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Social portfolio… for reporters

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 27, 2007 in links. 0 Comments

In continuation on my previous post about social networking portfolios. Here’s an article describing why a reporter needs to use Facebook and more, why a reporter needs two Facebook profiles:

With a Facebook “page,” a journalist can collect followers or fans of his/her work. For example, here’s a page for ABC’s Sunlen Miller, who is covering the Barack Obama campaign. (Note: You’ll need to be logged in to your Facebook account to see that page.) Miller’s page features notes and photos from the campaign trail, links to ABC News coverage, and anyone can “Follow this reporter,” which is sort of a variation of becoming a “friend.” Followers of Miller’s work can send her a message, or write on her “wall.”

Social networks = social politics?…

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 27, 2007 in social networks. 1 Comment

Yesterday Facebook and ABC announced a partnership to bring political coverage to Facebook:

ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.

This partnership is primarily focusing on political news, but that alone wouldn’t be enough for Facebook users, so ABC and Facebook jointly sponsoring and organising Democratic and Republican debates in New Hampshire.

Now, this may look as a partnership to bring massive news (political) source into one of the most popular online social network, but is that it? If you think about it, Facebook has 57million active users, with 50% of them logging in to Facebook each day and spending at least 20 minutes on the site. There’s groups, there’s polls, there’s people chatting, there’s custom applications… And you bring politics on top of that.

I see at least two immediate areas of influence:

  • Attempt for form the political view. This is obvious one, this has been happpening for ages with the help of mass media, and social networking sites are just another type of mass media.
  • Completely opposite reaction. Most of Facebook users are in US, but yet this is international community. Given that, any political even will be analysed and will get different opinions regardless the government will. Now, add social groups in to the equation and you ultimately might end up with more objective voters…

I guess it’s really hard to predict where this is all going, but definitely it is going to be the new way of doing politics.

Now you have to thank Alexey, who installed the polls things, and here’s a question for you:

What will the direction of political influence be?

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Battle royal

Published by Alexey Gabsatarov on November 26, 2007 in enterprise and social networks. 0 Comments

Beware, early social adopters! The giants are finally awake and are closing on each other on the social arena.

Google with OpenSocial, Microsoft with Cloud OS and IBM with Lotus Connections are exploring the domain from different angles but unavoidably arrive at the same point.

It is interesting that new Microsoft visionary Ray Ozzie who outlined a major change in company’s direction, is the Lotus Notes original creator. Lotus was later purchased by IBM and is being transformed into IBM social enterprise product Lotus Connections. It is a small world.

And finally a little spot the differences game. Social enterprise from Microsoft and IBM.
Presentations are taken via excellent LotusConnectionBlog.

Facebook poketology

Published by Alexey Gabsatarov on November 26, 2007 in social networks. 2 Comments

I have to admit I am fascinated by facebook poke. And for the very simple reason – poke is a very social thing that did not and does not exist outside of social network context.

Since poking developed inside facebook, it is important to understand mechanisms behind poke to understand how social network works.

When an individual joins the group, it has two basic ways to get around unfamiliar environment – “trial and error” and “imitation”.

Trial and error treats the group as a part of the environment and explores it from the outside. Individual learns by acting and measuring subjective feedback from the action.
Imitation is much more powerful and robust as a social interaction. User acknowledges being part of the group and trusts the group. Instead of spending a lot of effort to establish what is socially acceptable using trial and error, users start imitating other users. After all, we are natural born imitators – why don’t we do what we do best?

In every dynamic group there will be still a fair amount of trial and errors and most successful attempts will set new trends. But there is no truly social interaction and there is no truly social network without imitation.

Let’s take poke. After a new user joins facebook and acquires a few facebook friends, she will be poked. Outside of facebook being poked (whatever the equivalent might be) by a complete stranger is at least confusing. Inside facebook one quickly learns that poking is normal and acceptable thing. If poking is normal, is there one way to use poke?

Facebook informs that poke is a cool feature without specific purpose. The same page suggests to invent own meaning of pocking. So in a best social sense, poke has provided facilities and left the usage and interpretation to the users. Some users set trends and the others follow.

Reflecting the diverse audience, there are currently 500+ user groups around meaning and usage of poke on facebook, ranging from pancakes to sex invitations. To be fair the pancakes group only managed to get 252 users against 332 thousands of “sex poke” supporters.

However, there are hundreds of poke usages that are a little bit more useful than pancakes invitations. The beauty is interpretation is entirely dependant on your friends demographic. And it could be a good idea to check what poke group they are on before poking back.

But remember that sometimes a poke is just a poke.

So what is your poke?

Why do you poke?

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Developing your Facebook strategy

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 26, 2007 in links. 4 Comments

Since we’re in social networking, we have to use social networks to promote ourselves, right? I was reading about various strategies to promote a blog. And found an amazing article by Dave McClure.

In short, Dave recommends the following seven steps for promoting your business/organisation using Facebook:

  1. Set Up Your Graph: Profiles & Privacy
  2. Make Connections: Networks, Groups & Events
  3. The Need for Feed: Your [Shared] Social Activity Stream
  4. Share Your Content: Share & People-Tag Your Stories & Media
  5. App to the Future: The Facebook Platform, APIs, & Applications
  6. Pay to Play: Ad Networks, Sponsored Stories, & Paid Distribution
  7. Show Me The Bunny: Gifts, Points, & Virtual Currency

Online social portfolio

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 25, 2007 in social networks. 2 Comments

I want to identify what is an optimal set of social networks one should join and participate in.

First, let’s identifyuser groups we’ll be selecting portfolios for. We can’t use “one size fits all” approach here, especially when talking about social groups.

So, most obvious selection is by age, let’s start with three groups (G):

  1. Under 30
  2. 30 to 50
  3. Over 50

Second selection group is based on occupation (O):

  1. Student
  2. Non-professional
  3. Professional

And thethird, and last at this moment, is by income (this should be based on national average and abviously vary between countries, but the grouping remains the same) (I):

  1. None to high low
  2. Average to high average
  3. High and above

Now here comes an interesting bit, how do we select most common combination? After I’ve done some research I came up with only two selections that make up two large distinct groups:

  1. G1 + O1/2 + I1
  2. G2 + O3 + I2

This is just my feeling which is not based on anything at the moment, so I’d really appreciate if anyone could point me to some statistical data.

I’ve mapped this to some statistical data I could come accross, and the second group is much smaller in all popular networks. Both groups follow similar distribution pattern in most of the large networks. The only real differentiators I’vespotted were LinkedIn and MySpace. Therefore I think the portfolios should look like this:

First group:

  • MySpace or Facebook
  • Twitter or Jaiku
  • LiveJournal

Second group:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter or Jaiku
  • LinkedIn

Surely these lists must be customised for each case, depending on one’s preferences and interests, but I believe these could serve as initial kick off point.

Syria blocks Facebook

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

Syrian government blocked access to FaceBook on Friday in an attempt to control political activism on the internet.

Thousands in Syrian use Facebook to communicate with relatives and friends abroad. The social network also links groups with political and cultural interests. Syrians who have pages on the site include businessmen with links to the ruling class and pro-government commentators.

Seems that the major authorities concern is the articles posted by activists that criticises the government.

Facebook API vs OpenSocial

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

Found an interesting post at BlogMaverick. Mark discusses whether OpenSocial can compete with FaceBook API. At the moment OpenSocial is unified API for participating online social networks that allows developer to write applications that would work across the board, ie on all participating platforms. Facebook however has its own API, and is not part of the OpenSocial group.

Whether this is good or bad time will show.

Mark argues that Facebook stands above other social networks because it enforces real identities:

When you go to my Facebook profile, you get the real me. Thats not to say I answer every profile question. I don’t. I’m not going to disclose everything about myself. However, the data that is available about me is the most comprehensive, self maintained database record about me on the internet or probably anywhere. Access to that information times the however many tens of millions of Facebook active users is worth a lot of money.

As a consequence the information about users is so much more valuable, especially if combined with search engines:

So back to Yahoo and the Facebook API. I thought that if you put the 2 together, enabling Yahoo to access the Facebook database of users within the current API constraints, Yahoo search and ad serving would improve considerably. Expand the Facebook database with an opt in option to add further personal data that could be used FROM WITHIN THE YAHOO WEBSITE, the results for Yahoo could be extraordinary. A Yahoo searchbox within Facebook , or a search from a Yahoo site that recognizes you are the owner of a Facebook profile and customizes the results according to information culled from your profile would be incredibly powerful.

In order for this to happen Facebook needs to open their API, so the application could exist outside the Facebook domain.

Tim O’Reily has made some valid observations on his blog, yet I’d like to disagree with some of them:

A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building “social applications” misses the point. We don’t want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn’t about a social UI. It’s about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application.

I personally think that these two (reusing social data and developing more applications to improve that data) are equally important. Moreover, extracting social data for use in searches and other activities might bring some security issues and put off those concerned about privacy.

To summarise I see tree problem areas here:

  • Centralised location to control user profile data
  • Access to social data /read/
  • Access to social platform /write/

All these three should be addressed separately. I guess Google is doing well with OpenSocial on the third, whereas social profile aggregator sites are targeting the first. Second one is rather tricky, because it touches very sensitive area of privacy.

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