Social Media - Centralized via Facebook Connect or De-centralized via Google FriendConnect

Social network is hot. 

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Growth of Youtube, Facebook, and Myspace have focused attention on the shared aspects of the Internet. The latest battle features incumbents like Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft against growth leaders like Facebook, Myspace, and Youtube. Each company has chosen different strategies. 

Who will win? 

What path should bloggers, publishers, and enterprises choose to participate?

Facebook Connect versus Google FriendConnect

Facebook and Google are extending beyond their respective strongholds to reach more partners. 

• Facebook Connect revives their controversial beacon program. Partners like Techcrunch, Digg, and Wordpress allow visitors to sign-in using their Facebook userid. Activities, like comments, report to minifeeds and newsfeeds at Facebook - for viewing by friends and associates. Partners and users benefit from increased mindshare at Facebook. Conversely, Facebook gains mindshare outside of the Facebook walled garden. Sites like FriendFeed, Twitter, and Mybloglog that aggregate activities from many sites become less relevant. 


• Google FriendConnect allows publishers, primarily blogs at their blogger.com site, to add social network features to their site. Visitors sign-in using their Google userid. Their profile at socialized blogs point back to their website. Other features replace the commenting features of blogger with a centralized database managed by Google. Blogs and users benefit from shared visibility. The primary winner is Google, as they struggle to build the newsfeed services to match Facebook. The loser might be Ning and other custom social network services. 

Facebook targets larger sites with a centralized approach. Google targets millions of smaller sites with a de-centralized approach. Who wins?

Is it an 'apple-orange' comparison?

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo Join the Battle

Connect versus FriendConnect is not the only battle. 

• Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have integrated their profile and personal page services with their email to allow members to connect with each other. Do email users trust these companies to control the sharing?
• Circle of Moms, Pickens Plan, Barak Obama, and others have levered Facebook applications to cherry pick Facebook users and build their own social networks. Not surprisingly, Facebook has made it harder for third-party developers to have a viral presence in their walled garden.
• Youtube and FlickR have opened their platforms to share content with partners big and small. At the same time, they have also added friend connections and group discussions to encourage centralized participation. 
• Myspace/Fox and Bepo/AOL suffer paralysis analysis after being purchased by media companies.
• Secondary social networks like LinkedIn, Hi5, and Ning have accelerated features development.

Who Wins?

Despite the economic problems, the pace of change has accelerated. In bad economic times, web usage explodes. It's an opportunity that enterprises can't ignore.

Millions of websites and bloggers struggle to keep up with the trend changes. 

So, who wins?

Billions of users benefit from more interesting and accessible content.

What do you think?

BTW, join Google FriendConnect.

No Improvement for ‘Standard’ Online Advertising

No Improvement on Horizon for ‘Standard’ Online Advertising

A slow-to-no growth forecast in the US for “standard” components of the interactive advertising market - such as banner, display and pop-up ads - is not cyclical and shows no signs of improving quickly, even if the nation’s economy starts to move upward and out of recession, according to a forecast report from Borrell Associates.

Though the report projects that overall 2009 spending on traditional, offline media will decline 1.4%, and spending on interactive will increase 7.2 %, it notes that these figures do not tell the whole story.

In fact, 2009 will be the first year since the start of century in which banners, pop-ups, and interactive display advertising overall will show little or no growth, and may likely decline.

For local interactive media, the big slowdown began a year earlier than Borell initially anticipated, magnified and accelerated by the credit crisis. The spending levels by local advertisers - which grew at a frenetic 47% this year - are expected to slow to a paltry 8% in 2009.

Local media companies projecting double-digit and even triple-digit increases in their interactive budgets next year will have a very difficult time meeting those expectations - especially if they rely on banner ads, the report said, adding that as new advertisers move to the web, they will be less enthusiastic about spending their newly-shrunken ad budgets on traditional formats that they perceive to be less effective.

Future dollars are likely to be spent on other forms of interactive advertising, such as email, paid search and streaming video - which is expected to see the biggest spending growth, according to Borrell.

The report, “2009 Outlook: Big Slowdown Begins For Interactive Advertising,” which is available for purchase, includes national forecasts for US media revenue and spending, detailed analysis of the credit-crisis impact on media revenue and spending, and projections for growth and spending on promotional advertising.

Social Media Weekend

Banker Releases Social Network Marketing Ebook MarketWatch - Dec 5, 2008 In the Community Banker's Guide to Social Network Marketing, Mr. Torres addresses socialnetworks, user demographics and the role of social networks within ...

BBC News

Friends of friends of friends cheered, social study finds Boston Globe, United States - Dec 5, 2008 But the new social network analysis showed that that contagious effect extends three "degrees" - as far as a friend of a friend of a friend - and drops off ... Happiness is contagious in social networks CNN International Happiness in a Social Network, 2000 PhysOrg.com Be Happy; It’s Contagious MedHeadlines Washington Post - io9 all 705 news articles »

BBC News

Facebook Connect: Show And Tell For The Web CRN, NY - 18 hours ago The program enhances the connectivity among the social network, its users and the Web pages users visit. In addition, Facebook shrewdly increases ad revenue ... What if Amazon and iTunes Implemented Facebook Connect? ReadWriteWeb First Look: Why Facebook Connect Is Bound For Success Washington Post Socialising all over the web? Economist VentureBeat - CRN all 230 news articles »  GOOG

SCCE and HCCA Social Network Now Open to All Compliance and Ethics ... MarketWatch - Dec 4, 2008 Previously, to access the social network sites and participate in the online discussions, compliance and ethics professionals had to be members of either ...

SaveThePlanetAndWin: Another Social Network Hoping To Make The ... TechCrunch, CA - 21 hours ago by Jason Kincaid on December 5, 2008 Save The Planet And Win, a new green social network looking to help users cut back on their carbon deficits, ...

Bird Social Network is Flying High IT Business Net, CA - 16 hours ago DMN Newswire--2008-12-4--Bird Network, a leading social network for bird enthusiasts worldwide, has been launched this month. The website has already had a ...

73s.org - Social Network for Hams eHam.net - 8 hours ago 73s.org is the new social network for Hams! Setup a profile, raise your antenna, and get ready to communicate with hams around the world online. ...

MaxxAthlete.com Launches MaxxProfile+, The First Social Network ... PR Leap (press release), CA - 7 hours ago "MaxxProfile+ allows a parent to create their own social network by determining who may access to their son’s athletic player profile. ...

BigDates Solutions Extends Leadership Position in Social Greetings ... MarketWatch - Dec 5, 2008 With a new focus on the social network space, BigDates Solutions is leveraging its assets, content library, and expertise in driving ecommerce around ...

Mobile social network brings adwords to SMS Register, UK - 23 hours ago Billing itself as the most visited, dedicated mobile social network site in Europe, Wadja has built up a significant number of customers with the offer of ...

With 850K Users In 2 Months, Circle Of Moms Comes Out Of Nowhere

PhotoNews^tm - dynamic photos from FlickR

With 850K Users In 2 Months, Circle Of Moms Comes Out Of Nowhere

It may seem like the last thing the web needs is another parenting website, but you wouldn’t know that by the impressive growth the new websiteCircleOfMoms.com chalked up over the past couple of months. The site, launched in October 2008, has already grown to over 850,000 registered users. Seventy-five percent of the users are US-based.

Circle of Moms is what you would expect from the name. It’s a community that lets moms connect with friends, talk about their kids, and join topical Q&A communities. Users have created over 1,000 such communities for topics like parents with toddlers, special needs children, and even recipe swapping. Many have tens of thousands of members. This holiday season the site will also be turning on a gifting widget to let moms recommend the best gifts for kids by age group and gender.

Brand advertisements, beginning next week, as well as affiliate revenue from gift purchases are the main modes of monetizing the site in the short run.

But the story doesn’t stop with a site that’s struck a chord with mothers; Circle of Moms has grown its user base with a unique multi-pronged approach. The site has a standard web presence plus a Facebook application. The combo allows moms to interact with each other through both the main site and Facebook. The Facebook application itself currently has over 840,000 monthly active users.

Founder Ephraim Luft says that the Facebook application and website have helped re-enforce each other, with mothers on Facebook pulling in friends on the website and vice versa. He plans to continue integrating with other platforms in the future to ensure mothers can continue to access the services regardless of where they are on the web.

It may seem like the last thing the web needs is another parenting website, but you wouldn’t know that by the impressive growth the new website CircleOfMoms.com chalked up over the past couple of months. The site, launched in October 2008, has already grown to over 850,000 registered users. Seventy-five percent of the users are US-based.

Circle of Moms is what you would expect from the name. It’s a community that lets moms connect with friends, talk about their kids, and join topical Q&A communities. Users have created over 1,000 such communities for topics like parents with toddlers, special needs children, and even recipe swapping. Many have tens of thousands of members. This holiday season the site will also be turning on a gifting widget to let moms recommend the best gifts for kids by age group and gender.

Brand advertisements, beginning next week, as well as affiliate revenue from gift purchases are the main modes of monetizing the site in the short run.

But the story doesn’t stop with a site that’s struck a chord with mothers; Circle of Moms has grown its user base with a unique multi-pronged approach. The site has a standard web presence plus a Facebook application. The combo allows moms to interact with each other through both the main site and Facebook. The Facebook application itself currently has over 840,000 monthly active users.

Founder Ephraim Luft says that the Facebook application and website have helped re-enforce each other, with mothers on Facebook pulling in friends on the website and vice versa. He plans to continue integrating with other platforms in the future to ensure mothers can continue to access the services regardless of where they are on the web.

Updates on Google FriendConnect

The New Economics of Advertising has joined the Google FriendConnect network. Look for the new widget on the left sidebar, sign-in using Google, and share with your friends. 

Join the new social network without walls.

FYI:

• The install is simple but confusing for blogger or blogspot. Other platforms may experience significant technical difficulties.
• Performance seems fast, compared to the private release.
• Visitors sign-in using their Google or Orkut account. No support yet for Yahoo, Myspace, or Facebook id.
• Your friend list is maintained by Google. If you have gMail, that list of email addresses is easily accessible. I exported from Yahoo and imported into gMail to maintain a back-up list of email addresses. Yahoo remains my primary email account. 
• The FriendConnect becomes a social way to invite friends to join. It's still spam, but more socially acceptable as Google spam. ;^)
• You can create a Google profile that contains links to your websites. The profile automatically lists all your FriendConnect memberships.
• The site administrator sees names with options to befriend and block - no access to member email addresses. 
• Thus, personal privacy depends 100% on Google. 

Any other observations on FriendFeed?

Tampa Tribune, TBO.com, and WFLA-TV launch Multimedia News

US: Tampa Tribune launch a three-pronged multimedia news approach

Posted by Katherine Thompson on December 4, 2008 at 11:39 AM

The Tampa Tribune has launched a three-pronged multimedia news approach working with the newspapers staff, TBO.com and WFLA-TV.

The Tampa Tribune's move follows a round of cost cutting measures at the US regional newspaper.

Janet Coats, vice president of news, reports, "It's a progressive, audience-driven approach. The focus puts the audience at the center of our decision-making."

The new initiative is a step beyond the continuous news desk introduced in 2007. All three teams of journalists will sit together in order to facilitate an instant newsgathering focus, driven by a Web-first strategy. Despite this, each organisation will produce content appropriate to its brand.

New Economics of Advertising Joins Google FriendConnect Network

The New Economics of Advertising has joined the Google FriendConnect network. Look for the new widget on the left sidebar, sign-in using Google, and share with your friends. 

Join the new social network without walls.

Using images to find other images

Yahoo Search Assist Adds Image Previews; I Wish Google Had This

Google may get three times more search traffic than Yahoo, but, SearchWiki aside, most of the innovation seems to be coming from Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search as they strive to gain a larger slice of the search market share.

Last year Yahoo introduced Search Assist, an advanced autocomplete feature that recommends related searches as you type your query into the search box. Autocomplete isn’t a new concept - Google has offered it for years through Firefox and its browser toolbar (and recently integrated it into its homepage). But Yahoo takes it a step further, going beyond just guessing what word you’re typing by suggesting possible related searches.

Today the site is introducing thumbnail previews for its image searches, allowing users to see how they should modify their queries to get the set of images they’re looking for. For example, typing “Obama” presents suggested searches for “Obama family”, “Barack Obama”, and “Michelle Obama”, each accompanied by a thumbnail indicative of what the query will yield. After trying a few searches of my own it’s easy to see how this could come in handy, especially when it comes to searching for queries with multiple, very different meanings (like “Sierra Nevada”, the beer or the mountain range). That said, the feature is a little quirky - oftentimes I had to refresh the page if I wanted any suggestions to appear.

Meanwhile, earlier this week Microsoft’s Live Search introduced the ability to use an image itself to search for similar images.

Wikipedia Gets Grant to Help First-Time Authors

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit entity behind the immensely popular Wikipedia, just announced a new project that is meant to make it a lot easier for inexperienced authors to contribute articles and edits to the project. To do this, the Wikimedia Foundation just received a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation. The project will focus on making the user interface for editing and writing Wikipedia articles easier to use for less tech-savvy contributors.

While there are already numerous browser extensions that try make editing Wikipedia articles easier, the default interface and markup language of the Wikipedia can be quite intimidating for first time users.

Helping First-Time Authors

As Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, points out in the announcement, most of the current Wikipedia authors have a "moderate-to-high level of technical understanding." This, however, excludes a large number of potential contributors who aren't very tech savvy, but would like to participate in the project.

The Wikimedia Foundation will use this grant to create a team of developers and user interface designers that will work on reducing barriers of entry for first-time authors. Specifically, the team will look at hiding the more complex elements of the user interface from users who don't need to deal with them.

To us, this seems like a worthwhile project. Anybody who has looked at the markup language for the Wikipedia knows that is anything but intuitive and that there is quite a learning curve involved before one can start to contribute anything more than simple edits. Reducing these barriers of entry will allow a whole new group of users to contribute their knowledge to the project.

Using images to find other images

With features like continuous scroll and an index that encompasses millions of websites, a single image search query is often all you need to find what you are looking for. But sometimes those initial results only give you a hint of what’s available and you need to refine your search to uncover the images you want. With Live Search, you can now use images, rather than additional keyword queries, to refine a search and discover more content.

For example, if you searched for images of boxing icon Muhammad Ali, you would get initial results that include everything from portraits to action shots of both a young and old Ali:

But say that you’d like to see more images of Ali’s famous defeat of Sonny Liston. When you hover over that photo in the results, you’ll see an option to Show Similar Images: 

If you click on Show Similar Images, you'll get a new set of results focused solely on the iconic image from 1964 in which Ali towers over an unconscious Liston, after a quick right cross to the jaw.

Now, a question for sports history buffs: are the above images from Ali’s first fight with Liston in Miami, Fla., or their second battle in Lewiston, Maine? To find out, try Live Image Search.

Henry Hall, Senior Product Manager and Jason Xia, Senior Software Development Engineer

Tag That Image: Visual Bookmarking Sites Worth Browsing

By JENNA WORTHAM

Half the fun of surfing the Internet is stumbling across tasty little Web treats that you never would have thought to look for.

Traditional social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious are great for finding articles and other text that other Web surfers have tagged as interesting.

For the visually oriented, the pickings have been slim. Now, however, a handful of photo-oriented bookmarking sites are emerging to entertain the eye as well as the mind.

We Heart It screenshot.
Enlarge This Image

The sites — We Heart It, FFFFound andVi.sualize.us — resemble constantly changing art installations. Similar to a white-walled gallery, they present their goods with little to no flourish: simple, clean interfaces are all that stand between visitors and eyefuls of color.

The sites work similarly to their text-based brethren. When members discover an image worth preserving, they bookmark it, either by right-clicking or using a site-specific browser button. Although the sites are still light years away from the popularity of their older siblings -– Digg alone boasts 35 million unique users per month and as many as 20,000 submissions per day -– they are steadily gaining a loyal following...

Photo world begins grappling with video SLRs

This frame from Joi Ito shows how video from newer digital SLRs lets people blur backgrounds to emphasize a particular subject, something that's harder with conventional videocameras.

(Credit: Joi Ito (Creative Commons attribution))

The photography world is beginning to adapt to a new phase in the marriage of cameras and computing technology: the arrival of SLRs that can shoot not just still images but video, too.

The change began with the arrival of image sensors, the light-sensitive microchips that replaced film. Now two new SLRs--Nikon's D90 and Canon's EOS 5D Mark II--are taking another step away from the film paradigm, following in the footsteps of point-and-shoot cameras by recording continuous video and not just still images. Doubtless video will gradually spread to other SLR models and makers.

"This camera is the ultimate 'equalizer'--you no longer need half-million dollars' worth of high definition video cameras and lenses delivered by a truck with its own driver to shoot a high-definition film in low light--you just need a $2,700 camera and a few lenses," gushed professional photographer and Canon advisor in New York Vincent Laforet in a blog post about a 5D Mark II prototype.

But not everything will be simple for Laforet wannabes excited by the new possibilities. Hardware, software, Web sites, and perhaps most of all, technique all must catch up to the new technology.

Though how-to book authors have yet to weigh in, there are signs the adaptation has begun. Take the case of video hosting.

Canon's EOS 5D Mark Mark II.

(Credit: Canon)

SmugMug's 1080p offer
With the 5D Mark II now for sale, some people will be looking for a Web site that can share their videos in full high-definition 1080p glory--1920x1080 pixels. SmugMug, a subscription-based photo-sharing site geared for photo enthusiasts, wants to be that place. Chief Executive Don MacAskill and his father and fellow employee Chris MacAskill each got 5D Mark II SLRs, and now the company is testing full-resolution videos on its site for those with $149.95-per-year Professional-level subscriptions.

"If anyone else out there is shooting 1080p video with cameras like this and would like their SmugMug Pro accounts to allow 1080p video, let us know. That feature is currently in beta, but we'd love to get a few more people using it," Don MacAskill said in a blog posting.

High-definition video is starting to trickle onto the Web more broadly, though not generally at the aggressive full-resolution format. Vimeo hosts high-definition videos with some limitations on file size and uploads, and Google has begun experimenting with higher-resolution versions. But the network capacity challenges are formidable for both the site hosting the video and for those watching it.

More emblematic is Flickr, a popular haunt for photo enthusiasts who like to share photos with like-minded people. When Flickr added video support earlier this year, some photography purists made a big stink. Now Flickr looks prescient: SLR video brings new aesthetic possibilities to the digitally savvy photo buffs.

...

Stephen Shankland covers Google, Yahoo, search, online advertising, portals, digital photography, and related subjects. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered servers, supercomputing, open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen.

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