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Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media and Web 2.0

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A Balanced Assessment of the Criticisms of Engaging Social Media:

Determining the advantages and disadvantages of particular activities for people and organizations is an important task. Why else would education, books, think tanks, and presidential debates exist. I thought fleshing out my personal experience with the advantages and disadvantages might be instructive in determining “the truth” about social media, web 2.0, and blogging technologies.

Advantages of Social Media

• Democratization of media.
• Relationships and conversation.
• Creativity and re-mix culture.
• Embrace your passion and identity.
• Community, sharing, and connecting.
• Increase transparency in government and organizations.

Criticisms of Social Media

• Lots of great content still gets overlooked. Current lack of good filters creates problems finding the best content.
• Writers have problems delivering content consistently.
• Anonymity can engender polarization and hate.
• Information overload and social networking overload.
• Work/Life balance is hard to achieve.

As society and technology moves forward we stand at a watershed moment and history, so it is vitally necessary to stop and think about our societal trajectory. Thoughts? Did I miss an advantage or disadvantage?

How you can learn more or learn how to make your corporate blogging efforts more strategic and productive:

If you liked this post you might be interested in a more comprehensive criticism of social media which suggests that its a little early to drink the social media and web 2.0. Alternatively, if you want to strategically blog or productively use social media and web 2.0 tools which addresses many of these concerns, you should check here. Finally, the problems with the traditional social media agency.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Part II: The Risk of a Web 2.0 Bubble

This presentation by Dave in January of 2008 outlines the economics and cultural stresses which might cause one to be wary of the web 2.0 wave, and as a very astute venture capital investor he ultimately concludes with a happy future for the world of Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is Dead; Long Live Web 2.0!<div style="font-size:11px;font-family:tahoma,arial;height:26px;padding-top:2px;">View more presentations from Dave McClure.</div></div>

(image credit: pikkus)

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Posted 18 days ago

Social Data Revolution

Social Data Revolution, Part 1 — Time and Money: What Instantaneous and Free Communication is Doing For Consumers

Way back in time, communication seemed simple: people were home in the evening, and you could just swing by for a chat. But then the printing press was invented, greatly increasing the scope and reducing the cost of communication. Print, often complemented by services such as mail delivery, enabled firms to reach a huge number of people inexpensively.

Sears, for example, sent its catalog to millions of US households twice a year from 1896 until 1993. It was a slow world—products and prices remained valid until the next issue came out. Relevant dates, such as the delivery date, were hard to predict and rarely communicated to customers. But the customers did not expect much transparency from the firms, either—they were happy as long as the toaster they ordered eventually arrived.

Shifting the focus from transaction to relationship

In this era of limited communication, the firm only knew about the final orders, not the process of decision making. The focus was on transactions, not on relationships.

And now? The Internet allows us to reach anyone, anywhere, instantaneously. The reach of communication has increased from the people in the sender’s town to the entire world. People are social—they want to listen, comment, and be heard. But now that everyone can have a voice, who actually gets heard?

In the old world, senders bore the main cost of communication. Buying stamps and mailing out physical letters limited the number of messages generated. But in electronic communication, the marginal cost of another message is essentially zero. The bottleneck has moved from the sender to the receivers: they are becoming inundated with more requests for attention than they can deal with. The problem is that we are hard-wired to attend to new stimuli. We need to make these new technologies work for people and not against them.

The new currency: May I have your attention, please?

With all these demands on our time, how should we allocate our attention? Randomly? Perhaps—a former colleague’s strategy was to sporadically delete the messages in his inbox as his way of coping with information overload. Needless to say, though, his typical excuse (“I guess your email must have been in the batch I deleted”) was not particularly popular.

Right now, for most of us, that long-awaited love letter arrives the same way as yet another credit card solicitation. Can we do better than allocating our attention randomly? The answer comes in two parts: data, and more data.

Meta-data matter

Meta-data, data about the message, can help guide our decisions: how important it is for senders that their message gets read, and what is the message’s expected value for the reader?

Well, the simplest way to get this data is just to ask! Mr. Sender, tell us on a scale from 0 to 10: how important is it to you that the reader actually reads your message? And how much do you think the reader will get out of it? These two numbers can help us prioritize our attention.

But taking these values by themselves won’t do the trick. Just as in the physical world, slimy marketers will try to game the system by creating the impression that their message is of utmost importance to us. They’ll try to whet our appetites and get us to open that spam.

To solve this problem, we’ll need to introduce a direct feedback mechanism by getting some data from the message’s recipient. Obviously, this wouldn’t work for physical mail—our junk mail just finds its way to the shredder. This non-response is a very weak learning signal since the sender has no way of gauging the recipient’s response to the message. It could be that the recipient was an early adopter of the sender’s product and is very happy with it. Or, he could be getting very annoyed with all these messages, to the degree that he is actually starting to hate the company!

In the world of cheap, bi-directional communication, we can do better. The receiver can directly indicate the actual value the message has for him—if he actually does enjoy receiving lots of updates, for example, he can express positive feedback. By indicating the actual relevance for him, the receiver can increase or decrease the relevance of future messages from the same sender. That is, he directly benefits from his actions in the immediate future.

Senders, on the other hand, can benefit as well. There is a new term in the cost function of mass communication—the cost of sending unwanted messages, as expressed by the rising voice of the consumer. Being aware of their recipients’ feedback helps them maintain their pristine reputation—senders will not benefit by becoming attention offenders.

Cheap communication allows us to calibrate senders’ predictions with the actual value perceived by the recipient. As we build up a history of direct feedback, our relevance functions will improve and allow us to prioritize our attention effectively. With free bi-directional communication, the era of the con-artist is coming to an end—only companies that respect their customers will be able to get through to them. Since everybody has an incentive to make as accurate relevance predictions as possible, we can use the power of the community to build a good system.

To sum up, two data sources allow us to harness the power of the community: relevance predictions from the senders, and relevance assessments of the recipients.

The communication revolution is a meta-data revolution

With communication being free and instantaneous, attention is increasingly scarce. Economics is the science of scarcity. So, that’s why we need to develop an economic model of communication. Before, scarcity was on the side of the senders (time, money). It was impossible for firms to communicate effectively with large numbers of people at once, and communication/coordination between customers was even more difficult. There was no way for an individual to effectively reach a broad audience beyond a very limited radius. But the communication revolution has brought about many changes. At first glance, this seemed to be great for companies—it’s now almost free to bury customers in ad campaigns! However, now that the scarcity has shifted to the recipients (time, attention), communication needs to go beyond transactions and move to relationships. In fact, the value of relationships is greater than the value of transactions. Truly customer-centric companies like Zappos understand the value of long-term relationships and bidirectional communication. Unfortunately, though, these companies are the exception. There are many more companies that are moving in the wrong direction by cutting costs in customer service. In general, communication between individuals and firms has not become any easier even though it’s now easier than ever for individuals to communicate with each other. When will the communication revolution allow us to easily reach all companies we want to talk to?

Social Data Revolution, Part 2 — Why We Need a Sound Data Strategy

A previous post discussed how free communication has changed the world, including the expectations and work of individuals, business, and society. This post discusses how two data revolutions (the first about passively collected clicks on Amazon.com, the second about actively contributed data), and the ensuing change in consumer expectation make an astute, coherent data strategy critical.

The first data revolution came from the dream of collecting data from consumer decision-making. With the advent of the web, firms pondered whether it might worth saving the vast amounts of data that customers were generating through their clicks and searches. For consumers, there was no hiding-after all, there is no online equivalent of discreetly checking out a magazine while a bookstore employee is looking the other way. Amazon.com has pretty much saved all user data from its beginning.

Back then, customers had no choice but to share their intentions with firms. If a technology enthusiast wanted to find out if a website sold a particular surveillance device, there was no shortcut but to type some keywords into a search box and therefore give the company a valuable intention stream. Companies, therefore, had all the power. Many tried often too hard to push products and advertisements. The consumer had no voice.

During the first data revolution, successful companies gained power by collecting, aggregating, and analyzing the customer data they collected. However, most companies did not know what to do and ended up burying their data in tombs.

The second data revolution brought about a new dimension to data creation: users started to actively contribute explicit data such as information about themselves, their friends, or about the items they purchased. These data went far beyond the clicks and search data that characterized the first decade of the web.

An early example of user-generated content was Amazon.com’s reviews system. The firm realized that users often trusted recommendations by other users more than promotional material found elsewhere on the web. By enabling users to actively contribute such explicit data, Amazon.com succeeded to leverage knowledge dormant in its large customer base to help customers with their purchasing decisions.

Later, Wikipedia increased transparency even more by allowing online collaboration. By allowing users to interact and build on top of each other, the site relinquished control over their space. The benefit of allowing such user interaction today is obvious-why spend time on hold with a customer service representative if we can just Google the cryptic error codes to see if someone else has already solved the same problem? People learned that by sheer large numbers, an online user community was likely to be more helpful than a representative employed by the company.

Today, the online world has shifted to a model of collaboration and explicit data creation. Successful firms develop systematic ways to encourage and reward users who contribute honest data. A good system does not try to trick customers into revealing demographics or contact information that is useful for the company. Rather, it rewards users with information that is useful to them.

Netflix, for example, allows users to contribute ratings for movies that they have seen. Users have an incentive to contribute accurate data because this will give them better recommendations for new movies. The 1999 “Web 2.0 company” MoodLogic (acquired by All Media Guide, in turn acquired by Macrovision) enabled users to create metadata about their favorite music. Why on earth would they do that? Because they got back playlists, which made it easier for them to discover new music they enjoyed. Such successful companies realized the key feature of a good incentive system: people need to see that they profit from the outcome in some way if they are willing to put in the effort to contribute truthfully.

In the last few years, users have gone a lot further than contributing metadata to movies and music: in fact, they have taken center stage. The center of the universe has shifted from e-business to me-business. Customers are also starting to discover each other, and to interact with each other. Knowing that they are not alone has shifted the balance of power from companies back to consumers. And they have begun to demand transparency. Customers are beginning to have a voice. They are realizing that the data they voluntarily contribute can help them and others with making decisions, providing true value. In turn, they want to be treated fairly as individuals by the companies they pay attention and money to.

What are the consequences of this change towards the expectations of consumers?

Successful interactions have become genuine communication with near-instantaneous feedback. For example, PayScale allows users to retrieve real-time salary reports based on their job title, location, education, and experience-but only after they have contributed their own data. As the expectations of users change, firms must spend more time developing incentive systems that will entice users to participate.

Indeed, the online world is beginning to be ruled by the expectations of the users. No longer is it sufficient for a search engine to cough up some hotels across the world when a weary traveler is looking for a good deal in Bangkok! As these consumer expectations shift, companies that want to stay relevant have no choice but to accept the ideas of the consumer revolution as swiftly as possible. For users, switching costs are cheap-firms can no longer think of “customer relationship management” as providing stickiness for thecustomer (just like fly paper provides stickiness to the fly). Industries such as real estate and automobiles whose business models are built on information asymmetries will quickly lose their revenues to those who increase transparency using data contributed by consumers.

This leaves us several deep questions to ponder, including what the implications are on customer expectations, and what companies can do to address these expectations. This is the social data revolution (SDR).

Social Data Revolution, Part 3 — Digital Exhibitionism: The Future of Relationships?

Yesterday alone, Facebook users issued 21 million friend requests. 17 million requests were accepted. So many new connections, and yet they’re all treated the same—what an oversimplification!

All Facebook links are created equal. But links can differ in strength—for example, a close friend versus a casual acquaintance. Links can be in different categories, like your boss versus a random hookup. And links can be asymmetric—Amy may think that Bob is a good friend, yet Bob may not trust Amy at all! The world is not a binary place.

Discovering Discovery: Don’t ask, Do tell

How can we use data to investigate these different properties of links? Today’s social networks do a lousy job of leveraging our existing data. Why do you need to manually confirm my friend request if we’re already calling, IM-ing, and emailing each other all the time? These data sources should be able to make a good guess about the strength and type of our relationship. Why not use existing data sources to propose better default responses?

If we give our networks a richer structure for our links and relationships, we will also be able to discover interesting facts about ourselves. Why is this important? By investigating implicit relations, we can gain insight into our relationships and how they work. For example, I might be surprised to find out that whenever I email my friend John, he always writes me back promptly whereas I always take 10 times longer to respond to him! Armed with this knowledge, I would ask my system to tell me to get my act together and crank out that response if I’m getting too delinquent.

Facebook 1.0 has helped us create an intimate network of our 17,000 friends. Will Facebook 2.0 help us manage them?

Mind the Explicit, Mine the Implicit

What else can data tell us about the quality of our relationships? One way to use data is to figure out differential interest in budding relationships. It’s easy to do this by looking at communications patterns in email, for example—does one person spend hours crafting that perfect email, only to get a reply that took only a few minutes to write? Or has he suddenly acquired a brand new set of favorite books, movies, and music that just happens to match his new love interest? People leave rich traces on the web—we can discover much more about them than the data they explicitly give.

This is only possible if we can look at the user’s history. After all, we can only make inferences about our behavior if we have a past to compare it against. But this introduces new questions: how much would you pay to know how long Monty spent writing you that email? How much would you pay to keep your data private?

Trust Networks

Social networks are also great for learning about trust. Let’s say that I’m thinking of entering in a business deal with you, but I don’t know you too well. Should I trust you?

There’s an easy way to use the power of networks to answer this question. Let’s just look at all of your other connections: do they trust you? We can give people reputation scores by allowing users to rate their interactions with friends. To make the system even more powerful, we could allow users to link their reputations. To illustrate: let’s say I trust my friend Mike so much that I am willing to attach a trust coefficient of 0.9. This implies that if Mike’s rating goes up by 1, I should get a rating boost of 0.9. Conversely, if someone has a bad experience with Mike and downgrades his rating by 1, my rating will also go down by 0.9. Through the power of the community, reputation ratings would spread quickly. (What trust coefficient would you attach to the author of this post?)

Reward Content Generation

One of the best ways to engage users is to get them to understand how every bit of data they contribute will end up benefiting them. In the example of trust networks, people can improve their own reputations by linking themselves with others. In my previous post on communication, I talked about a system where providing feedback on an email’s relevance would directly benefit you in the future. Online social networks need to reward people to provide explicit data, too.

The Facebook Feed was a brilliant idea for surfacing relevant content created by friends. Ideally, the Feed would create a positive feedback loop: good content provided by friends would get high ratings, which would motivate them to post even more good content. However, an early system of allowing users to rate the submissions of their friends was poorly designed—only 21% of users used the feature. On a rainy day, April 15, 2008, Facebook turned off the feedback system. What a step backward! I wish Facebook instead had created a better machine learning system to reward its users to generate and surface good content.

Social networks based on mutually confirmed binary relations was Day One in evolution of social networks. Introducing, richer semantics, more expressive structures including trust coefficients are the beginning of Day Two. What will the second week bring?

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Posted 1 month ago

Better and Better: The Myth of Inevitable Progress | Foreign Affairs

Indur Goklany's The Improving State of the World offers a healthy corrective to the pervasive view that everything is getting worse. But its facile suggestion that further advances are all but inevitable misreads the true causes of progress.

James Surowiecki is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Wisdom of Crowds.

via foreignaffairs.com

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Posted 1 month ago

Crowd computing

Crowd computing is an overarching term which defines the plethora of human interaction tools that enable idea sharing, non-hierarchical decision making and the full utilization of the world’s mind space. Examples of these tools (many falling under the Web2.0 umbrella) include collaboration packages, information sharing software, such as Microsoft’s SharePoint, wikis, blogs, alerting systems, social networks, SMS, MMS, Twitter, Flicker, and even mashups. Business and society in general increasingly rely on the combined intelligence, knowledge, and life experiences of the “crowd” to improve processes, make decisions, identify solutions to complex problems and monitor changes in consumer taste. An early example of crowd computing was the discovery of a gold deposit location at the Moribund Red Lake Mine in Northern Ontario. Using all available data, the company, Goldcorp, Inc. had been unable to identify the location of new deposits on their land. In desperation, the CEO put all relevant geological data on the web and created a contest, open to anyone in the world. An obscure firm in Australia used their software and algorithms to crack the puzzle. As a result, the company found an additional 8 million ounces of gold at the mine. The only cost was the nominal prize money awarded.

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Posted 1 month ago

The History and Evolution of Social Media

Social media has become an integral part of modern society.

There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries.

There are niche sites for virtually every special interest out there.

There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends.

It seems there are social solutions to just about every need.

In this article, we’ll review the history and evolution of social media from its humble beginnings to the present day.

Precursors to Social Media

Usernets

Usenet systems were first conceived of in 1979 by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis. Usenets let users post articles or posts (referred to as “news”) to newsgroups.

Usenets have no centralized server or dedicated administrator, setting them apart from most BBSs and forums. Usenets are mostly responsible for the development of newsreader clients, which are the precursor to RSS feed readers so commonly used to follow blogs and news sites today.

Group sites such as Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups use many of the conventions established by the original usenet systems.

BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems)

The first BBSs came online in the late 70s. Originally these were primarily hosted on personal computers and users had to dial in through the host computer’s modem. Only one person at a time could gain access to the BBS.

While there were legitimate BBSs, most were at least somewhat involved in illicit, illegal, or other shady practices. Adult material, virus code, information and instructions for hacking and phreaking (phone hacking), and materials like The Anarchist’s Cookbook were commonly hosted on BBSs.

But BBSs were the first type of sites that allowed users to log on and interact with one another, albeit in a much slower fashion than we currently do.

Online Services

After BBSs came “online services” like CompuServe and Prodigy. These were the first real “corporate” attempts at accessing the Internet.

CompuServe was the first company to incorporate a chat program into their service. Prodigy was responsible for making online service more affordable (CompuServe had been prohibitively expensive for many, with charges of $6/hour plug long-distance fees that often made the service run $30/hour or more).

Genie was an early online service created by a General Electric subsidiary (GEIS) in 1985. It ran through 1999 and was one of the earliest services available. It was a text-based service, and considered the first viable commercial competition to CompuServe. The service was created to make use of idle time-sharing mainframes after normal U.S. business hours. GEnie offered games, shopping, mail, and forums (called RoundTables). There was even a print magazine associated with the service at one time.

AOL started as an online service too and made great strides at making the Internet more universally accessible in the U.S.

IRC, ICQ, and Instant Messaging

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was developed in 1988 and used for file sharing, link sharing and otherwise keeping in touch.

It was really the father of instant messaging as we know it today. IRC was mostly UNIX-based though, limiting access to most people.

ICQ was developed in the mid-90s and was the first instant messaging program for PCs. It was at least partly responsible for the adoption of avatars, abbreviations (LOL, BRB) and emoticons. Other IM clients soon followed.

Early Social Networks

Dating Sites

Dating sites are sometimes considered the first social networks. The first dating sites started cropping up almost as soon as people started going online. They allowed users to create profiles (usually with photos) and to contact other users.

Forums

Online forums also played a large part in the evolution of the social web. These were really descendents of the BBSs popular in the 70s and 80s, but usually came with a more user-friendly interface, making them easier for non-technical visitors to use. Various forum platforms, including vBulletin and phpBB, were developed, many of which are still used for forums. Forums remain a popular part of online culture, and many have made strides to add more social networking-type features (like profiles).

While many people consider dating sites or sites like Classmates.com to be the first social networks, they don’t really fit the definition.

Dating sites rarely allowed you to keep a friends list, neither did Classmates in its early years (and profiles were severely limited). The following sites were the first true social networks.

Six Degrees

Six Degrees was launched in 1997 and was the first modern social network. It allowed users to create a profile and to become friends with other users.

While the site is no longer functional, at one time it was actually quite popular and had around a million members at its peak.

In 2000 it was purchased for $125 million and in 2001 it was shut down.

AsianAvenue, MiGente, BlackPlanet

These sites cropped up in the years following SixDegrees’ launch, between 1997 and 2001.

They allowed users to create profiles and add friends (generally without needing approval to add people). Users could create professional, personal and dating profiles on these sites.

While they were some of the earliest social networks, there were few innovations among them.

LiveJournal

LiveJournal started in 1999 and took a different approach to social networking.

While Six Degrees allowed users to create a basically-static profile, LiveJournal was a social network built around constantly-updated blogs.

LiveJournal encouraged its users to follow one another and to create groups and otherwise interact. It was really the precursor to the live updates we see in social networks currently.

World of Warcraft / MMORPGS

MMORPGS (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games) have become social networks in their own right. The most famous of these is World of Warcraft, where players interact both in the game world and on related forums and community sites.

Social interaction within the games ranges from teams set up specifically for tactical reasons within the game to friendships to romances. MMORPGS became popular in the early 2000s, though there were other online role-playing and other games prior to that.

Major Advances in Social Networking

The early 2000s brought some huge developments in social networking and social media.

Friendster

Friendster was really the first modern, general social network. Founded in 2002, Friendster is still a very active social network, with over 90 million registered users and 60+ million unique visitors each month. Most of Friendster’s traffic comes from Asia (90% of it).

Friendster operated by allowing people to discover their friends and then friends-of-friends, and so on to expand their networks.

Its goal was to be a safer place to meet new people than in real-life, as well as being faster. Friendster was, in part, a new kind of dating site.

Instead of matching complete strangers based on shared interests, it operated on the assumption that people with shared friends and acquaintances would have a better chance than those who had no shared connection.

Friendster was most popular with three different groups: gay men, attendess of Burning Man and bloggers.

Hi5

Hi5 is another major social network, established in 2003 and currently boasting more than 60 million active members according to their own claims.

Profile privacy works a bit differently on Hi5, where a user’s network consists of not only their own contacts, but also second (friends of friends) and third (friends of friends of friends) degree contacts.

Users can set their profiles to be seen only by their network members or by Hi5 users in general. While Hi5 is not particalarly popular in the U.S., it has a large user base in parts of Asia, Latin America and Central Africa.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn was founded in 2003 and was one of the first mainstream social networks devoted to business.

Originally, LinkedIn allowed users to post a profile (basically a resume) and to interact through private messaging. They also work on the assumption that you should personally know the people you connect with on the site.

Gradually, other features have been added, including groups, question and answer forums, and advanced profile features, including real-time updates.

MySpace

MySpace was founded in 2003 and by 2006 had grown to be the most popular social network in the world.

MySpace differentiated itself from competitors by allowing users to completely customize the look of their profiles. Users could also post music from artists on MySpace and embed videos from other sites on their profiles.

Originally MySpace allowed communication through private messages, public comments posted to a user’s profile, and bulletins sent out to all of your friends. Blogs are also a big part of MySpace profiles, with each member automatically getting a blog.

In 2006 MySpace introduced MySpace IM, an instant messaging client that lets users chat with their friends.

Other recent additions to MySpace’s functionality include the addition of real-time status updates and a news feed showing friend activity.

Facebook

While Facebook started out as a Harvard-only social network back in 2004, it quickly expanded to other schools, then to high schools, businesses and eventually everyone (by 2006).

In 2008 Facebook became the most popular social networking site, surpassing MySpace, and continues to grow.

Facebook doesn’t allow the same kind of customization that MySpace does. Facebook does, however, allow users to post photos, videos and otherwise customize their profile content, if not the design.

Facebook has added a number of features over the past few years, including instant messaging/chat and apps (and their developer platform).

Users have a few different methods of communicating with one another. Private messaging is available as well as writing on another user’s wall. Wall posts are visible to that user’s friends, but usually not to the general public. Users can easily change their privacy settings to allow different users to see different parts of their profile, based on any existing relationships (the basic privacy settings are “only friends”, “friends of friends”, and “everyone”).

Users can post notes that are visible to all of their friends. Users can also comment on or, more recently, “like” the posts of their friends, and conversations often occur within the comment sections among multiple people.

Other Major Social Networks

Multiply, a “family-friendly” social network and media sharing site was established in 2004 and puts much more emphasis on security and privacy than many other networks. Multiply users have the option to set security levels on each item they post, making things public, network-only, or invite-only.

Orkut, launched in January 2004, is Google’s social network, and while it’s not particularly popular in the U.S., it’s very popular in Brazil and India, with more than 65 million users. Orkut lets users share media, status updates, and communicate through IM.

Kontain, which launched in 2008, works a bit differently than many social networks, putting the focus on usability and allowing users to follow each other through photos, videos, and music, rather than just simple status updates. They also actively recruit businesses to sign up, promotin their service as a way to connect with customers.

Niche Social Networks

As social networking grew, niche sites began cropping up for specific interest groups. There are now social networks for virtually every hobby, passion, interest, industry and group that you could imagine.

Ning

Ning is a platform for creating niche social networks. Networks are hosted by Ning but can take on their own personality and can even pay to have their own branding instead of the Ning brand.

New users can either create social networks for any niche they choose or join any of more than 1.5 million existing networks.

Ning was the first widely-used social networking platform. It’s biggest advantage in the market was that it made it incredibly simple for even non-technical users to set up their own social network.

While most other social networking platforms required coding and programming knowledge, Ning required neither of those.

Company-Sponsored Social Networks

A number of niche social networking sites have been developed by corporations in all sorts of industries.

Authonomy is one example; it’s a writers’ network hosted by the UK division of Harper Collins that has attracted thousands of hopeful writers from all over the globe, but plenty of other companies have created their own networks.

While some of these have active groups, many do not, and end up being shut down due to a lack of activity.

Media Sharing

Social media isn’t just limited to social networking sites. Sharing photos, videos, and other multimedia content is also a popular social media activity.

Photobucket

Photobucket was the first major photo sharing site, launched in 2003.

Photobucket allows users to share photos publically or in password-protected albums. They allow users 500MB of storage (lowered from 1GB in August of 2009).

Pro accounts get 10GB of storage (lowered from 100GB to 25GB in July of ‘08 and then to 10GB in August of ‘09). Photobucket also hosts video content.

In 2007, Photobucket was purchased by Fox Interactive Media (a News Corporation subsidiary). It was rumored to have sold for as much as $250 million, though terms of the sale were never disclosed.

Flickr

Flickr has become a social network in its own right in recent years. They claim to host more than 3.6 billion images as of June 2009.

Flickr also has groups, photo pools, and allows users to create profiles, add friends, and organize images and video into photo sets/albums.

One of Flickr’s major advantages is that they allow users to license their photos through Creative Commons, as well as retaining all copyrights.

Flickr has also recently launched a collection called “The Commons”, which features archived photos and images from a variety of museums and other institutions under a “no known restrictions” license (basically meaning the photos are believed to be in the public domain).

YouTube

YouTube was the first major video hosting and sharing site, launched in 2005.

Users can upload videos up to 10 minutes long and share them through YouTube or by embedding them on other websites (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.).

YouTube now allows users to upload HD videos and recently launched a service to provide TV shows and movies under license from their copyright holders.

YouTube’s major social features include ratings, comments, and the option to subscribe to the channels of a user’s favorite video creators.

Revver

Revver took a slightly different approach to video hosting and sharing.

While YouTube, Metacafe, and most other video sharing sites let you post videos for free and didn’t pay content creators for any advertising revenues their videos generated, Revver has been sharing revenue from the start.

Revver splits the revenue generated by a video 50/50 with that video’s creator. Some other video sharing and hosting sites are moving in the direction of revenue sharing, but Revver still remains the primary one that does it with all content on the site.

Social News and Bookmarking

Sharing photos and videos wasn’t isn’t the only kind of information sharing happening with social media.

The advent of social news and bookmarking sites in the mid-2000’s brought about a whole new way of see what’s going on in the world and discovering interesting content.

News became more widely available thanks to sites like Delicious, Digg, and Reddit, who allowed users to share any news or other content they found interesting with a much wider audience than they might have otherwise had.

Delicious

Delicious (aka, Del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking site founded in 2003. It allows its users to bookmark any content they find online, tag that content, and then share it with other users.

Users can search for bookmarks or browse for them via tags. Delicious also allows users to view the most popular content among other users, as well as up-and-coming content, not unlike most social news sites.

Digg

Digg was founded in 2004 by Kevin Rose, Ron Gorodetzky, Jay Adelson, and Owen Byrne.

Digg users can share links to anything online and other users can vote that content up (”dig”) or down (”bury”). Users can also comment on content posted by others and keep a friends list.

Digg has undergone a lot of controversy in its day, including criticism about the power the top 100 Digg users have over what becomes popular on the site.

The “Digg Effect”—when content makes it to the front page, thereby sending a huge influx of traffic to that site, often overloading its servers—is also well-known and often frustrating to those unprepared for the sudden popularity.

Reddit

Reddit is another social news site founded in 2005. Reddit operates in a similar fashion to Digg, allowing users to vote content up or down.

Users can view popular items, new items, and “controversial” items (presumably those items that have received a lot of both up and down votes). Reddit, like Digg, also allows users to comment on posted items.

Real Time Updates

Real-time updates have become the new norm in social media. With the advent of Twitter in 2006, status updates have become the new norm in social networking. Virtually all major social networks now allow real-time updates.

Twitter

Twitter was founded in 2006 and gained a lot of popularity during the 2007 SxSW (South by Southwest) conference.

Tweets trippled during the conference, from 20k per day to 60k. Twitter has developed a cult-like following and has a number of famous users (Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Soleil Moon Frye, MC Hammer, Oprah, Martha Stewart, and many, many more).

Twitter has also spawned a number of third-party sites and apps, turning it into more of a platform than a single service. There are Twitter clients for updating and managing followers; services that track Twitter trends; and services for posting photos and videos directly to Twitter.

Posterous

Posterous is the newest major microblogging application, started by Y Combinator in May 2009.

Users post content via email. Emails can include attached photos, MP3s and other file types that are also posted. No initial signup is needed, setting it apart from most other social media services.

Tumblr

Tumblr is sort of a cross between a lifestreaming application and a microblogging platform. Tumblr was founded in 2007 and had around 75,000 tumblebloggers switch to the service immediately.

The site lets users post photos, video, text, audio, links, conversations, and other content on blog-like sites. There are mobile applications available for posting to Tumblr, making it ideal for lifestreaming.

Tumblr is also very easy to use, making it well-suited to less technical users. It’s similar to Twitter and other microblogging platforms in the way that it lets you follow other Tumblr users and see their updates in a specialized dashboard feed. Users can also “heart” (favorite) other Tumblr users’ content and reblog posts from other users, keeping the original credit intact.

Other Services Adopt Real-Time Updates

As mentioned before, virtually every social networking site now allows for status updates. Facebook has incorporated status updates into their interface for years. MySpace adopted the practice more than a year ago. And most recently, LinkedIn has started to allow users to update their status.

Real-time updates allow users to stay connected to their friends and family on a constant basis and often improve relationships between people.

When you constantly know what’s going on with friends and family, it’s easier to discover shared interests, activities, and other information that might never have come out in real-life conversations. This can lead to stronger relationships offline.

The iPhone’s Role in Real-Time Updates

The iPhone can be largely credited for the rise in popularity of real-time updates. Prior to the iPhone’s launch, mobile browsers were clunky at best, and virtually unusable at worst.

But the iPhone made it easy and even fun to browse the web from a mobile device. Add apps for virtually every social network to the mix and it became possible for users to update anytime, from anywhere.

Other phones have followed suit and there are now mutliple devices available that let users easily update their status on the go (including posting photos and video updates).

The iPhone has taken such a huge role in social media that there are now social networks only available on the iPhone. iRovr is a social networking app specifically for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

It allows users to post photos, updates, links (including to YouTube videos), create polls, subscribe to RSS feeds and more. It was launched in 2007 and is still going strong two years later.

Lifestreaming and Lifecasting

Real-time updates have led to an increase in the number of people who are now lifecasting or lifestreaming virtually everything they do. While some opt to lifestream by aggregating their online activities in a single place (such as with FriendFeed).

Ustream.tv

Ustream was founded in the summer of 2006 and has become the streaming video host of choice for celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Soleil Moon Frye.

While most Ustream users only go live occasionally, there are channels that are live around the clock (mostly security cameras, animal cameras, traffic cameras, and other stationary feeds).

Ustream allows viewers to post comments and ask questions directly to the feed host during live broadcasts, and this interactivity often engages users to a greater extent than other video sites where videos are posted after they’ve been filmed instead of being streamed live.

Justin.tv

Justin.tv is a streaming video host founded in October 2006 that lets lifecasters and live show creators to broadcast to hundreds or thousands of Internet users.

iJustine is probably Justin.tv’s most public user, lifecasting practically her entire life on the site at one time (she appears to be lifecasting a bit less recently, though she’s still very active on the site).

There are more than 400,000 channels on Justin.tv, and they get more than 41 million unique visitors each month.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed, which launched in 2007 and was recently purchased by Facebook, allows you to integrate most of your online activities in one place (Twitter, RSS feeds, and Flickr, among others).

It’s also a social network in its own right, with the ability to create friends lists, post updates, and otherwise communicate.

Other Lifestreaming Sites

There are a number of other lifestreaming sites out there that people are using. Most can be integrated into your blog or website to show your visitors all of your activities around the web.

There are even some dedicated blog plugins for lifestreaming. WP Lifestream is one such plugin, specifically for WordPress. It lets you integrate your profiles from Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm and Wordie right out of the box, and you can add additional modules for integrating more feeds.

Profilactic.com is another lifestreaming application that lets you integrate feeds from 190 different websites, including Blippr, Delicious, Digg, deviantART, Dopplr, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, LiveJournal, MySpace, Pandora, Revver, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Tumblr, and more. Sweetcron is a similar app, though it’s opensource and you host it on your own servers.

Social Everything

It seems that nowadays there are social and user-generated sites for just about every activity you can imagine. There are social shopping sites. Social financial planning sites. Sites for getting book, movie, app, and other reviews. Sites to share your goals and meet like-minded people. Sites to plan your travels and share them with others. And sites to help you make decisions on just about anything.

Social media has become a huge part of the lives of millions of people worldwide. Whether it’s something as simple as looking up reviews of movies from real, live people (instead of professional movie reviewers) or getting advice on major life decisions, there are social sites out there to provide you with the information you seek.

Even on general-purpose social networks and social media sites like Twitter there are thousands of ways to get input on just about anything.

Instead of using Google the next time you have a question about something, try asking on Twitter. A lot of the time you get better information from the crowd there in less time than pouring over pages of search results.

Social Media Concerns and Criticism

As social media has grown in popularity and become mainstream, it has been faced with growing controversy and criticism.

The main criticisms seem to fall along a few lines: Social media can be used by stalkers; Social media can be used by child predators; and, Social media sites open up privacy and security concerns.

While there is only so much social media sites can do about the first two, there is a growing trend among many sites to bolster the privacy policies and make users feel more secure.

Social Media Used by Stalkers

Facebook and other social media sites have come under attack for making it easier for stalkers to track their victims or even to find new ones. This kind of accusation is not entirely unfounded.

Many social media users don’t take advantage of privacy settings and leave their entire profiles public. While this is often a good idea for professional profiles where you want to make connections with people you don’t necessarily know, personal profiles can benefit from hiding some information from public display.

Social networks make these privacy settings available to users to help prevent stalkers and predators from being able to see their updates.

But they can’t force users to use them, so in the end much of the responsibility falls to the individual users, not the networks themselves.

Social Media Used by Child Predators

MySpace is the most publically attacked social networks accused of being a haven for child molesters and pornographers, but the site, and other social networks, have made great strides in protecting the identities and information of minors using their sites.

Again, this is one of those situations where much of the problem came from users not making their profiles private.

MySpace took a major step to prevent predators from friending underage teens by requiring friend requesters to know the email address or another personal identifier in order to send a friend request to a minor.

They also require the profiles of teens under the age of 16 to be private, not allowing non-friend users to view them. Other sites have taken similar steps.

Privacy Concerns

Facebook recently came under attack for changes to its privacy policy that were worded ambiguously enough to effectively grant rights to Facebook to use any of your content, private or public, for their own purposes (such as advertising) even after you’d delected your profile.

While the company maintains that was never their intent and it was simply unfortunate wording, the backlash was severe enough that Facebook changed their privacy policy back to its previous version and then solicited user input for revisions. It was a harsh lesson in how concerned many users are about the information they provide online.

When you consider that many people post information about all aspects of their lives online, mostly on social media sites, it’s no wonder many are concerned about what companies can do with that information.

Social networks and other sites have to rapidly respond to user concerns over privacy and security. With the information in an average social media profile, it would not be inconceivable for a hacker to illegally gain enough information about a person to steal their identity or otherwise cause problems.

Security concerns have also cropped up as average people have found their profiles hacked and embarrassing information posted about them.

While this type of thing was once relatively confined to celebrities and well-known people (or people who had a personal vendetta against them), it has become more widespread and it’s not unheard of for regular people to be targeted (such as this woman on Facebook recently).

The Role of Social Media in Pop Culture

Social media has, in the past year or two, become a mainstream online activity. In 2007, social media activities overtook pornography as the most popular online activity in the U.S. (the two industries continue to battle it out, alternately gaining or losing ground on a monthly basis).

Celebrities now use Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks on a regular basis. And it’s not just their publicists—stars are updating their status themselves and interacting with fans on a daily basis.

It’s not uncommon to see Twitter-inspired t-shirts, and there has been at least one “fail-whale” tattoo (I’m sure there are more out there).

When Twitter and Facebook both suffered a DDOS attack in early August ‘09, there was a real sense of loss among many users until the sites were back up.

Social media has become an integral part of how people communicate, stay in touch, keep on top of new developments, and otherwise connect with the world around them.

The Evolution of Social Media

Social media has come a long way since the days of BBSs and IRC chats. And social media continues to evolve on a daily basis.

With major social networks and social media sites making changes and improvements on an almost daily basis, it’s sure to keep evolving in coming years.

The one thing we can be pretty sure of at this point is that social media is not just a phase, and likely won’t go away any time soon…at least until something better comes along.

Further Resources:

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

Where do you think social media is heading and how do you use it? How much influence does social media have in your life?

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Posted 1 month ago

Social search startup Aardvark hires search and mobile experts, building iPhone app

Aardvark began opening its social search engine to more users earlier this month, and now the ambitious company is starting to reveal more of its future plans. It’s bulking up its Google-heavy technical team with Sameer Paranjpye, the Director of Yahoo’s grid computing group and a founding member of the Hadoop project. It’s also taking aim at the mobile market, hiring on Ben Keighran, the founder of mobile messaging service BluePulse. I caught up with Keighran earlier today and he sketched out what sounds like a very useful iPhone application — it will let you get answers from friends wherever you are.

But hold on, what is Aardvark?

Put simply, it’s a new way to get answers from your friends. You email or instant-message your question to Aardvark, it figures out around half a dozen people you know who might have a good answer, then emails or IMs them for a response and sends what they say back to you. “Aardvark is supposed to work like a contact,” co-founder Max Ventilla tells me. “It should know you, understand what you want and make one-off introductions to the right person who can answer your question.”

What problem is this solving? Search engines are great for providing links to information that is online but sometimes a real conversation with a friend (or friend-of-friend) can provide much better information than a web page. After all, there’s far more knowledge and experience in people’s heads than there is written on web pages. Aardvark isn’t going to approach the utility of Google for information about things like “San Jose weather” or “history of computers” but it can connect you to the right person in your network if you’re looking for great live rock music or a tasteful restaurant for a date. In contrast to web search engines, Aardvark is trying to answer such subjective answers subjectively — a sort of real-time, personalized Yahoo Answers, and loosely similar to human-powered search engines like ChaCha.

How does Aardvark work? It analyzes social data about you and your friends, pulling in information like your email and chat contacts, and who your friends are on Facebook. If you give it access to Facebook — using the social network’s Connect service for exchanging social data with third-party sites — it will gather information from your and your friends’ profiles, like what geographic or work networks people are in and what their interests are. So, for example, if one of your friends on Facebook includes “action movies” in the interests section of their profile, they might be more likely to receive a question you send out about which Arnold Schwarzenegger hit you should rent tonight. Ventilla says about 40 percent of Facebook profiles contain enough information to be highly useful for Aardvark.

But Aardvark is trying to gather as much social data as possible, from everywhere. You can also directly provide Aardvark with keywords about your expertise, and when you invite friends you can tell Aardvark what you consider them to be experts in. And look for it to start tapping into other social networks that provide user data to third-party developers — the opening up of Facebook and other social networks over the last couple of years was one of the inspirations for starting the company, Ventilla tells me.

To be clear, though, social data is just one piece of what Aardvark does. The company, which is not shy about its engineering talent, uses machine learning software to figure out what people are intending to ask about when they ask a question — then it pairs that question with your friends. For a deeper look at how everything works, take a look at our write-up last fall.

Where Aardvark is going

In testing so far, around 70 percent of active Aardvark users respond to a targeted question, more than 90 percent of questions get answered — and over half of all questions get answered in under five minutes. But the results aren’t always perfect. The company is bringing in Paranjpye to help the service improve and scale. He’s a former search engineer at Yahoo — and before that he was a search engineer at Yahoo-acquired seminal search company Inktomi. In his most recent Yahoo position, he built up the 40 person Yahoo team working on grid computing initiatives and was one of the main architects of Hadoop: a software framework to build applications for processing thousands of petabytes of data. At Aardvark, he’ll be doing related work, helping to improve the speed and accuracy with which questions get paired with people.

Refining the core product is necessary for the company to start making money. For example, it’s already sending affiliate traffic to Amazon. The more successfully that questions can be paired with people to answer them, the more opportunities for this sort of revenue. Longer term, the company hopes to gain new insight on human behavior by watching what its users do in aggregate. One day, for example, a company might use Aardvark’s technology to help people communicate quickly across large organizations. A multinational corporation with tens of thousands of users could use it so a salesperson in one country could instantly ask a question of the right technologist in another country — more efficient than an email list. To that end, the company is already testing out a way to create groups of users within the site around particular themes.

Which brings us back to mobile. One of the most obvious use cases for wanting to get an expert answer from someone you know is when you’re away from the computer — like when traveling in a foreign city and trying to find a fun place to go out at night. You can already use Aardvark on your phone using mobile email or a third-party mobile IM client, but the company aims to make it even easier through mobile applications and SMS. First up for development is an iPhone application, Keighran (pictured) says, that will let you either type in a question or speak it into the phone. The message will then go into the Aardvark system, appearing in front of the experts you’re connected to on the site — sort of like a local review site, but live and just with your friends.

How it Works

Aardvark works the same way on the iPhone as it does over IM or email:

1. Ask your question in plain English, like you would to a friend.

A list of your previous questions and answers…

2. Aardvark discovers someone who’s online now and can give you an answer right away.

You’ll get a PUSH notification with an answer within minutes.

3. You can also answer questions for your network!

See open questions about topics you’re interested in.

Special Features

Built-in location detection
Aardvark will find answerers in your neighborhood, automatically.

Language engine analyzes your question to find key topics
Or you can select from a list.

Get notified when someone answers your question
Or when there’s a question you can answer.

Connect to friends
Using Facebook Connect, or email invites from your address book

Secret Aardvark Shake
Find the screen where a little shake gives a surprise…

Thank You!

We’ve been working extremely hard on the Aardvark iPhone app for several months. Ben Keighran and his team (Gene Tsai, Nick Maher, and Brad Robinson) deserve a special thank you here. Ben is Aardvark’s lead advisor for mobile products, and he led the charge on the iPhone app, from the initial designs through the final implementation details. Thanks guys!

Also a shout out to our friends at CarbonFive who helped us build the very first prototype of the iPhone app. As always, extremely valuable to have an early version that we can use to gather user feedback and learnings along the way. Thanks CarbonFive!

And I want to give a special thanks to all of our amazing users who volunteered to help us by testing early version and giving useful feedback along the way. We absolutely could not have produced such a great app without your help — we’ve included a special “thank you” in the App itself

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Posted 2 months ago

Parental Guidance How safe are the top social-networking sites for teens? We take them for a test run.

By JULIA ANGWIN

When I was in high school, I spent much of my senior year polishing up the prose that appeared in the little rectangle next to my photograph in the yearbook.

Seniors could write whatever they wanted in that tiny space. We filled it with references to our favorite music and soft drinks, and our friends' names.

Teens aren't much different today. It's just that their yearbook equivalents are online at social-networking sites like MySpace.com. On their MySpace pages, teens list their favorite music and drinks, and add links to their friends' pages. Instead of signing each other's yearbooks, they post comments on each other's pages.

But teens can also meet up with strangers on these sites -- and that's where the problems arise. Young girls in several states have been sexually assaulted by men they met on MySpace, according to law-enforcement officials. The family of one 14-year-old Texas girl who was assaulted is suing MySpace in Texas state court for not providing adequate safeguards. And the site's sometimes-racy content is under fire generally for being an unsafe environment for teens.

MySpace says it doesn't comment on individual members' online or offline activities, and it declines to comment on the suit. The site has been beefing up security measures for its youngest users, 14- and 15-year-olds. It has also added privacy protections for all users and has started an educational campaign to help parents teach their children not to put identifying personal details on their Web pages.

Sensing an opportunity, many other sites have started promoting themselves as safer for teens. I decided to try out a few big names and newcomers to see if any are safer than the others. In one instance, I gave a site a false birth date in order to register as a teenager. In another, I gave a false birth date for my child. Here's what I found.

MYSPACE

Setting up a MySpace profile is incredibly easy, which is one reason the site is so popular. Click a few buttons, answer some questions and you've got a rudimentary page. The site, owned by News Corp., allows you to keep some personal information, such as birth date and home town, private. But it automatically displays age, home state and zodiac sign.

Unlike most other sites, which give users a template for their pages, MySpace allows much more personalization -- which leads users to compete for attention. Many pages have elaborate background photographs, and many play music when you land on them. Some users also post provocative photos and use racy language. Many disclose their school and hometown. And as with many other social-networking sites, people who aren't members can view MySpace profiles as well.

The Los Angeles-based site also focuses on meeting new people. The front page of every profile lists details "About Me" and "Who I'd like to meet." Despite declining to describe who I'd like to meet, as soon as I joined, my inbox was full of emails, many of them from bands I'd never heard of or women in low-cut shirts, wanting to be my friend.

Then there are chat rooms. It was a little scary to be invited to join a singles group where the other people were 14- and 15-year-olds wondering why they had been invited to join. An older user warned the youngsters to leave the group because it was full of "net stalkers." Unlike other social-networking Web sites, MySpace does not post warnings in the chat rooms, although users can click on the "safety tips" link from most pages. And since I was invited to join the group, MySpace has started marking such groups as "mature" and prevents users under 18 from joining.

A Page of One's Own

A look at the visitor traffic at select social-networking sites. Figures represent unique visitors, in millions.

	JUNE '05	JUNE '06	PCT. CHANGE*
MySpace.com	17.7	52.3	196%
Classmates.com sites	18.0	14.0	-22
Facebook.com	6.1	13.8	126
YouTube.com	N/A	13.4	N/A
Spaces.MSN.com	3.9	8.7	124
Xanga.com	8.1	6.8	-16
Flickr.com	1.1	5.9	451
360.Yahoo.com	N/A	4.7	N/A
LiveJournal.com	6.3	4.1	-34
MyYearbook.com	N/A	4.0	N/A
Hi5.com	3.4	2.1	-39
Tagged.com	0.7	1.8	154
Bebo.com	1.6	1.7	5
Friendster.com	1.1	1.4	20
TagWorld.com	N/A	1.3	N/A
43Things.com	N/A	1.2	N/A
Sconex.com	N/A	0.5	N/A
LinkedIn.com	0.2	0.3	39
Orkut.com	0.05	0.3	426
XuQa.com	N/A	0.1	N/A
Cyworld.com	N/A	0.09	N/A
Percentage changes are based on unrounded numbers. Source: comScore Media Metrix

MySpace has added a feature that lets users specifically block friend requests from bands, as well as people who don't know your last name. And the site is studying ways to make it harder for young teens to meet adults on the site. It recently added a feature that prevents adults from sending private emails to members under 16 whose last names they don't already know. But this hinges on the honor system. MySpace doesn't attempt to verify ages, so kids and adults who lie about their age can avoid these controls.

Additionally, MySpace says it aims to remove adult content from the site, and reserves the right to ban users who post inappropriate content.

"Our top priority right now is to find or build the right set of technologies that will make the Internet and MySpace safer for teens," says MySpace Chief Safety Officer Hemanshu Nigam. But, he adds, "whatever technical solutions we implement can only be successful if they're coupled with a mom or a dad teaching their teens how to be safe online."

XANGA

Setting up a Xanga account is even more streamlined than setting up a MySpace account. Just a few questions, and you're ready to go. Xanga lets you choose whether you want your birth date and other personal information to be shown on your page. It also has three levels of protection for everything you post on your site. Private postings can be viewed only by you. Protected postings can be viewed only by your designated friends. And public postings can be read by anybody.

Xanga, which is oriented toward blogging, has just introduced a rating system where users rank the adult-content level on their own or other blogs. Xanga members cannot see EX, for "explicit," content unless they prove they are 18 by registering with a credit card or faxing some other form of identification. Users can also flag content on other blogs that, for example, contains underage nudity. Xanga says that as of July 11, users had submitted 109,978 ratings and 42,235 flags.

Overall, Xanga feels like a pretty safe space. In large part, that's because it doesn't offer private communications between members. If you want to talk to someone, you have to leave a public comment on his or her blog.

Xanga has a few social-networking-type features, such as letting people build profiles and link to their friends' profiles. But in an interview, Xanga.com Inc. Chief Executive John Hiler says the New York-based site won't add instant messaging, chat or other private communication features until "we feel comfortable that we could have safety features built into them."

FACEBOOK

When I went to college, the facebook was a pamphlet with pictures of every freshman, his or her name and hometown. Facebook.com was originally designed to bring that idea online, with students at various colleges, as well as alumni, faculty and staff, posting information on the site. It has since expanded to certain high schools and offices.

The nice thing about Facebook is that it restricts members to their own school or organization; the site tells if you belong by looking at your email address. Unless you specifically allow someone outside your school to become your friend, that person can't see the details of your profile. Within your network, you can put different privacy settings on each piece of information on your profile.

Setting up a Facebook profile was a snap. Using a free email address offered to all alumni by my college, the University of Chicago, I joined the school's Facebook community. With an email confirmation, I was able to join the community.

Immediately, I noticed a difference between Facebook and other sites. Because people are in a smaller community, they use their real names and the information seems less fantasy-related. (Although I did wonder if Paul Wolfowitz knew that his profile on Facebook describes his job as "chillin at the World Bank." The University of Chicago says the email address on the profile is valid but definitely doesn't belong to Mr. Wolfowitz. Mr. Wolfowitz confirmed that he didn't create the entry.)

Facebook encourages networking -- although on a limited scale. You can search for people within your university by age, degree program, political views and "relationship status." Like Xanga, the vibe of the Palo Alto, Calif., site is fairly innocent, with people listing their majors and student activities. Facebook Inc. Director of Marketing Melanie Deitch says that some people create fake profiles, but that most prefer to use their real names. And using real names encourages them to behave the same way online as offline. Users can report false pages by clicking a "report abuse" button, and the site says customer support responds to all potential abuses within 24 hours.

HI5

Hi5 started out as a site aimed at Indian youth and is now one of the most global social-networking sites. Setting up an account was simple, with lots of choices for privacy settings, including "hide age" and "hide location."

Like MySpace, Hi5 user profiles are viewable by non-Hi5 users, and Hi5 promotes networking among users. Users can email each other and search for users by age and relationship status. Still, Hi5 does seem to try to promote safety. Along with its privacy settings, in the chat rooms it prominently posts a list of safety tips reminding users not to provide personal data or arrange to meet online friends offline.

At the same time, the site seems to attract a pretty random cast of characters. When I joined the San Francisco group, supposedly for people who have the city as a hometown, I ran across a bodybuilder from Egypt and a Peruvian girl posing in her underwear.

Hi5 Networks Inc., San Francisco, says the site focuses on vetting member profiles more than policing who joins groups. Hi5 Chief Executive Ramu Yalamanchi adds that in groups, users have a measure of privacy: They can see each other's photos but not the rest of their profile. (Still, if you click on the user, you go to his or her profile page.)

BEBO

Bebo is so popular in the U.K. that by some accounts it has surpassed MySpace there. It also has the most lax age-verification procedures of all the sites I tested. It says you must be 13 to register, but I was allowed to enter "my age is secret" instead of an actual date. Bebo says it has subsequently changed this feature to require users to enter a date.

I did appreciate that Bebo alerted me to enter only the first letter of my last name on my entry form or else it would appear on my profile page. It also automatically limits contact information to your designated friends and groups. At the same time, however, it doesn't limit private emails between members and allows them to call each other via Skype, the online phone service.

It also has a nice, clean interface, with fewer ads than Hi5. But like Hi5, Bebo doesn't seem to police its groups. To get some friends, I listed myself as an alumna of the University of Chicago. But when I perused other supposed alumni, I ran across a 13-year-old Latino girl from Chicago and a 17-year-old Puerto Rican rapper from Chicago, neither of whom appeared to be alumni. Now those people can see my profile and contact me.

Bebo Inc., San Francisco, says it is in the process of stepping up the policing of school groups to make sure that members are within the appropriate age range. Bebo also has hired British Internet security expert Rachel O'Connell as chief safety officer.

"It is our intention to make Bebo one of the most hostile environments for users with ill intent," says a spokeswoman.

TAGGED

Tagged promotes itself as a safe place for teens and lets only kids ages 13 to 19 join the site. In order to check out the site, I made up a birthday that would make me seem 16. While interviewing Tagged officials later on, I informed them of this, and they raised no objections. To make sure people don't sign up their friends without their knowledge, the site sends an email verification.

When I made it into the site, I was immediately bombarded by pop-up ads. Every single page was covered with ads -- I often ended up clicking on one when I thought I was going somewhere else on the site.

And the site isn't exactly strait-laced. The front page has chat rooms labeled "flirt room" and "dating room." The chat was wildly suggestive, and there were warnings at the bottom of the page: "Be Smart. Don't post personal information about yourself, your phone number, or your address in Chat."

Also, I wasn't able to make my profile as private as I would've liked. I went into my account settings and blocked people from sending me instant messages and kept my city private. But, as on MySpace, I couldn't prevent my age and state from being automatically displayed.

Like many social-networking sites, Tagged also offers software that imports member's address books onto the site. I decided to try it, by importing my AOL address book, but was shocked when two people in my address books started receiving emails from Tagged asking them to join the site. A colleague forwarded me several of the notes: "hey, i'm on Tagged Get on Tagged so we can talk! Julia."

Tagged Inc. Chief Safety Officer Louis Willacy says that I must have mistakenly checked a box that allows the site to send the emails. He also says the San Francisco-based company randomly monitors chat rooms to check for inappropriate comments and discussions.

In terms of privacy, Mr. Willacy adds that, unlike at sites like MySpace.com, nonmembers can't see Tagged members' profiles. And Tagged Chief Executive Greg Tseng says the company is trying to figure out how to unclutter the advertising.

IMBEE

Imbee is designed for kids ages 8 to 14 and their parents. Parents must approve their kids' registration, and although the site is free, parents must submit a credit card to validate their identity. To get into the site, I had to supply some false data: I registered as a parent and then set up an account for my daughter, saying she was 10 years old. In fact, she's not old enough to be eligible to join. As in the case of Tagged, I informed Imbee officials later on, and they raised no objections.

Imbee allows parents two levels of control for the kids' accounts: monitoring, which means parents are notified of changes and communication after it happens, and approval -- which means parents must approve the kids' messages and account changes before they can go through. I chose the slightly less draconian monitoring level.

But Imbee's privacy is so strict that the site felt strangely empty. You can't search for other members unless you already know who they are and they give you their Imbee profile name. And there are no groups or chat rooms. So unless you know someone else who is already on the site, there's really no one to talk to.

Imbee says it is working on ways to help kids talk to each other on the site. Already, Imbee mails business-style cards to kids who join, so they can tell their friends about the site. Jeanette Symons, founder and CEO of Industrious Kid Inc., the Emeryville, Calif., start-up that runs Imbee, says the company plans to build group sites where kids can interact safely around themes like sports or celebrities.

* * *

After a week in the world of social networking, I came to some conclusions. Really young kids (say, under 13) probably shouldn't be on any of these sites except possibly Imbee. Slightly older kids might do best on Xanga, where opportunities for strangers to connect are limited but the site doesn't have the strict feeling of Imbee. And Facebook is the best option for high-school and college students -- because ultimately the Internet is safest when used for networking with people you already know, or might know, in real life.

—Ms. Angwin is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's New York bureau.

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Posted 2 months ago

Tech Ideas From Twitterland

To make an electronics company, you need a lot of people: executives, managers, accountants, marketing, manufacturing, and on and on. But somewhere inside that cloud of administration, there are always a few anonymous geniuses, the heart of the company, the ones who keep the whole thing going: the people who actually come up with the ideas.

How do they do it? How do they come up with enough new features to keep us excited, year after year?

I don’t know how they usually do it, but I know how they should do it: by crowdsourcing. Thousands of times a day, all over the world, ordinary people remark, in restaurants or offices or living rooms, “You know what cellphones really need?” — and never suspect that they’ve just struck commercial gold.

In September, ’tis the season for tech companies to roll out their new iPods, new cameras, new everything, in hopes of kicking off lucrative holiday sales. And to celebrate the new products, and to give those tech-company idea makers a head start for next year, I’m pleased to present the results of the first Pogue Tech-Idea Crowdsourcing Exercise.

I asked my Twitter followers for their best tech-product enhancement ideas. They responded wittily, passionately — and immediately (this is Twitter, after all).

Now, a huge percentage of the wished-for features already exist. Dozens of people wished for cameras that could beam photos to the Web wirelessly (yours can, if you buy an EyeFi memory card). Many imagined cellphones that wouldn’t ring during certain hours, or that could send certain callers directly to voice mail (yours can, if you sign up for Google Voice).

A lot of people wished they could make a cellphone beep loudly when it’s lost somewhere in the house (the iPhone does that, if you’re a MobileMe subscriber).

Maybe a couple of the ideas below already exist somewhere, too; if so, apologies. (What do I look like — a tech expert?)

All right then: let the Twitterfest of fresh ideas begin!

Cellphones

The first thing everybody pines for is better service. But the second-place wish list is all over the map. Here are my favorites, complete with the Twitter names of their inventors.

“Self-charging cell batteries that charge through kinetic motion as you walk around.” (Narniaexpert) Hey, yeah! Wristwatches do it — why not cellphones?

“I’d love a cellphone that is 100 percent waterproof. I’ve lost several to the washing machine and toilet!” (passepartout)

“A display that shows if you’re calling someone with the same carrier, thereby making it a free call.” (ottoolah)

“When you need to step out of a meeting, a button that answers the call with a message that ‘this person will be with you shortly...’ ” (bonnyface)

“Being able to turn off the annoying ‘low battery’ warnings. I got it the first 10 times, but I’m not near the charger!” (micahherstand)

“Flip-out charging prongs, so you can charge it anywhere there’s an outlet. No need to carry cords/chargers.” (betaboy78)

“Automatic shock feature, like invisible dog fencing, for people who ignore NO CELLPHONE signs in public places!” (FastFoodMom)

“A special detector that helps you avoid run-ins with iPhone snobs.” (larrybehrens)

“Breathalyzer built into the mouthpiece. Prohibits drunk-dialing after you hit a specified limit.” (jesssteyers) To which AmericaTerror responded: “Then how would you call a cab?!”

And my favorite, from someone who’s clearly seen too many sci-fi movies: “Poor-quality, blue-tinted hologram conferencing.” (kbranch)

Home Theater

Predictably, what most people crave in home theater is simplification. Get rid of the cables. Make the remote easier. But some of their other ideas were juicy, too:

“A TV that displays network logos only when I’m channel-surfing. I can turn the logo off (or on) once I find a show to watch.” (hughesviews)

“Separate volume controls for dialogue and background noise/soundtrack.” (molliejoan1)

“Choose your transition between channel change. Cube effect, slide, mosaic, etc.” (kellycroy)

“Use your hand as the remote — the TV recognizes your gestures. No more searching for lost remotes!” (renzoroni)

“Like that Fly Clear airport program: If we get preapproval by giving fingerprints, iris scan, or our firstborn child, we can skip F.B.I. warning on movies.” (hughesviews)

“Spray-on sticky floor coating, for that authentic experience!” (ColinDabritz)

“GPS for the remote, and mute button for the kids.” (larrybehrens)

Cameras

This was the year of camera specialization: high-speed models from Casio, low-light models from Sony and Fuji, dual-screen models from Samsung. But the following ideas would be cheap, practical and popular:

“A pop-out U.S.B. connector to download your photos, like the one on the Flip camcorder.” (vidiot_) (This is my favorite idea of all.)

“Retractable, self-storing tripod legs.” (spaceace83 and others)

“Voice recognition. I should be able to tell my camera what to do. Enough with endless menus!” (argosan) And, as Narniaexpert added: “Also, with voice recognition, you could prop up the camera, get in the photo, and when everyone says ‘Cheese,’ it’ll take the picture.”

“Sharing photos with friends as soon as the pic is taken.” (Gokul685) Actually, Fujifilm sold a couple of models that could exchange photos wirelessly, but of course, only with each other.

“Rate photos (thumbs up/down) while viewing on the camera. This would aid later sorting and pruning on the computer.” (barrybrown)

“A warning when your thumb is in the way of the lens!” (trainman74)

Laptops

There were common threads on the twitterers’ suggestions for laptops. They included touch screens (coming this fall with Windows 7), detachable screens (already available on Windows convertible laptops) and self-adjusting time zones (already on Snow Leopard Mac laptops).

But the biggest irritations are chargers and charging.

“Built-in solar panels.” (rkarolius) To which 2rz responded: “Or at least standardize laptop chargers, so that hotels/conference rooms can stock them for travelers.”

“Wireless power! Enough with the batteries and cords and chargers!” (argosan)

“Small, attached, retractable power cord that I can extend/lock, then recoil automatically with a button.” (JonHenke)

“A carrying handle, like on the old iBook — but it holds battery to increase use time.” (D_Chan)

“Built-in high-def projectors: watch a movie in bed on your ceiling.” (eddiepro)

“Bidirectional U.S.B. ports: doesn’t matter which way you put the plug in, up or down.” (shamroc34)

“Easy-to-pop-out keyboard grid to enable users to dump out crumbs.” (EllenSchendel)

“Gesture detection, via camera: wave your hand in the air to turn a page, trash a file, etc.” (macdac) But Gracels wasn’t so sure: “Gesture detection? I could delete all my files in one heated conversation. Have pity on Italians!”

“Can’t we have a keyboard that splits and lifts for ergonomic comfort?” (juliegomoll) And a reply from jmproffitt: “Splits and lifts? Are we talking about a laptop keyboard or a new bra?”

“A button labeled, ‘Push here when all else fails!’ ” (rylanhamilton)

Music Players

You might think that iPods and their ilk have too many features already, but the Twitter gang thinks there’s still room for improvement:

“Karaoke mode.” (zigziggityzoo) But a caution from Whirledworld: “Karaoke mode MUST be disabled on airplanes!”

“Synchronize music beat to my running/walking. Play music slightly faster if I need to run faster.” (barrybrown)

“Music players should be able to identify a song playing in the room, like what Shazam does on the iPhone.” (@SeB_or_Sam)

“Why doesn’t someone give us an audio TiVo? Record and replay live radio, and pause or fast-forward?” (hughesviews)

“Group listening mode. Through Bluetooth, you can share your music stream with your friends at close range.” (shannonmelton)

“Super-Genius mode: If you keep skipping the same type of song, the player learns you’re not in the mood.” (Joethewalrus)

And finally, this suggestion: “After an hour of continuous play, it tells you to put the earbuds away and go be social with an actual person.” (MisterRoo)

Good idea, MisterRoo. In fact, maybe they should build that feature into every electronic gadget.

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Posted 2 months ago

posterous

Hi Still Dreaming Nerd

Just wanted to update you with what's been going on over at Posterous-- lots of new features and more on the way all the time. Here's the biggest three features we launched since the last time we talked...

Now Available for your iPhone

PicPosterous - Your new iPhone instant camera

The new Posterous iPhone app removes all the friction with posting photos and video online. PicPosterous is designed to be a replacement for the Camera app on your phone, posting photo sets and video to your Posterous site live, as you take them. Learn more »

It's free and available NOW from the iPhone App Store. Download it now »

Autopost 2.0: Now supports YouTube, Vimeo, Picasa, FriendFeed, Delicious and more

We've added more media, microblogs, and bookmark sites. Now we even autopost video! Learn more »

Posterous + Google Maps = crazy delicious

Photos you take that have geocoded information (e.g. from your mobile phone) now automatically get a location and map indicator. Links to Google Maps now become instant map widgets in your post too.
Learn more »

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Posterous adds new autoexpansion sites...
Github Gists, TrailerAddict.com, The Daily Show, YouTube HD videos and Screencast.com. That means you can paste any URL from those sites and we'll expand them into an embed if they're embeddable. Got a site you want us to support? Email us.

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We're working hard to make Posterous better every day. The best way to keep track is by subscribing to our official blog. As always, feel free to email us anytime at help@posterous.com and we'll get back to you right away.

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Posted 3 months ago

Our Shout Out to Flock’s Facebook and Twitter Users…

At Flock, we love to hear from you. We want to make sure that Flock continues to help you discover, enjoy and share the relationships and content you’re passionate about. So while you’ve been talking, we’ve been listening. The result is a new version of Flock that reflects the new ways you want to use your favorite social browser along with two of your favorite networks—Twitter and Facebook.

The new version that we’re releasing today lets you keep your finger on the pulse of your social networks, yet it gives you the freedom to explore online without having to click back and forth between websites, tabs, applications and content. And now, Flock is the only browser that let’s you take Facebook Chat with you wherever you go on the Web. You can also drag and drop photos, videos, links and text into your chats, making everything simple, social and fun.

Flock 2.5 makes sharing and discovering content fast and easy. You just drag and drop URLs, photos, videos, text or other things you find on the web to a friend’s Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or other profile in Flock’s People Sidebar and it’s instantly shared. And now Flock comes with Twitter Search right in MyWorld, so you can keep up to date on all the topics you’re most interested in and save them in the best place possible, your Flock browser.

<p>Flock 2.5 - Twitter from Flockstar on Vimeo.</p>

Last but not least is FlockCast, an effortless way to share information across your social networks. With FlockCast, you can broadcast anything from blog posts and picture uploads to Tweets and MySpace status updates directly to your Facebook profile. And when you share a URL in a Twitter message, Flock automatically shortens the URL.

<p>Flock 2.5 - FlockCast from Flockstar on Vimeo.</p>

clearly, this new version of Flock is for those of you that are Twitter and Facebook fans. Our Facebook users have grown over 80% since the beginning of 2009! And, on Twitter, we are proud and appreciative of in the great things you’re writing about Flock across the Twittersphere… (check out #flock). Flock’s popularity has been almost entirely driven by the generous recommendations coming from each of you (we just passed 7.5 million downloads). We’re extremely grateful for your support and hope that you’ll keep spreading the word. And now we’re giving you the opportunity to earn the recognition and rewards you deserve by telling your friends about Flock on Facebook at http://www.flock.com/refer

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Posted 3 months ago

About Me

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web2.0

What are the consequences of this change towards the expectations of consumers?

Discovering Discovery: Don’t ask, Do tell

Mind the Explicit, Mine the Implicit

Trust Networks

Reward Content Generation

Precursors to Social Media

Usernets

BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems)

Online Services

IRC, ICQ, and Instant Messaging

Early Social Networks

Dating Sites

Forums

Six Degrees

AsianAvenue, MiGente, BlackPlanet

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World of Warcraft / MMORPGS

Major Advances in Social Networking

Friendster

Hi5

LinkedIn

MySpace

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Flickr

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Social Everything

Social Media Concerns and Criticism

Social Media Used by Stalkers

Social Media Used by Child Predators

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The Role of Social Media in Pop Culture

The Evolution of Social Media

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By JULIA ANGWIN

A Page of One's Own

* * *

PicPosterous - Your new iPhone instant camera

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Posterous + Google Maps = crazy delicious

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