Archive for November, 2007

Social rank

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 24, 2007 in news and social networks. 4 Comments

Came across another interesting project - SocialRank by MindValley.

Let me first start with MindValley themselves. It’s a young company and growing quite rapidly:

From working in our pajamas with an initial investment of $500 bucks we built a million-dollar company in 2 years (without any venture capital, business plans or loans).

MindValley acts as an idea incubator. They launch 2-3 companies every year, that specialises in one of the three areas: Technology, Media and Marketing.

Now, what so special about SocialRank? It is claimed to work under the same principle as Google page rank, but only for blog posts. The algorithm is meant to identify hottest blogs posts in specific niche.

Relativelly recently they have launched 50 SocialRank sites dedicated to specific niches:

  1. AgileDaily.com - Agile Development
  2. AllNightCoder.com - Programming
  3. AppleFever.com - Apple
  4. BikingCircle.com - Biking
  5. ChallengeReligion.com - Atheism
  6. DailyMovieGuide.com - Movies and Film
  7. DailyPhotoblogs.com - Photoblogs
  8. GadgetRoll.com - Gadgets and Technology
  9. DailyVoices.com - The talk of the town, for any given area
  10. JournalismDaily.com - Journalism
  11. JustFlashing.com - Flash and Macromedia/Adobe
  12. KittyCatCentral.com - Cats and Kittens (Meow!)
  13. KnittingFriends.com - Knitting
  14. LearningSignal.com - eLearning
  15. MarketingLens.com - Marketing
  16. MathBloggers.com - Mathematics
  17. MightyBlogger.com - Blog Monetization
  18. MyCupofJava.com - Java Programming
  19. NewMediaSignal.com - New Media
  20. ProductivityZen.com - Productivity
  21. PRVoices.com - Public Relations
  22. PythonBytes.com - Python
  23. QueerFever.com - Queer Lifestyle
  24. StartupSignal.com - Entrepreneurship
  25. SweetGaming.com - Computer Games
  26. SweetSecondLife.com - The World of Second Life
  27. TheCarInsider.com - Automobiles
  28. TheLibraryShelf.com - Librarian
  29. TheMomsWorld.com - Motherhood
  30. TomorrowsBrands.com - Advertising
  31. CraftyRascal.com - Kids Crafts
  32. DailyDogWatch.com - Dogs
  33. FeministFocus.com - Feminism
  34. FilmMakerDaily.com - Film Making
  35. HomeBusinessDaily.com - Home Business
  36. IndieFilmWatch.com - Independent Films
  37. InsideManga.com - Manga
  38. MakeSomethingToday.com
  39. MicrosoftGate.com - Microsoft
  40. OracleInsider.com - Oracle
  41. ParentingWatch.com - Parenting
  42. PhotoshopWatch.com - Photoshop
  43. PopFart.com - Pop Culture
  44. RecruitingWatch.com - Recruiting
  45. SmallBusinessRadar.com - Small Business
  46. TechnoratiTop100.com - Technorati TOP 100
  47. TheBlueAmerica.com - Liberal US Politics
  48. TheRedAmerica.com - Conservative US Politics
  49. TheToySociety.com - Toys
  50. DailyVentures.com - Venture Capital
  51. RubyGalore.com - Ruby on Rails

And that is just the beginning:

Our goal is to identify the top 1,000 niches on the Net and launch sites to cater to each of these blogger communities. Often we get surprised at the niches we discovered.

On the negative side:

These sites are just one step above spam. The social rank is not a transparent ranking and does not identify the most important posts, but rather is clearly set to get bloggers (who used to at least link to each other) competing for the right to get on a list so that these folks get fresh stuff to put against their adsense.

One might wonder, how is this all related to social networking? Very simple,  if this catches up, it allows identifying and forming social groups of similar niche interests automatically.

Interesting blend

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 24, 2007 in links. 0 Comments

What happens if you mix online social networking and biology? The answer is most popular family history site - Ancestry.

There are many things you can do on their web site, but people join Ancestry to start building their family tree. You start with yourself, then add you direct relatives, also you can search massive user database of already registered users. Regional websites allows searching public records, such at telephone and civic record books.

However the most interesting bit is the DNA based discovery. If you have your DNA sampled, you then can track your origins. Tracking includes geographical visualisation, so for example you could end up with something like this:

It also allows doing DNA matches, so you’ll locations of users that are close DNA matches to yourself.

Another interesting option is finding the distance to a common ancestor with any other registered user.

Read more on their

More on categorisation of the social networks

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 24, 2007 in social networks. 0 Comments

As I have identified earlier there are two types of social networks:

  • hard-linked networks, where users consciously select and build their network by hand-picking their friends.
  • soft-linked networks, where users become part of a group depending on their activities.

Building the catalog and going through many different sites, I decided to add another dimension in identifying the networks. This time identification will be by type of activities:

  • general purpose

General purpose networks, such as Facebook, MySpace

  • professional

Networks targeted to professionals, LinkedIn, Viadeo

  • targeted

Networks that are built for very targeted niche, such as Flixter or ParentsConnect

Enterprise social networking solutions

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 24, 2007 in social networks. 1 Comment

I have to admit I wasn’t aware of any serious enterprise social networking solutions before I came across Lotus Connections product from IBM. It has rich feature set including: profiles, communities, blogs, dogear (bookmark sharing) and activities.

Lotus Connections isn’t a recently developed product, it is a combination of various internal tools and utilities that IBM were using for quite some time already. What IBM did, is they packaged all those nice little “HR type” products in to a commercial package and made it available for sale. Apparently the system is used at IBM internally and proves to be very efficient.

I’d also recommend watching this introduction video:

Do we need a metanetwork?

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 23, 2007 in social networks. 0 Comments

Problem statement: We have lots and lots of social networks out there, with more coming each day. Some of them we can ignore right from the beginning, as they are completely out of our interest circle, but how do we go about those that are of some interest to us? It’s really putting of when you have to fill in same information over and over again. But that’s OK, what is really annoying, is the fact that you have to build your own network around you from scratch.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a single point to control all social networking activities? A place where you could enter you details and preferences just once? A place where you keep your relation data, so that when you go and join another network all your existing friends re-connect to you immediately and you don’t have to start with an empty buddy list?

Solution: Market is recognising the demand and responding accordingly. There are at least two streams - full blown implementations and emerging standarts. Both are trying to address the same issue - lack of centralised control (or view) in decentralised system of social networks.

This is all very well and good. Only issue that I see, is that users might want to differentiate their social network on each site. For example you may not want your LinkedIn contacts to see pictures of yourself you are posting on MySpace. The problem here is that account on these “aggregators” might become a beast to manage with all sorts of different options and settings for each network you control from there. So, will the easiness and convenience of managing all accounts from one place outweigh the complexity of personalisation settings? We shall see…

The meaning of it all…

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 23, 2007 in social networks. 0 Comments

One of the reasons I’m in all this social networking stuff is that I find it hard to understand and grasp the meaning of it. OK, I do understand practicality of it, like finding contacts, jobs, etc. What I am failing on is to completely understand the remaining bit of it. Self exposure, communications, chats and so on, that still OK, I get it… What I was really not getting is the “my current status” type communication.

Just recently I found a very interesting article, that pretty much explains the mechanics behind. It all starts to fit together, so for those of you who, as I did, fail to grasp the meaning of “exhaust data”, have a read.

What your network is worth?

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 22, 2007 in links and news. 0 Comments

Very funny application. Lets you calculate your social network value. In fact it’s just a game, but concept is very interesting.

If only it gathered data from social networks and online search engines… Something similar to this service (or rather calculator) for blogs.

By the way, my network value is rather low comparing to “similar profiles”, yet it is valued £76′000. Any suggestions how to monetise at least a bit of it?? :)

What is a social network?

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 19, 2007 in social networks. 1 Comment

We started compiling a directory (or catalogue as we call it here). To begin with, we’ve revisited a rather comprehensive list on Wikipedia. And we found something that confused us. Among “normal” social network sites, blogs, forums and collaboration sites were listed as well. Here’s when we started discussing, what exactly is the social network? Or what makes a network (or a website) the social network?

Let’s look around for help and some definitions.

Google suggests (I picked one of the suggested items) that social network is:

The personal or professional set of relationships between individuals.

Wikipedia’s view is:

A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, idea, financial exchange, friends, kinship, dislike, conflict, trade, web links, sexual relations, disease transmission (epidemiology), or airline routes.

If you do more research, you’ll find different definitions (in terms of wording) for a social network, but generally it boils down to “group or related individuals”. Now, all above mentioned types of web sites fall under that definition. Whether it’s a collaboration site (such as wikipedia), or forum, or even Open Source Development site (such as SourceForge), or even a news site with their registered users, they all are social networks for they unite individuals in one or the other way. If you do more generalisation, the Internet is one big social network, because it unites all Internet users. That’s useful…

So, when it comes to sorting and identifying social networks, I believe we can distinguish two types: hard-linked and soft-linked networks.

Hard-linked networks are social networks where users pick their peers themselves. Theme of the network isn’t that much important. This type of network focuses on “friendship” and links between users. Examples of these networks are FaceBook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Linking is explicit, as links are picked by users themselves.

Soft-linked networks are social networks where users are “grouped” by some set of attributes, such as music they like, web sites they visit, software they develop or even company they work for. Linking in these networks does not play important role and in most cases is non-existent, because people already belong to a group. Exmpales of these networks could be any forum, news sites (Slashdot) or social bookmark sites (Delicious). Linking is implicit, as all group members are related by their attributes.

Surely, there are many gaps and holes in this definition, but for now, we’ll use this as a working theory for our catalogue.

Under pressure

Published by Alexey Gabsatarov on November 13, 2007 in social networks. 4 Comments

Social networks represent a way to simulate real interactions between people. Those interactions have always been and always will be there. Why social networks created so much hype around them lately?

Human is a social animal. Our very identities are shaped and defined by society we live in. We accept common wisdom of “Tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are”.

Well, this is it. Social networks is a modus operandi to show our identities in a different way. Very powerful and reveling way I must add. The same way performing requires spectators, social networking requires exposing. This creates even more powerful phenomena of exposing social interactions by means of social interactions.

Peer pressure, huh? What about Facebook pressure? :)

Good night!

News of the social networks

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 13, 2007 in links and news. 0 Comments

Some interesting links and news from social networking arena.

DanceJam is YouTube for Dance. People would post video clips where they dance and then can compete with other dances. Check out this interview for more details. Their web site is still closed, but stay tuned if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

UpDown proves once again that social networking is not only for fun. Project is built upon an idea that community of like minded people can perform better analysis and come up with better investing strategies. UpDown offers many different services, such as investing competitions and allows creating your personal investing profiles. So far this service is receiving very positive feedback.

BeliefNet is a social network dedicated to religious devotees, spiritual leaders, and faith-based group. This once again proves that social networks are no longer dating and band fan gathering places.

Befaft is a very interesting or rather unusual network. This social network is dedicated to plastic surgery patients. Users can ask for advise whether they need plastic surgery in the first place. The site also offers tools to simulate effects of the plastic surgery. Ex-patients can post their pre and post surgery pictures.

PetSugar is yet another social network, but not really for us, humans… It’s a social network for girlie dogs! Polls, votings, comments, suggestions, pet food selections, even pet celebrities. All you (sorry, your dog) can find on PetSugar.

Enemybook plays rather negative note. List your enemies, unite with enemies of your enemies. Tell others why your enemies are in the list. It’s not a social network site, it is a Facebook application however. There are more networks that represent the opposite side of social networks. Coming back to security in the social networks one should always keep in mind that socialising online can sometimes cause a lot of grief.