped to the 125,511th top blog.  That’s over 700% improvement!  Unfortunately, that’s not at all impressive when you explore what it means.  Technorati’s rating score indicates that socialmedia.vox.com was linked to by 52 other bloggers 30 times.  The more bloggers that link to this blog, the higher my rating score goes.

When I dug a little deeper into who was talking about my blog, I realized that the links to my blog included:

• Legit mentions from other blogs (though there was a duplicate mention, which counted twice – both the original post and then the archived, permanent post).
• People who added me to their VOX neighborhood (My hyperlinked image appears on their vox home page.)
• Multiple links from fraudulent blog sites… By this, I mean links from websites formatted to look like blogs but lacking in their own content.  Take, for example, “MySpaceRIP.com”.  (I won’t hyperlink the URL because the undesired result would be an improvement in Myspacerip.com’s Technorati rating.) This appears to be a holding page for a domain name for sale + advertising space for sale.

All of the bogus “link to’s” that I saw listed under my blog made me question Technorati’s usefulness as a “rating” tool. Based on my experience, no real meaning can be derived from the actual ranking.  However, Technorati is an incredibly useful tool for discovering who is talking about blogs and topics.  One of the most interesting things that I discovered when trolling through my “link to’s” was one blogger’s opinion of the “Top Bloggers On Communities”.  If you are interested in on-line communities, this list is a great resource for new reading material.

If any of you out there know of a better tool than Technorati for measuring the impact and popularity of blogs, please post a comment or, if you’re a non-voxer (and can’t leave a comment), email me, and I’ll post your comment manually.

Here’s some great food for thought- especially the last minute of the video: Web 2.0 is linking people…People sharing, trading, and collaborating…

We’ll need to re-think a few things…

• copyright
  
• authorship
  
• identity
  
• ethics
  
• aesthetics
  
• rhetorics
  
• governance
  
• privacy
  
• commerce
  
• love
  
• family
  
• ourselves