FriendFeed is a service that keeps track of the activity of your contacts across pretty much every social network. The problem with FriendFeed is that people want to view different sets of contacts in different ways. There are third party desktop clients for Twitter and Pownce, for example, that let you follow along and respond to comments more easily. But when you lump those services in with less-immediate ones like Yelp, Flickr, or the RSS feed to your friend's blog, the slower stuff starts to gum up the works.
Alert Thingy to the rescue! If you use FriendFeed, and you've been looking for a faster way to read updates, you're in luck: a desktop version is here. Alert Thingy is an Adobe Air application, which gives it the advantage of being lightweight and cross-platform. There aren't a lot of bells and whistles to it, but it will display your feed and allow you post items directly to FriendFeed.
Sporting Connections is a social network site for athletes, teams, and sporting-event coordinators that is designed to connect people based on sport interest. Teams can connect their team members via a team page and message board. Individuals can find teams to join or find other individuals to form a team.
The "Events" search function lets users search for events by sport, location, and date. Sporting Connections supports photo galleries, but does not currently support video.
The site lets users search for (and contact) other users making it easy to find, for example, a tennis partner. Sporting Connections is free to use when you register for an account.
Tired of visiting tons of sites to keep tabs on your friends (or vice versa)? Sign up for a Profilactic profile and link over 140 social sites (like Facebook, Flickr, Digg, etc.) and let your friends view the Profilactic mashup of your web activity.
Your Profilactic profile also has links to the specific social sites you use, so your friends can get quick access to your Dugg stories at Digg.com for instance. The mashup section can be searched or filtered by social site.
Social-site aggregation is a welcome concept as the number of sites we join seems to increase on a daily basis (private betas anyone?). Being able to go to one profile to view Twitter posts, Dugg stories, Flickr photos, and blog posts can make your web surfing more efficient.
Traackr is a free web service that lets you aggregate data about your media presence on the Web. Just create an account, add your "subscriptions" (flickr username, last.fm username, etc.), and wait about 24 hours for Traackr to get statistics.
Each day Traackr will get information like number of views, comments, and ratings, with trend graphs to make the data pretty. It will also show you which of your tags get the most views (helpful for getting user attention). You can also create campaigns to track how well certain media objects are "performing" which could be very useful for a photographer to see how popular certain groups of photos are.
Traackr could be a great tool for musicians, photographers, videographers, and the ego-centric social-site user. It's a central location to see how popular you (or your work) are, and it gives you seemingly arbitrary "Buzz" and "Populartity" scores.
There was a time when Facebook only came in one flavor: English. Well, no longer; there is now an option under "Languages," which you can get to via "Account," to change Facebook's primary language to Spanish.
Currently, there are about 2.8 million registered Facebook users in Latin America and Spain. Both regions will begin to load the Spanish version of Facebook by default starting on Monday, but users will have the option to change the default language back to English should the change be considered bothersome.
Though critics are weary of Facebook's ability to maintain itself and its large social-networking market-share, the company is now destined to grow internationally. Good luck, Mr. Zuckerberg.
Fancy Last.fm? Fancy Windows Mobile? Then you'd probably fancy the Last.fm Windows Mobile app currently in development, which happens to be called Last.fm Mobile. The Pocket PC version includes scrobbling and experimental radio functionality, but the Smartphone version can only scrobble from Windows Media Player.
The app has a healthy backing of supporters at the Last.fm forum, which is where you can learn where to download and how to install Last.fm Mobile. You'll need Windows Mobile 5 or 6 and the .NET Compact Framework 2.0, which should be included with Windows Mobile 6.
Last.fm offers tools for discovering new music, social networking, and, of course, listening to music. The addition of WM functionality only makes it that much more useful.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project just posted its findings on teens and the web, and it seems to have uncovered much of what we already know about the internet. Here's a bullet point summary of the major findings. With each point, we'll try to name site/service who's users would stereotypically match.
AIM: 93% of American teens (ages 12-17) use the web. Many of them use the web to interact with others.
YouTube: 64% of online teens create online content, up from 57% in 2004.
Livejournal (bad poetry): 39% of online teens share their artistic creations online.
MySpace: 27% of online teens keep a personal web page.
LOLcats?: 26% of online teens "remix" content they find online.
WoW: 49% of online teens play games online.
America: Teens are more likely to own desktop computers over any other type of "gadget." This one was almost surprising.
Facebook: Social network communicators are more "intense" communicators.
Facebook: Girls eclipse boys in photo posting.
Nintendo Wii: 31% of teens spend time time with friends outside of school every day.
High School: 34% of teens spend time with friends outside of school several times a week
To be honest, a lot of this is pretty obvious. We shouldn't need a study to find out chat rooms suck, teens tend to own computers, and girls are more likely than guys to post photos online. Regardless, there's a lot more information where that came from, so if you'd like to learn more about the online habits of today's teenagers, make sure to check out the full study.
In a move to add even more functionality to their site, Facebook has quietly rolled out Friends grouping. This long expected feature enables you to make different groups of friends such as "High school buddies", "Co-Workers", or "Ex-boyfriends".
To start making your own groups, simply log into Facebook. Next, click on Friends in the upper nav bar and you'll see the option to start creating new friend groups. Simply name a group and start typing in the names of those you'd like assigned. It is also pretty easy to select multiple friends at a time by clicking on "Select Multiple Friends". That way you can also select your buds by their pictures.
Facebook friend groups allow you to send messages to specific groups. However, what is missing is to control what information is available from your profile. For example - do you really want your co-workers seeing those drunken photos from the party you had last weekend? We thought so.
Even though its great Facebook has given us a little bit of added functionality, we're waiting for the whole package. They aren't going to be able to compete with the likes of LinkedIn when it comes to attracting a 'professional' audience until you're able to filter content based on your groups. Why is this? Ask the guy who lost his job after his boss found the photos available in his Facebook account.
Two of our main issues with Pownce, the Twitter and Jaiku-like social web service, have been their lack of mobile support and the absence of an API. Well, back in October they fixed the API issue and it seems now that Pownce has a mobile client.
It seems Kevin Rose and friends have been busy developing m.pownce.com in a very quiet way.We tried m.pownce.com on our mobile and it is very slick. You can post messages, events, and links, but not pictures at this time.
To use the pownce mobile client, simply fire up your mobile phone browser and go to http://m.pownce.com .
A killer feature, in our opinion, would be to allow mobile users to upload pictures taken on a mobile phone for all our pownce friends to see.
Flock, the social web browser, recently passed its milestone 1.0 release. If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Why aren't more people using Flock?
It's a good question. Strip Flock down and what you've got is a Firefox clone. You can do everything with Firefox that you can do with Flock, if you're inclined to add extension after extension. But when all is said and done, Flock is so much more than the sum of its parts.
True social powered search arrives today. Mahalo is beefing up its human-powered search engine by letting users submit additional links directly to any of the site's 26,000 human edited search pages.
Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis is announcing the new social link submission network today at the Le Web 3 conference. If Mahalo can attract the right user base, the human-powered search engine could straddle the line between Google and Wikipedia.
Already a year ahead of its published goal to create human edited result pages for 25k of the most popular search terms and, having a declared 400 paid contributors through it's Greenhouse program, Mahalo's next phase blends social networking with search in a way no service has quite attempted before.
There's no denying the appeal of demographically focused media outlets like BET, Lifetime, and SpikeTV to potential advertisers. So whether you're selling products for black people (BET) , women (Lifetime), or gangly teenage boys (SpikeTV), you can exploit a specific vertical media outlet that will expose your product to more of the people you are concerned with selling to.
As we enter the age of social networking, we begin to look at demographic focus in a slightly different manner. Because of database and user profile technologies, it's possible for a single social media outlet, such as MySpace, to provide access to many different tightly-defined demographic consumer groups who are participants in the social network.
Now, instead of dedicating the entire media property to a particular interest group, the social network operator can identify communities of special interest, of a specific race or gender, or of a particular religious background, making very appealing advertising opportunities available. Those who are pushing products aren't so much advertising any more, as they are merely participating in the network that serves their vertical.
Nevertheless, somebody at a company called Community Connect has decided that the approach employed by television network BET (that is, branding an entire media property around a certain race) remains the way to go. And apparently, over one million American blacks agree with them. BlackPlanet.com is a social networking site that is patronized primarily by African-Americans. The site has little to differentiate it from other social networking sites, although there are certainly a few cute innovations here (like BlackPlanet's Secret Admirer feature, a twist on Facebook's "poke").
Community Connect also runs MiGente.com, which is being pushed towards Latino-Americans, and AsianAve.com, which is being pushed towards Asian-Americans. Can these vertically-oriented social sites survive in a Facebook world? Having a million members is certainly a good start. So is carving out a meaningful niche--it appears BlackPlanet has done both.
Not sure who to trust in this crazy world? TrustPlus, a browser plug-in, looks to solve your trust issues with some social networking mojo. The plug-in, available for both IE and Firefox, adds an overlay to sites where trust can be an important decision factor, like Craigslist, eBay, Backpage, Gumtree or Facebook. The overlay reports trust information contained within a users' "trustcircle".
But, what if you don't have a trustcircle? Or if the person you're looking to do business with hasn't ever heard of TrustPlus? That's where TrustPlus' new component PeopleResearch comes in. According to TrustPlus, PeopleResearch "allows users to retrieve business information on any individual" through on-the-fly access to a database of background information on nearly 40 million people.
Useful? Certainly. You'll pardon us, however, if we're a little leery of even further expanded access to the amazing amounts of personal data lying around in public databases. Sure, we'd use TrustPlus but, we probably wouldn't like ourselves for using it.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In this case, the "them" is Facebook. Microsoft joined them. Google wants to beat them.
Tomorrow, Google will launch its new social networking API, called OpenSocial, with a host of high-value social networking players already at the party. The most significant of these players are LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Orkut, who've all been around quite a while and have substantial vertical popularity: LinkedIn in the business work, Salesforce in CRM applications, and Orkut as a South-American MySpace-killer. Even Friendster, which has become a sort-of also-ran with a great brand name, has joined the party. Perhaps these relatively peripheral social nets see Google as their ticket to competing with MySpace and Facebook.
Like Facebook, Google's API will provide participants with options for dealing with user profiles and events. But unlike Facebook, OpenSocial will really on commonplace JavaScript to do the API's bidding. Facebook uses it's own "FBML" specification, which means it can't be used off of the Facebook system. Google's intention is to get as many third-party social nets supporting OpenSocial as possible. And developers will flock to anything that saves them from having to re-develop their widgets for a dozen different social nets.
Ever do online dating? Come on, fess up to that match.com subscription you've been meaning to cancel for the last six months, and we'll get you hooked up with another 2.0 social site that's, well, different. Consider one of the testimonials from Fobfire: I only had a few seconds. I was getting off the subway and she was getting on, but our eyes met and it clicked. So I slipped her a fob!
The way this web site works, you get a set of tokens, called "fobs", which you can hand out to people in order to hook them up with one of your several fobfire identities: there are fobs for business, fobs for personal, and fobs for dating. The theory goes, when you meet somebody with whom you want to socially network, you hand them a fob, sort of like a key to get into the correct Fobfire profile, so they only see the info you want to see, depending on the kind of relationship you want to set up with them.
Ah, the potential for fun. Imagine accidentally handing a dating fob to a potential business client. Of course, as our own Brad Linder put it in a discussion we had earlier, "Once you hand somebody anything called a fob I don't think you really need to worry about them visiting your dating profile."
FriendFeed is a service that keeps track of the activity of your contacts across pretty much every social network. The problem with FriendFeed is that people want to view different sets of contacts in different ways. There are third party desktop clients for Twitter and Pownce, for example, that let you follow along and respond to comments more easily. But when you lump those services in with less-immediate ones like Yelp, Flickr, or the RSS feed to your friend's blog, the slower stuff starts to gum up the works.
Sporting Connections
