Social Networking and Web 2.0

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook are great for keeping in touch with your friends. But not everyone you add as a “friend” is really someone you would share your innermost thoughts with in real life. That’s why it’s important for social networking sites to let you differentiate between different types of friends — something you haven’t been able to do so far on Facebook, one of the most popular social sites on the internet.

Well, it looks like that’s about to change. Facebook is working on an update that will let you organize your friends into different groups. Say you don’t want your work colleagues to see the same level of detail that your best friends from high school can see. Not a problem. Don’t want your mom to read everything you’re writing about your new girlfriend? Should be doable. Well, we think so anyway. To be honest, we don’t know much about the new feature other than the fact that it’s coming soon.

Facebook has also announced you’ll be able to receive your Facebook notification e-mails in digest form. If you currently get thousands of e-mails a day, this feature could come as a godsend. If you only have two or three friends, then please disregard this post in its entirety.

[via Mashable]
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Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, Photo, E-mail, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Slide.com has been getting some much deserved respect in the photo sharing sector this year, beating out Flickr with their unique photo offering amongst Kiwi users.

Slide grew by 228% between the beginning of May and the end of September this year, stepping over the popular Flickr in New Zealand. Slide lets its users upload images from social networks, photo sharing sites and desktops to create custom slideshows with sounds, themes and effects to share amongst friends.

Flickr dropped to third place in New Zealand with a 13.73% market share, and PhotoBucket took second place with 15%. Social networks are driving the new found interest in Slide, with 59.18% of users coming from Facebook App widgets, and 21% from Bebo.

Flickr still keeps users interest, with the average user staying for 9mins, 3mins longer than Slide viewers. As for worldwide users, Flickr is zooming along with over 10 million registered users, and 27 million unique visitors worldwide. Slide however, has been rocking the widget world and managed to serve over 117 million widgets worldwide in April 2007.
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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Facebook and MySpace may get all the media attention these days, but social networking pioneer Friendster isn’t resting on its laurels. The site got over 10 billion page views last month, making it one of the most trafficked sites on the web.

A few days ago Friendster, which is apparently huge in the Pacific Asian region launched a Chinese language version of the site. Today, Friendster announced another new feature: fan profiles.

While musicians, actors, comedians, and politicians have been using social networking sites to find new fans and keep existing fans informed, they often have to work within the constraints of a social networking platform. For example, every time a Friendster user wants to befriend a band, the person managing that band’s profile needs to approve the friend request. Fan profiles does away with that. You can set your account to automatically accept friend requests.

The fan profiles service has been in beta for the last month or two. Users have been able to befriend celebrities, non-profits, and other “entities,” but until today the fan profile creation tools were invite-only. Now anyone can create a fan profile. Right now the easiest way to find fan profiles is to search for someone like Hillary Clinton or Dane Cook (seriously, both were involved in the beta). You can also browse through all the fan profiles, but right now there’s no way to sort profiles by categories like actors, singers or politicians.

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Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Social Software

IBM workers went on strike this morning in Second Life marking perhaps the biggest (if not the first) virtual strike in history. Italian workers are upset over a new contract deal that canceled their performance bonus costing them each 1000 Euros (close to$1400) a year. The pay cut came at a time of big profits for IBM, and right after the workers asked for a small pay increase.

Workers took their strike to the IBM islands of Second Life this morning carrying virtual picket signs. The employees online protest coincides with a real-life picket line outside of the IBM offices in Italy also taking place today. 900 avatars have signed on to protest in Second Life, representing more 18 different countries.

If you’re not on Second Life but still want to get in on the action you can sign the petition to IBM and follow the protest today online.
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Filed under: Social Software

MySpace has fulfilled a lot of its original vision. It enables people with absolutely no web skills to create a home page. Sure, sometimes these home pages are downright ugly, but it’s a start for those, who like our 60-year-old moms, wouldn’t otherwise have an ice cube’s chance in Hades of making a home page.

In some ways, MySpace has become what .Mac should have. .Mac’s intentions were to foster social interaction by means of media shared between friends–basically what MySpace does. Yet MySpace is free and has probably five hundred times more users than .Mac. So Tom and gang are obviously doing something right.

Yet most MySpace users who’ve been on the service any length of time will bellyache about the nuances of their chosen social networking site. Here are 10 ways MySpace can assure their future as a viable outlet for media sharing and socializing:

Continue reading 10 ways MySpace can (and needs to) improve

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Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Internet, E-mail, Web services, P2P, Social Software, Beta

Get ready for a whole new Facebook. Instant Messaging is getting set to find a home in the ever expanding, bulging at the seams social network.

Just when you thought that all that news about Facebook’s valuation, the developer grants, and the possible Microsoft investment was enough to raise the roof on their worth, we hear news that the site is launching an IM client.. A new Facebook IM is set to go into Beta this Friday and will take on the likes of MSN, AIM, Google Talk, and Yahoo. We would imagine that this could not be used as a standalone application, and would work inline with Facebook profiles. Sam Sethi has received an early look at the beta, and enjoys the fact that there is no download or install necessary. But will it replace your standard IM?

With Yahoo! and MSN being somewhat locked down in their protocols, we are sure that things will change as the Facebook IM becomes the new in “instant messaging application”. But for now, it looks like only chatting between Facebook friends is possible.
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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Mixx is a new social news site that recently launched an invitation-only beta. The service looks and works a lot like Digg, and even has a four-letter name that looks like someone meant to type three letters but didn’t lift their hand from the keyboard in time.

While Mixx obviously doesn’t have the kind of enormous user base that makes Digg work so well, the site does have a nice clean interface and a few nifty features. For example, Mixx adds a personal home page. You can select specific areas of interest like news, politics, or technology. When you login to Mixx, you’ll be greeted with a start page showing the top user-submitted stories in each of those categories. If you’d prefer, you can still browse each of category page individually.

Mixx has separate tabs for popular pictures, videos, or stories. But while you can see thumbnails of popular images, there’s no thumbnail preview for videos, which is a little frustrating.

Another nice Mixx feature is the ability to create private groups. You can submit Links that only members of your group will be able to see or vote on.
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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, Beta, web 2.0

If you’d asked us a few months ago whether we thought there was room for two Youtube-for-documents style sites, we probably would have laughed. But then Scribd came along and showed that people really are interested in perusing interesting documents online and embedding them in blogs and other websites. And then Docstoc decided to tease us with a similar site geared more toward professionals.

While you can find pretty much any sort of document at Scribd, Docstoc has a focus on documents that can help with work. For example, users have uploaded forms for calendars, budgets, leases, invoices, and tax preparation.

We first got a sneak peek at Docstoc a few months back. But now that we’ve had a chance to peruse the site ourselves, we have to say, it’s incredibly useful for anyone who needs a ready made form or two. Need to send an invoice for work you’ve performed, but don’t have a template handy? Docstoc users have already uploaded dozens.

There’s also a social aspect to the site. Users can create profiles and leave comments on documents uploaded by others. You can browse through the most popular documents overall or within various subcategories.

Docstoc is still in private beta, but we’ve got a few invitations to give away to the first 5 people who respond to this post. The invites are time sensitive so you’ll have to respond and sign up today.

Update: Congratulations to our 5 quickest commentors! We’re all out of invitations. But stay tuned, we’ll be giving away invitations to a few more cool services in the coming days.
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Filed under: Blogging, Social Software, web 2.0

Earlier this week I wrote about being banned from Facebook, wrongly accused of being a spammer. Needless to say there was in fact no justification for allegation, I managed to inadvertently triggered Facebook’s anti-spam mechanisms by emailing a set of similar questions to a number of Facebook developers for an article I was writing.

Today Facebook gave me back my account but there wasn’t the slightest bit of contrition in sight. In an email from customer service, they continued to assert that the emails that I sent to Facebook developers could still be seen as spam.

‘Your account was disabled because you took repeated actions that could be construed as spam. For instance, it is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use to repeatedly send the same message or to make the same post. Facebook prides itself in protecting users from spam, and we take this standard very seriously.’

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy that Facebook takes action against spammers, but it would be nice if they acknowledged when the system had made a mistake. After all I wasted a considerable amount of time trying to research an article on Facebook development, time that was completely wasted since none of the developers would have been able to respond to my suspended account. Further, Facebook customer services even had the gall to suggest that if I violated the Facebook Terms further that they would terminate my account for good.

‘Please do not send or post any more form messages. Further violations of our Terms will result in the termination of your account.’

The interest in my earlier article showed that my case was far from novel, numerous Download Squad readers commented with similar complaints and questions about Facebook’s standards. For a site such as Facebook which is entrusted with the personal data of millions, this kind of arbitrary action raises questions about the management of that data. Recent questionable recruiting tactics from other social networking sites such as Quetchup has raised questions about privacy and management for other companies such as Facebook.

So thanks Facebook for giving me my account back, but no thanks for squandering any goodwill that I previously held for your social networking site.

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It’s important that you get the right kind of Links if you want to get high rankings on Google. If you have 20 good incoming links then you’ll get better rankings than with 100 bad incoming links. So what makes a good incoming link? There are several points that can make a link better than other links.

Filed under: Business, Design, Internet, E-mail, Office, Productivity, Web services, Social Software, Beta, web 2.0

Checking multiple accounts is just a fact of life for many users. Log into a Yahoo account, then switch over to Gmail, then off to Facebook. Fuser aims to make things a little easier.

With Fuser, users can check multiple email accounts and social networks from one place and with one interface. Emails can be pulled in, read and replied to from popular email apps like Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and SquirrelMail as well as POP and IMAP emails and such social networks as MySpace and Facebook with a single login.

There is no limit to the number of email and social network accounts you tie into Fuser. All emails can be sent to one inbox, or the application can be set up so that incoming mail can be better organized through folders. As for security, Fuser does not store any of your emails. It simply views them. So if you delete an email from your regular email account, it is deleted in Fuser. All information is stored in encrypted databases, including passwords, usernames and any information that is transmitted.

Fuser is a great way to streamline emails, and a real timesaver if you find yourself switching between a number of locations.

[via TechCrunch]
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Filed under: Internet, Google, Microsoft, Social Software

The internet is starting to look like a Highlander movie. In the end, there can be only one company. And that company will have untold power over all the web.

Today’s big news is that Microsoft and Google are reportedly in a bidding war for a minority stake in Facebook. Sure, neither is planning on buying the site outright, but the move could help Microsoft bolster its online business or help Google expand its social network offerings.

Apparently Microsoft is willing to pay $300 to $500 million for a 5% stake in Facebook. That would give Facebook a $10 billion valuation, which is a bit silly if you ask us. Sure, the site is the hottest thing since we burned our hands on the oven the other day, but Facebook is just starting to turn out revenue. And the social networking space if fickle. We remember a time not so long ago when people couldn’t stop talking about how cool Friendster was.

Google is also interested in buying a stake in Facebook, although it seems nobody’s leaked exactly how much money Google is willing to spend. Oh yeah, and Facebook is getting greedy. Part of the reason we’re still talking about negotiations and not a deal is because Facebook is holding out for a higher valuation, possibly as high as $15 billion, which if our math is correct would mean Microsoft or Google would have to pay $750 million for a 5% stake.

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