Social Media Club No Longer Welcomed at MyRagan

Since I have received a few emails from some members already, let me just say I am disappointed that Mark Ragan has decided to take this action.  I have setup Social Media Club groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning and many other social networking sites, so that members who use those services can come together to further the goals of the club.  Mark invited me to create a group on his “myspace” clone a few weeks ago, and even invited me to promote our Workshop through it.

Since becoming the largest group on MyRagan, Mark has apparently changed his mind, because the group (and my profile) was represented by the Social Media Club logo.  His post to the group (which he deleted after my response to this message) read:

We are recreating the Social Media Club tomorrow and re-naming it to read simply: Social Media Tools and Strategies.

The current logo for the club is giving the impression that we are somehow selling this space to an advertiser.  We are not. These groups are designed as non-commercial places where free discussion can flow without fear of being pitched. 

Your moderator will be Ragan editor Bill Sweetland.

Because we are changing the name of the club, you will all have to join it again. But, as you know, this only takes a few seconds. Look forward to seeing you back here soon.

Mark Ragan
CEO
MyRagan.com

There is more to say about this of course, but for now, just wanted to let you know that if you want to talk more about this, please join the main Social Media Club mailing list or of course, comment here.  I wish I could still have the message I sent in reply to him, but since it was deleted before the conversation could even begin, it is lost. I am sure I was not overly polite in it, but I was definitely speaking to the truth of the situation.  This is apparently not a MySpace clone at all - it now just seems like a social network established for the purpose of selling Ragan rather than serving the interests of the community as he originally told me.
Truth is though, it is his site and his rules so he can do what he wants with it and there is nothing to do about it except leave.  We will simply take our conversation elsewhere and I will move on so we don’t waste anymore energy on such things…

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Social Media Now: Will the Widget Survive?

On the heels of the still-unconfirmed deal to buy Photobucket, Fox Interactive Media’s MySpace is apparently making another widget move–acquiring slide show widget maker Flecktor for  as much as $20 million, according to Techcrunch, although FIM has declined to confirm or deny the deal.

Michael Arrington neatly lays out the logic of the deal:

It’s an odd acquisition…since Photobucket also has a slide creation product that competes with Flektor.

But Flektor has a killer team of founders…. Also, Flektor is custom code built on Flex, whereas Photobucket’s competing offering is built with Adobe’s tools. If Adobe decided to compete directly in this space, MySpace will be in a better position owning their own code.

The acquisition also makes sense from a strategic standpoint. MySpace has massive distribution as the largest site on the Internet. Photobucket brings storage to the table, and the Flektor team looks to be able to create awesome tools for users to create content.

But what might the deal mean for the rest of the world of widget start-ups? At VentureBeat Dan Kaplan looks at the impact on the leading slide show specialists, Slide and RockYou:

While both Slide and RockYou have huge user-bases, they also depend heavily on social networking giant MySpace and other sites. MySpace has made it abundantly clear that it is happy to pull the plug on widgets that lose its favor. If a Slide or RockYou try to push more advertising, and compete head-on with one of MySpace’s new properties (Photobucket, and potentially Flektor), MySpace may try to snuff them. How valuable are these immensely popular widgets when a small competitor can innovate quickly, get scooped up at a much lower price by MySpace and have a giant platform (like MySpace) to gain distribution?

Good question, one David Hornik’s VentureBlog post earlier this week offered a possible answer to. I recommend reading the whole piece, which is a nice wrap up of the state of the widget economy. But most interesting are his observations on the relationship between start-up widget makers and the big boys of social networking:

If a widget is doing nothing to monetize its host’s traffic…, it might be viewed as neutral or perhaps symbiotic for freely increasing the functionality of the host’s site. If a widget is seeking to monetize the host’s viewers (e.g., ads or branding on a voicemail widget), the host may view that widget as parasitic. This relationship, of course, assumes there is a zero sum game of monetizable attention on any given host service, therefore the fact that a widget is monetizing some of that attention means the host has lost that revenue opportunity in return. ….my view is that if a service’s functionality is significantly enhanced as a result of the various widgets that attach to it (e.g., the MySpace experience was massively enhanced early on by the work of both Photobucket and YouTube), one might argue that the widget experience is always symbiotic — enhanced functionality in exchange for traffic, monetized or not.

But it’s interesting to see how quickly the the attitude among the digerati has changed towards widget start ups–from cheerleading for a new world order, to fatalistic resignation about the power of MySpace and Facebook. Om Malik, has a non-interview interview with FIM’s Peter Levinsohn, which is not nearly as bullish on widgets as Hornik’s piece:

The acquisition, if true, is yet another proof that widget (and other start-ups) need to diversify their user bases, because sooner or later MySpace is going to end-up compete with them. This is the way of the large companies, and it is not unusual. What is strange is that start-ups ignore this fact of life - putting their destiny in other people’s hands.

Think this way - if a company trying to do an IPO gets 50% of its revenues from one customers, even the bravest investor runs away from that deal. Why should it be any different for start-ups who are basically hawking traffic and eyeball stats? Funnily enough people have been ignoring what Fox executives have been saying for a while now.

But the Internet media business has always been like squeezing toothpaste, and its hard to imagine that MySpace and Facebook represent the last large audiences to be amassed in the social networking business.

 

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Social Media Now: How Much Is Social Media Worth?

We have a couple of indicators this morning about how much a commercial social network can earn, and how inexpensive it is to build a profitable one.

At the top of the market is MySpace. New Corp, which announced earnings yesterday, doesn’t break out MySpace’s numbers in it’s SEC filings but during a conference call with analysts yesterday,  executives confirmed that they expected interactive sales to reach at least $500 million this year, led primarily by MySpace. (FIM also includes Foxsports.com and AmericanIdol.com.)

With nearly 56 million visitors a month, $500 million per year amounts to around 74 cents in revenue per monthly visitor (if all of FIM revenue is attributed to MySpace). We don’t know if MySpace is profitable on an operating basis but perhaps we can infer something from the fact that News Corp doesn’t tell us.

Meanwhile, Techcrunch reports on a company called Tagged. Even at half the scale of MySpace, Tagged’s numbers are substantial–40 million members (half of whom are active) and 1 billion pageviews per month. Furthermore, Tagged CEO Greg Tseng says his company is profitable at $600,000 in monthly revenue. I think that means Tagged is attracting one billion pageviews monthly on an investment of $7 million a year.

Will the commercial social networking business develop on two tracks–with an indie, hits business continually bubbling up from the bottom end?

Look at the current economics of Hollywood comedies, which Jon Gertner brilliantly chronicled in the New York Times Magazine last November:

comedies…tend to have lower physical production costs, since they often don’t require extravagant sets or expensive postproduction work. And if they have low artistic production costs as well (for the cast and directors), they have a kind of jackpot potential that dramas, at least in recent years, have lacked. In other words, even when a comedy doesn’t produce the huge revenues of a blockbuster like ”Harry Potter,” it can help push the returns of a portfolio way up if it is put together in a way similar to ”Little Miss Sunshine” or ”The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which starred an inexpensive and untested Steve Carell. Such a film will pay off in the theater, on DVD, in television sales — and ultimately contribute to the studio’s catalog. A popular comedy is a valuable piece of intellectual property. If it’s made cheaply, it’s the equivalent of investing early in Google.

Speaking of money, I’m fascinated by Sequoia’s investment in Joost . As Matt Marshall at Venture Beat notes:

Roelof Botha, general partner at Sequoia Capital, led the firm’s investment in Joost. He was also the lead investor in YouTube, a short-length video site — different from Joost, which wants to show full-length video.

Obviously Internet video paid off enormously for Sequoia with YouTube. And by virtue of its founders experience and its corporate support, Joost looks like a great investment. But it sure looks like a hedge, playing both sides against the middle in media wars.

 

 

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Social Media Now: Monetizing Widgets, MySpace: Link Nazi, Social News

Bits and pieces this morning from around the world of social media.

First, in the wake of the mysterious end to the MySpace/Photobucket war, comes an interesting quick piece by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Chen, entrepreneur in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, on the subject of monetizing widgets. Widgets=ad networks, Andrew argues. And that means widget makers are faced not only with the challenges of making great widgets but also with the challenges of building sales staffs and paying publishers:

This means that companies like Slide, Photobucket, and others will start having to pay a Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC). For ad networks, this TAC looks like 60-80% to the publisher, but they are given a standard unit with little to no value to the end user. Let’s say that the widgets will get a better position, like 40-50%.

But even once this is solved, they will have to figure out how to monetize the space. They will also have to build out ad sales teams in order to monetize the real estate, and it’ll probably be brand advertising and not direct response. The former is much harder than the latter.

Andrew offers four things widget makers need to do to improve their earning potential including building sales teams and destinations sites of their own. And Chen is down on widget aggregators:

I think one major loser for this perspective on the market is widget aggregators. In those cases, every $100 needs to be split amongst the blog infrastructure, the widget market, the widget aggregator, and potentially the user. Yuck. That’s a bad business to be in.

Second, regular readers know I’m a believer in the creeping decentralization of social networking–moving away from hubs like MySpace and Facebook and towards white label social networks and Net applications (like the browser) with embedded social functionality (with some kind of cross-platform portable ID). It’s a future against which MySpace continues to erect barriers. Several blogs, and several forums for MySpace layout providers, have noticed that MySpace has begun to filter outgoing links posted in comments through a service called Msplinks.com–a property owned by fraud protection service Mark Monitor.

On one hand the move–which replaces direct links to outside sites with links through Msplink–will benefit users by targeted comment spam. On the other hand it gives MySpace the ability to defeat not only businesses it considers parasitic, but even defeat collateral brand building that come by placing links. Writes Hooman Radfar at Widgify:

For example, I posted a link to Widgify to my friend’s MySpace page. I set the link target to:

http://www.widgify.com

When the link was published to his MySpace comment section, the link target was replaced with:

http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LndpZGdpZnkuY29t

This means that MySpace can now not only track link-out activity, but can also block outbound links. This only seems to be the case with new comments. Old comments still point to their original link targets. MySpace has already turned off links for Flash widgets, so there is definitely a pattern emerging. This activity is extremely interesting in light of the upcoming changes coming soon from MySpace competitor, Facebook. Facebook seems to be moving in the opposite direction - opening up to developers. I wonder if MySpace take a hint from web history, or continue to move along their current trajectory. I guess time will tell if Tom still wants to be everyone’s friend.

Finally, in the world of social news, Seattle-based Newsvine launched a redesigned version of its service yesterday. CEO Mike Davidson gives a full wrap up of the new design on his blog. The central premise of the redesign is the ability of users to recreate not only “MY” style news pages but a customized front page for the service as a whole:

We have our own ideas for what the front page of a news site should look like and you have yours. Most major news sites attempt to solve this problem by maintaining their editorially imposed front page and then offering a “My” page which users can play around with and customize. The result of this strategy is almost always two-fold: 1) Barely anyone customizes. 2) Even among those who customize, there is hesitancy among users to give up their daily reading of the front page in favor of the “My” page. This is evident from sites like ESPN and Yahoo News, both of which have feature-rich “My” pages but do a ton more traffic on their front pages.

The move will be an interesting test of an important question in the world of customized news–do end users fail to customize because it’s not easy for them to do so, or do end users fail to customize because they’re more interested in having some third party provide a top level news filter in a world over information overload?

I think social news should function a lot more like Last.FM–I’m must more interested in knowing which news stories are being read by friends who share my interests than I am interested in knowing what news stories are being rated highly by an enormous general audience. A top level news filter based on social profiles and friends, plus distribution via widgets, would do a lot more for the social news business than individual customization or over all ratings at web hubs.

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Social Media Now: Climbing the Social Ladder

The blogosphere is full of cynics. And there’s plenty of cynical response on the Net to Forrester’s report on adult social media behavior. The report, which is geared to helping marketers integrate social media into business strategies, proposes a “participation ladder” as a metaphor, with six rungs stepping up from “inactives” at the bottom to “creators” at the top.

Pramit Singh criticizes the report, and all off the meme-making blogosphere punditry, for over hyping recycled information:

If you look at the above graphic, do you see anything new? To me, this looks like they have taken Jason Calacanis’ observation about social networking/web 2.0, namely ‘80% consume, 19% comment, 1% contribute”, added up known observations taken by the Pew Research and voila!, a new report is born.

But there IS new and interesting information in the Forrester report. Most importantly Li and her colleagues have tried to slice online social behavior into narrower segments that the traditional ones of contributor, participant, and tagger. In doing so they challenge the conventional thinking about social segmentation most recently reiterated at Web 2.0 Expo last week by Bill Tacer, general manager of Hitwise, who said:

It’s not the 80-20 rule anymore. It’s 1-9-90.” Spread across the Web, generally 1 percent of visitors are creators and producers, 9 percent are “highly involved participators”,… and 90 percent are consumers or viewers.

Li splits the universe of social media participants into the following categories:

• Creators, who publish blogs, web pages, etc, comprise 13% of users
• Critics, who comment and review, comprise 19%
• Collectors, who tag and bookmark, comprise 15%
• Joiners, who uses social networking sites, comprise 19%
• Spectators, who passively engage with social media content, comprise 33%
• Inactives, who use the Net but not social media, comprise 52%

Obviously the user classes overlap since the percentages add up to well over 100%.
I’m not crazy about Forrester’s metaphor. The ladder is bad because it implies that users climb from the bottom to the top–that “spectating” is a gateway drug on the way to creating. This isn’t true. Also the ladder fails to convey the truth these strata are not discrete–creators are also joiners, for example.

And I would quibble with Forrester’s nomenclature. Collector is the wrong word for someone who shares tags and bookmarks since collectors typically acquire rare stuff and hold it close.

The study also comes up short when it examines the reasons for which people become engaged in social media, slicing those into only three categories–entertainment, career, and family–so broad as to be utterly useless.

But I applaud Forrester for trying to look at the universe of social media through a finer sieve than is typical and I’m particularly interested in a table that Li et al have complied about different behaviors in each of these categories according to age. The table reveals that 18-21 year olds are way more deeply involved in joining social networks than people a little older and those a little younger. Could social the MySpace/Facebook business have peaked with this demographic?

At Skype Journal Phil Wolff proposes an additional ladder, a Ladder of Disclosure–a way of thinking about social media behavior based on how much personal information participants are willing to reveal from live webcam living Twitter addicts at the top to folks off the grid at the bottom. It’s a very interesting way of thinking about the social media universe although Wolff has no survey data to work with. Wolff also notes that Forrester’s ladder misses the mobile Net and live communications systems like IM or Skype.

In other survey news, Liz Gannes at GigaOM reports on a survey that MySpace commissioned of its users, which found, perhaps self-servingly, that there is an exponential increase in brand awareness that comes from social networking campaigns.
Widget Peace: Terms of the armistice have not been announced but MySpace has lifted its ban on video links from photo and video hosting widget maker Photobucket.
Funding News: Mountainview-based Podbridge, a podcasting analytics firm, has raised $8.5 million in second round financing led by new investor Sutter Hill Ventures and joined by first round investors Mayfield Fund and Worldview Technology Partners.

 

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Social Media Now: MySpace News Not Ready for Prime Time, Twitter Ready for Its Close Up

The digerati’s first impressions of MySpace’s social news venture, which launched in beta yesterday, was anything but positive. Well undercooked was the general consensus, even for a beta launch.

No one was more harsh, or more scatological, than Rex Dixon who called MySpace News nothing more than a clipping service linking the kind of of generic user rating system that is a generic part of many content management systems

At Wired News, Michael Calore concisely identifies problems more specifically :

MySpace users can’t add stories, only vote on them….

The site has no search, you have to browse items by category. Story ranking is counter-intuitive — are we looking at stories ranked by number of votes or average vote? The top story on the site has only 16 votes. Also, when you click through to a story, a MySpace News navigation bar remains at the top of the page (see my second screenshot below). A second click is required to load the linked article. This strikes me as a usability no-no, but maybe it’s just a matter of preference.

But Josh Lowenstein at Webware most specifically hit the nail on the head:

There are quite a few things missing from MySpace News. The first is integration with MySpace proper. There’s currently no way to show which stories you’ve been rating (or reading) on your MySpace profile. Likewise, you can’t see what your friends have been up to, something that is critical for a social network.

I’m not ready to pile on MySpace after one day, but it does seem to me that if social news is going to work it will have to rely on the kind of word of mouth discovery that comes from see what your friends are reading. I’m surprised that wasn’t the first step for the development team.

Twittermania, Chapter 387: The start-up story of the year so far in social media is the astounding rise of Twitter. Evan Williams’ Obvious announced on Monday that the company would spin off Twitter, with co-founder Jack Dorsey serving as CEO

Meanwhile developers and entrepreneurs continue to experiment with Twitter as platform. This morning at Mashable Kristen Nicole describes how Menuism, a restaurant ratings business, is using a Twitter feed its developed called Gutcheck through which members can share what their eating. And Fred Wilson offers a very interesting thought piece about his vision of Twitter’s future as “the status broadcasting system of the Internet”:

I don’t consume local services very often on my phone because it’s a hassle to log in and tell them where I am. But if I could just send a text message to Twitter with my location and information starts coming to me on my phone, I’ll do that.

If all these things happen because of one text message I sent to Twitter, that’s fantastic….

Twitter is a simple but flexible status broadcasting system. The web doesn’t have one yet and so Twitter is going to be it.

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Social Media Now: The Global War on Widgets Continues

Yesterday’s MySpace/Photobucket flap was the latest skirmish in the ongoing war on widgets led by Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp division responsible for running MySpace.

It’s funny watching the digerati contort itself in an effort to explain why MySpace is wrong both morally and financially. Jon Fortt at Business 2.0’s The Utility Belt, probably went the furthest, actually quoting scripture to suggest that MySpaces is on a hubris-paved path to destruction. And Photobucket’s own desperate attempts to foment unrest among MySpace users reminds me of nothing so much as the scene from Woodstock–mud caked hippies sitting in a field chanting “No rain”!

My old friend Ed Sim offered what I thought was the most simple, sober observation:

Well guess what-distribution via widgets on MySpace was relatively frictionless, but now that Photobucket is a serious player, the Gorilla is fighting back and that is just the way the world works.  I am not saying that you should not leverage free distribution, but that you should prepare yourself for the day that it may disappear. 

There’s plenty of other postmortem examination today, the best comes from Om Malik, who gives us 5 lessons of Photobucket Fiasco, and Nicholas Carr, whose comparison between the economics of social networks and the economics of sharecropping is truely inspired:

It’s worth remembering that the business model of Web 2.0 social networks is the sharecropping model. After the Civil War, when the original sharecropping system took hold in the American south, the plantation owners made money in two ways. They leased land to the sharecroppers, and they also leased them their tools. It’s no different this time. The payments for land (Web pages) and tools (video widgets et al.) don’t come directly, through exchanges of cash, but rather indirectly, through the sale of advertisements. But the idea is the same. If there’s a widget that can accommodate advertising, that tool will be supplied by the plantation owner, not by some interloping varmint. Whine all you want, but that’s the way it’s going to be.

Now, if the interloper would like to pay for the privilege of being a tool supplier on the plantation owner’s land, well, that’s a different story entirely.

There’s one crucial difference, however, between social networks and cotton plantations. God wasn’t making any more plantation acreage, but Internet real estate is infinitely expanding, and users don’t need to rely on government largess for their 40 acres and a mule.

Having spent a fortune for MySpace, executives at FIM are obviously feeling their oats and certainly MySpace (as well as Facebook) remains a powerhouse by virtue of the traffic it generates and the barrier to user exit created by the network effect.  But industry leading social sites have come and gone before, going back to the Web 1.0 days of personal web page building through the social media era. Does anybody remember TheGlobe? Geocities? Friendster?

(Wired News has an interview today with Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams about his new, vowel-challenged business, Socalizr, which combines event planning with social networking.)

Embedding social functionality in the browser in inevitable. Social networks that aren’t web based—like AIM–can snap on Web-based functionality (although the AIM Pages beta is lame so far). Businesses like Socializr reflect the trend of adding social functions to all Web content and services. The era of private label social networking is just beginning. Transportable identification will allow users to easily cross social networks. Clearly the future of social media is open, not closed.

As long as social networks like MySpace are free, easy to use, quick to add functionality and perceived to be cool, there’s no reason for consumers to switch. But there’s also no reason for consumers to join only one social network. The mindshare and pageviews crucial to MySpace as an ad supported business in the end may rely more on new and added functionality than FIM executives believe.

FIM may be on to something with its SpringWidgets platform–a plantation on which it invites sharecroppers to grow new widgets that Fox can own and control. But its an open source world. New and better functionality is sure to be developed more quickly via open access to widgets. That said, I understand how vexing it must be to see other companies selling advertising on your real estate.

Meanwhile, at Techcrunch Michael Arrington–who leaked information from Photobucket’s roadshow book–asks the question of the day: Can Photobucket Survive without MySpace? To the extent that Photobucket survived before the blockade by selling advertising on its site, seen by users uploading photos, then, yes, Photobucket can survive. (According to Techcrunch two thirds of Photobucket’s revenue came from advertising on its own site over the past two years. Last year’s total revenue was less than $10 million.) To the extent that Photobucket was counting on video posted to MySpace to meet its 2007 revenue target of $32 million, then no, it can’t survive. But it was hard for me to believe the 3X revenue growth in the Photobucket projections to begin with.

Link Love:

Two New Ways to Mine for Twitter Gold

The 12-Minute Definitive Guide to Twitter

To the average Joe, blogs aren’t cutting it
 

 

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Social Media Now: MySpace Kicks the Photobucket

This isn’t going to help Photobucket with its efforts to sell the company. Late last night MySpace moved to block its members from posting links to videos hosted on Photobucket.

Photobucket had been trying to expand it’s business from photo hosting to video hosting by offering users a suite of editing and production tools to spur the loading of video. The still photos it hosts remain unblocked.

Scoble offers a little tough love for users of Photobucket’s video service:

If you want to avoid these issues there’s really one choice: pay for your site’s own hosting and build your own traffic. One reason to join services like MySpace and Wordpress.com is that there’s a built-in level of traffic…. If you go off and build your own site you don’t have those advantages, but you’ve got to live with [it] when they pull down parasitic services, which is what Photobucket is.

Calling Photobucket a “parasitic service” is a little harsh. It’s a backend business that provides photo hosting and video editing tools for free to users. That its value relies on user created linkbacks from sites it doesn’t own doesn’t make it any more parasitic than your average search engine. Still, its fair to say that Photobucket, like dozens of backend service providers and widget makers, rely for their success on the kindness of strangers.

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch offers a short term history lesson:

This is turning into a habit for MySpace, which usually claims bugs, security issues or terms of service violations were the cause of a shut down. In January MySpace mysteriously shut down all Flash widgets on the site for 2.5 hours. An Imeem blockade came next. Vidilife, Stickam and Revver have been permanently banned.

Clearly News Corp’s war on widgets and add-ons continues.

Duncan Riley looks at the business implications for Photobucket, calling the MySpace move an “act of corporate sabotage” and wondering outloud if the move is designed to drive down Photobucket’s asking price:

….when your product targets social networks and you’ve had access partially blocked to the biggest marketplace of them all…with the possibility of course that the ban could end up involving all content, your value drops, and drops dramatically…and because of this there’s little doubt that News Corp has simply just screwed Photobucket over. I wonder if News Corp ends up buying Photobucket? What better way to squeeze a better price!

At Deep Jive Interests Tony Hung nails the lesson of the MySpace move for the development of the widget business:

If MySpace has an alternate video storage and management product cooking — which only has to be *just* has good — it will have no problem locking in its users. ….

And if MySpace *does* have an alternate to Photobucket, the next logical question is “what else do they have cooking?” There’s been a spate of news around widgets which cross blogs and social networks. But if MySpace (and other networks) starts developing their own in-house widgets, it might signal a larger trend towards creating truly closed-in system…not only preventing people from leaving MySpace…but also increasing the height of those metaphorical walls which separate its users from marketers who are salivating at the chance to get at this demographic. Higher walls (to flog the metaphor) can only mean steeper tolls to get access to MySpace’s users.

Scoble adds the observation that this will chill the climate for investment in businesses like widget businesses that rely on social networks to drive traffic.

That’s certainly true. It’s hard to invest in a business whose fate is in the hands of others (unless that business has a patent protectable technological advantage or some such defensible advantage). But I still believe that a secular trend is just beginning which will drive social networking away from walled-garden hubs towards more user directed networks. But a long term secular change is not going to help Photobucket build a consumer facing video business today. It looks as if, to do that, the company will have to launch a site of its own. Does anyone own the Videobucket.com domain?

Building its own social network seems to be the approach of one of Photobucket’s start up competitors. Kristen Nicole at Mashable writes today that DivShare, a photo and video hosting service, has soft launched DivShare Groups–which allows users to establish their own hubs for sharing media. On its blog DivShare lays out the features–comments, RSS feeds, access rules and the rest of the social networking kit and caboodle.

In the traditional media business, power once accrued to copyright holders who often had no direct relationship with consumers–film and TV studios not movie theater and TV station owners. But the irony of the Internet media business is that even though it’s offers a wide open distribution platform, hell, BECAUSE it offers a wide open distribution platform, power accrues to the company that can draw a crowd and develop a direct relationship with consumers. And the more that company relies on the network effect to draw and hold users, the stickier it is (think eBay).  For now, News Corp and Facebook, remain the girls with the most cake.

Link Love: 

Exclusive Screenshots: Spock’s New People Engine
Techcrunch offers an exclusive inside look at Spock, a people-centered search engine

 

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Social Media Now: Do Community and Commerce Mix

April 10, 2007

It’s tempting to dismiss the social commerce survey published today by iProspect as just the latest missive from the Duh! Department.

The survey, conducted by JupiterResearch, found that 33% of Internet users had relied on sites with user-generated recommendations to make buying decisions.

Frankly that number is surprisingly low, particularly considering that Amazon–by virtue of it’s user recommendations–fits the survey’s profile and considering what we know about the impact of social recommendation in the offline world. Writes Pete Cashmore at Mashable:

It’s hardly a surprise that users make decisions about what to buy based on Amazon reviews, and in fact Amazon was by far the most influential of the sites listed, with 28% of Internet users questioned saying they’d made a purchase based on info from Amazon.

The runner-up might be a little worrying: Yahoo Answers, which seems to be populated by teens who provide misleading answers about as often as they provide correct ones, influences 4% of users when they come to make a purchase.

I’d be more worried about the small numbers for big social network players. MySpace, which 2% of users cited as influencing a decision, lapped Facebook which was only cited by 1%; and iVillage, which offers great product-based discussion groups for buyers considering home appliance purchases, was cited by less than 0.5% of respondents. Those numbers suggest one of three things: either there is enormous, untapped potential for growth in commerce touched off by social networking hub;  or users like their commerce and community to remain separate; or the survey is plain wrong.

What the survey seems to suggest is that Internet purchases are most commonly made buy people who begin with the intent to purchase. And those people head to sites like Amazon.com that are identifiable as stores. Forty-six percent of respondents said they the reason they searched Amazon was to buy something, and 28% said the site influenced their decision to buy. Meanwhile 49% of respondents said they searched Facebook to connect to friends, and, unsurprisingly only 2% said the site influenced a buying decision.

What remains untested is the impact of social network functionality on online buying.  Cashmore is “willing to bet that the addition of a ‘consumer reviews’ section on YouTube could increase it’s influence. Likewise, MySpace doesn’t currently provide any way to convene around products.”

I agree with Pete. But the proposition remains untested. According to published reports MySpace is speaking with potential commerce partners about a MySpace store. Such an effort would offer one test of social commerce. Another test would be to look at the effectiveness to date of social shopping start ups like NextThis and ShopWiki.com to see if social shopping works as a widget or whether the social aspect of shopping is enough to allow a start up store to compete with a powerhouse like Amazon. Finally a survey with a control group would be nice: do stores like Amazon or Musicians Friend which are packed with user reviews have higher or lower conversion rates than stores, like LandsEnd.com, which don’t? Do products with higher user ratings outsell those with lower ratings on Amazon?

Link Love:

Gigya To Ease Widget Publishing On Social Networks
How to win in the Twitter vs. Jaiku battle

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Social Media Now: Teaching Citizen Journalists, Social Nets Underrated?

March 28, 2007

Who Knows What’s Best for Citizen Journalists? ….I was fortunate yesterday to help lead a fascinating discussion about trust, journalism and pro am media at the New York Social Media Club meeting. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen provided the jumping off point by presenting and discussing his mini-empire of experimental, participatory journalism. That empire includes his own NewAssignment.Net and it’s two recently announced joint ventures–AssignmentZero, an experiment in crowdsourced journalism conducted with Wired; and a participatory journalism joint venture with HuffingtonPost designed to organize semi-pro coverage of everyone running for president.

I remain skeptical about the value of attempting to harness citizen journalism by encouraging professional editors to saddle it up and ride it in one particular direction or another. Just as it can replace the traditional reporters’ functions, the community can replace the editors’ functions setting the agenda, calling attention to stories, copyediting and correcting. The fact that the Internet community does this organically, applying tools like blogging, tagging and aggregating, is part of what makes citizen journalism different.

Still it’s interesting to see the pros wrestling with a DIY future, even if much of that wrestling is taking place in the academic realm. Yesterday the Knight Foundation and The Institute for Interactive Journalism (itself a venture of the University of Maryland and the Pew Center for Civic Journalism) took the wraps off The Knight Citizen News Network.

The Network isn’t the ambitious attempt to practice new journalism that AssignmentZero is, instead it is intended as a resource for citizen journalists including a searchable database of US citizen journalism sites, a best-practices feature called “Things We Like,” a multimedia primer in what the Institute sees as “the principles of citizen journalism,” as well as links to the Institute’s case studies and other research.

The site was designed with input from some of the big boys in the formalizing citizen journalism JD Lascia, Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media and I, Reporter.

There’s something presumptuous and out of whack about professionals and academics telling citizen journalists how to do amateur journalism better,  particularly in an era when pro journalism has been so damaged by a credibility crisis (just this week The New York Times owned up to running a false rape allegation from a former US service woman and to one of it’s reporters cutting a $2000 check to a source). But as we watch big media wrestle with the changing DIY media landscape, efforts like KCNN are worth watching.

It’s Twitter’s World, We Just Live in It….Word out yesterday from Steve Poland at Techcrunch that changes to Twitter’s API may help turn the messaging service into a Web services platform, or more accurately a SMS-services platform. We love the idea of Twitter, or any kind of cross platform anywhere messaging service, becoming something other than a party line for the digerati but let’s not get crazy. To Nik Cubrilovic who writes that there will be a business in Twitter IDs akin to the mid 1990s business in domain squatting I suggest a reality check of the sort Fred Wilson writes about here.

Social Networking Under-hyped? …According to Pali Research’s Richard Greenfield (as reported at Barron’s Online by Eric Savitz)

MySpace is now generating “in excess of $30 million” a month in revenue, with about $24 million in domestic revenue and $6 million internationally. He adds that monthly revenues should more than double over the next 12 months, and “at very high incremental revenue margins.” So in 12 months, he’s saying, MySpace should be doing more than $60 million a month in revenue, for an annual run rate in the neighborhood of $750 million a year.

Quoth Valleywag:

…as one News Corporation exec says: “You know, it may turn out that social networks have been, not overhyped, but underhyped.”

Link Love:

Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection: TiVo Home Movie SharingJamendo Goes Platinum! 1.5 Million Albums Downloaded
Zoolit Launches Social Network Profile Link Aggregator

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Social Media Now: The Global War on Widgets

March 20, 2007

The global war on widgets launched by MySpace since its acquisition by News Corp made the New York Times today in a piece about MySpace blocking the Hooka music player a few days it was put to use by MySpace’s most visible user, a singer named Tila Nguyen, whose professional name is Tila Tequila.

Ok, so Hooka, a recently launched project of online music consultancy indie911 wasn’t really “blocked.”  A MySpace spokeswoman told the NYT:

A MySpace representative contacted [Nguyen] and told her that she had violated our terms of service in regards to commercial activity. She removed the material herself, after realizing it was not appropriate for MySpace.

The TOS element that Nguyen apparently violated was loading a potentially commercial widget whose maker doesn’t have a revenue sharing deal with MySpace (the MySpace music player is powered by Snocap).

At Mashable Pete Cashmore has been tracking the GWOW for a year noting today that News Corp has also killed Revver, VideoCodeZone, Stickam, Imeem and ProjectPlaylist.

Suggests Cashmore:

…maybe MySpace has realized that the value being created by exponential growth (YouTube, for instance), is far higher than a license fee would cover. Perhaps the more intelligent move would be an “acquire or die” strategy: snap up the best widgets on the way up.

That’s fine, but what happens if the widget war escalates? Say MySpace buys Hooka, and Facebook retaliates blocking Hooka and driving its users into a proprietary music player widget? Will users abandon widgets that aren’t supported by their social nets of choice? Or will they abandon the social nets who limit widgets in favor of open platforms?

After widget makers the people most interested in the answers to those questions are the VCs who invest in widget businesses.

These guys have been having a great conversation about the monetization of the business. David Cohen started it all proclaiming that no matter what widgets will be big business because users love them.

Brad Feld responded with the opinion that widgets which function as application containers for publishers will work, but widget management systems don’t make sense to Brad.

Mike Hirschland issued an open call for thoughts about how to monetize widgets and got a lot of interesting responses.

Chris Fralic offered the opinion that widget management will work as a business offering a variety of functions:

I think we’ll see features like multiple levels of control and customization, automatic updating across the installed base, and tracking of how widgets spread and their “parent/child” relationships

It seems to me that user-chosen widgets freely attachable to all sorts of platforms–from blogs to white label social nets–are the inevitable future and will constitute a new set of networks that will carry ads, messages, and other sorts of media and information. In the long run the social nets most open to innovative add-ons will survive the transition away from social networking hubs towards private -abeled social nets. Why? Because the Internet industry always develops from a more restrictive environment to a less restrictive one.

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Social Media Now: MySpace to Offer Social News

March 9, 2007

The idea of MySpace launching a news aggregator is hardly surprising. After all MySpace parent Newscorp is not only one of the world’s largest newspaper and TV news companies but also one of the most creative. (FoxNews changed the tone of TV news forever. I’m certain Newscorp is more comfortable than most with blog-style news that mixes information, opinion and personality.)

Terry Heaton, who had the first post on MySpace News, says the service will gather stuff from websites, blogs, and members, combining Google News-style and Digg-style functionality. Om Malik offers the phrase social news.

The story comes a day after an enormous thread centering around a Doc Searls’ post recirculated all the old saws about traditional vs. citizen journalism–everyone’s a reporter, its the relationship that matters, etc.

Most of the conversation around the impact of Web 2.0 on news focuses on the newspaper’s role as producer of information and the impact of citizen journalism on professional journalism.

That impact is real and enormous and barely hinted at by the creeping blogification of newspapers (Chris Heuer wrote about USAToday’s makeover this week). Socially-enabling national newspapers has had an impact on the way newspaper people work. A friend at The Times said that there is competition in the newsroom to be at the top of the daily “most e-mailed” list. That competition is a kind of social feedback. So to are comments (but only when editors and reporters are involved in the conversation).

But social news does more than just undermine the news gathering primacy of traditional journalism. It also unwinds the aggregator function of newspapers.

Ten years ago technology gave people the power to be reporters of their own lives. Today technology enables community aggregation. That’s what Digg and Technorati and del.icio.us allow–something beyond the self-selected aggregation of RSS feeds. Tagging, ranking and sharing create public hierarchical lists of information. That’s what newspaper editors used to do. The Internet is an enormous, on-going Page One meeting.

Can any one aggregation service capture all that? We’ll find out. So far efforts to pull together that kind of grand unified shared aggregation haven’t lived up to the promise. Maybe MySpace News, which will have both the problems and benefits of serving a closed group of members, will show us how it can be done.  Will it be to all sources of information or just those with which it cuts deals? How will it exploit it’s members input? And most of all will newspapers feel the influence?

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