Citizen Media Watch

Jonas Nyvang from MySpace talked a bit about MySpace apps and Open Social.
- We give 100% of the revenues you can get from the app you develop. We’ve been pioneering the monetization of social networking.
Like when Arna and I met him in september last year, he doesn’t want to see Facebook as a threat. He makes this distinction between MySpace and Facebook.
- Facebook is more about the social graph, while MySpace is more about your interests, what you strive for and your passions.
His/MySpace’s view of how the web is evolving isn’t new. It is becoming more personal, more portable and more collaborative.

David Haddad of Spontu works with social networking on the mobile. Since Hubbub is all about convergence, he focuses on the convergence of positioning, connectivity and powerful mobiles.
He shares some lessons learnt:

• Be intellectually honest about your motivation. Solve a real human social inefficiency.
• Choose a technology that works, with an eye on the future.
• Don’t compete, but rather build on other players. There’s a good basis available to build upon.
• Build something that’s good enough today. It needs to solve a real problem.
• Social networking needs to be all-inclusive, and work for everyone. Follow the least common denominator approach when finding your target audience.

- Execute a killer product strategy, don’t plan a killer app, David Haddad says.

He then answers three questions.
How will the mobile look like in the future, i e in four years?
- The Nokia N95 is targeted for the early adopters. Down in four years time, the phone that’s going to be in everyone’s hands is going to be similar to what you have now. The N95 is a good indicator.

How will social networking look in the future?
- If everyone in this room has an N95, how will that affect my experience with for instance Facebook? There are three things that differ from our current experience.
- The social networking will become concurrent, cirkumstantial and fundamentally socially impactful.

David Haddad thinks the adding of friends on social network sites will be automatic, by for instance bluetooth. News feeds will be more realtime.
Like Jaiku! : )

What can we do today to change the social networking environment?

• Pick your development environment.
• Choose your method of connectivity.
• How do you want to position users? There are many different technologies.
• How will you make money? Find a business model.
• Who are you going to partner with?

He believes in combined solutions for web and mobile units.

In the q&a a few interesting issues, including privacy and more on killer product strategies came up, but unfortunately there were network problems… and I didn’t catch much. I’m sure others have more, though.

Stefan Waldeck, Yahoo, talks about mobile marketing and search marketing at Daytona Sessions.

Self expression, social networks, and new technologies are the new trends. In the cellphone all of this comes together, he says.
- The cellphone is with you 100% of your waking hours. Plus it has a higher penetration than computers.
When you move from 2G to 3G you start using photo and video a lot more.

Yahoo!Go is a small java applet which lets the user access email, flickr, search and more. It will be in 200 cellphone models at the end of the year.
- It is very easy to use on a small screen.
There’s also an RSS reader integrated.
- We haven’t tried to copy what we do on the internet, but do a special solution for the cellphone.

Mobile seach is based on need and boredom, which translates into people wanting usefull information and games.
Search ads on mobile phones are more sensitive to appearing in the top part of the screen, since people don’t scroll much.
But click through rates are much higher than on the web.

Today Google will announce its new web API for social networking sites called Open Social.
I’ve read two very different takes from Marc Andreessen and Dave Winer. I am leaning a bit more towards Andreessen, but it’s way too early to tell. Also he is already a Google partner in this, with Ning being one of the initial platforms that has encorporated Open Social.

Marc Andreessen explains the concept as similar to Facebook’s, but without the constraints. Any social networking system can be a container, and any application developed with the Open Social standards can be included in any of these containers.
One thing that seems promising is that it’s all HTML and javascript, making it easier to build applications.

Andreessen writes:

If you recall how I previously described the Facebook platform as “a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry”, you’ll understand why I think Open Social is the next big leap forward!
Open Social takes the Facebook platform concept and provides an open standard approach that can be used by the entire web. Open Social is an open way for everyone to do what Facebook has done…
…including Facebook itself, potentially

He has also published some screencasts and screenshots.

Dave Winer is more sceptical:

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don’t work.
In this case it’s Google trying to undermine Facebook.
And I don’t think it’s going to work.
What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer — Internet companies giving users full control of their data.
When Google makes their announcement on Thursday, the question they should be asked by everyone is — How much of my data are you letting me control today? That’s pretty much all that matters to anyone, imho.

Very interesting statistics today from Johan Myrberger at The Killer Attitude. He has taken Jeff Pulver’s statistics one step further, with detailed graphs. Sweden has close to one million Facebook users. One million. In a country of nine million people. That is pretty amazing.

Two Swedish Digg clones have merged. Digga shut down earlier after pressure from Digg.com. Now it re-emerges along with competitor Sovrat, as the two sites merge under the name Pusha.se.
Here’s what the Pusha blog says (my translation):

Digga and Sovrat have been cometitors from the start in the struggle to create a Swedish equivalent to popular American site Digg. At the end of September, Digga was contacted by Digg, who asked them to change names since Digga was too similar to “Digg”. We then thought it was time to stop competing and instead merge into a strong and unified site.

Pusha will use the same technology as Sovrat and the same database, so that old Sovrat members won’t notice much change. You will also recognize the design, even if we’ve made a few usability improvements.

Yesterday MySpace held a big party in Stockholm to celebrate their launch of the Swedish version of the site. Along with a bunch of Swedish bands, LA stand up commedian Pablo Francisco did a gig which was much appreciated by the crowd of Swedish MySpace users and their friends.
Not all users were thrilled about the site being in Swedish though. One person who had journalism as an interest got it translated into belly dancing. And parts of the site still seem like they’re translated by babelfish.
- We’re working on continual updates to make the site more useful, MySpace’s Jonas Lindberg Nyvang told my colleague Arna.
Also, like Hans Kullin noted, the timing of the release was rather bad, since the site was down for maintenance yesterday.
Nevertheless, a large number of fans had made their way to Mosebacke in Stockholm.
Some users we talked to preferred the site to be in English, saying they got on it to improve their English in the first place, and to meet people from all over the world. Others, however, thought it was about time to get a Swedish edition.
- My English is quite bad, so this is a good thing, said Natali, 19.

Pablo Francisco, the lead act at the party, is one of the many artists with a MySpace profile. We got an interview with him about using sites like MySpace for building a career.
- People put my act on the internet, which is a beautiful thing, because the internet is more exciting and more fun to be around than television now. Because you can actually communicate with the stars, get advice and be friends with them, he said.
Check out the video clip from the interview below.

I’ve created a separate gmail account for signing up to social networking and social media sites. I thought it was a smart move, since they generate quite a few messages. Though now I find myself checking that account as much as I check my regular account, which only doubles the work. The flood of messages from sites like Facebook, MySpace, Jaiku, Orkut (yes, I’ve still got an account), Trig, etc. can be annoying, and at the same time you don’t want to miss out on the action.

Through Robin Hamman’s blog I found an interesting article about the lack of interoperability on social networking sites. Michael Geist writes in the Star that this undermines the networks’ usefulness.

The irony of the current generation of online social networks is that although their premise is leveraging the Internet to connect people, their own lack of interconnectedness stifles their potential.

Geist also points to the regionality of social networking sites, even the international ones. He has a list with some examples, for instance Orkut’s appeal to people in Brasil and India.

A number of initiatives are working towards greater interoperability, though. Some examples:

OpenID
An effort towards a single, decentralized identification system for social media sites. Requires sites to offer OpenID sign-on. Among sites offering OpenID identification are AOL, LiveJournal, Ma.gnolia, Wikitravel and others.
While security issues have been raised, OpenID remains an interesting project.

The Liberty Alliance
Presented as a “standards organization with a global membership that provides a holistic approach to identity”, the Liberty Alliance are defining standards for open identity, writing guidelines for privacy management etc.

Members work closely together to:

* Build open standard-based specifications for federated identity and identity-based Web services.
* Drive global identity theft solutions.
* Provide interoperability testing.
* Offer a formal certification program for products utilizing Liberty specifications.
* Establish best practices, rules, liabilities, and business guidelines.
* Collaborate with other standards bodies, privacy advocates, and government
policy groups.
* Address end user privacy and confidentiality issues.

Project Higgins
An open source project, Project Higgins has code contributions from IBM, Novell and Parity Communications. The goal of the project is to “give people more control over their personal online information”.

“Higgins is an open source software project that is developing an extensible, platform-independent, identity protocol-independent, software framework to support existing and new applications that give users more convenience, privacy and control over their identity information.”

Geist again:

Some services may believe that it is in their economic interest to stick to a walled garden approach; however, given the global divisions within the social networking world, the mix of language, user preferences and network effects, it is unlikely that one or two services will capture the global marketplace.

I found this interesting in the wake of the Facebook debate.

PS. I’ve been on a more or less unintentional break from this blog. Most likely I’m back, though don’t expect daily postings. DS.

After some pretty bad network problems everything seems to be up and running at Podcamp Europe. I spent the greater part of Christopher Penn’s talk on marketing aspects of podcasting working out these network problems, but here’s what I snapped up.

He talked a lot about evangelists, the people who really like your podcast and so they market it for free. And so you have to give something back to them, to make them want to keep doing it. He mentioned live videos from your podcasts, free cds that bands might send you, have competions where the first people who mail in might get some freebies etc.
Also it’s a good idea to make places for them to hang out.

He had a bunch of useful advice on important features on the podcast’s website.

• You need text to accompany your media.
• It might be a good idea to have mailing lists or send lists with show notes, news etc.
• Have your first episde available for people who are new to your podcast.
• Give your visitors things to do on your site, obvious calls to action.
• Subscription has to be one click, or you’ll lose listeners.
• Offer both download and direct play options.

More advice form Christopher Penn:
It’s important how you name your show - the name needs to be easy to share by word of mouth.
Add your subscription buttons to your social media profiles on for instance Facebook or MySpace.
Use the analytics - see who’s visiting your site, who is linking to you, and go to their site and connect.

A couple of services mentioned:
Reactee.com - you print t-shirts, they set up an sms gateway, and people can text message it and get your url in return
crazyegg.com - shows where on my web page ppl are clicking
feedburner.com - offers good statistics

To check out all my photos from Podcamp, check out to my Podcamp Flickr set.

Interesting Washington Post piece on law enforcement in virtual worlds like Second Life or the game World of Warcraft.

Two years ago, Japanese authorities arrested a man for carrying out a series of virtual muggings in another popular game, Lineage II, by using software to beat up and rob characters in the game and then sell the virtual loot for real money.

The key question is whether for instance rape, child abuse, mugging and killing online should be compared to these acts in the real world. And if so, which country’s laws should the crimes fall under.

Philip Rosedale, the founder and chief executive of Linden Labs, said in an interview that Second Life activities should be governed by real-life laws for the time being. He recounted, for example, that his company has called in the FBI several times, most recently this spring to ensure that Second Life’s virtual casinos complied with U.S. law. Federal investigators created their own avatars and toured the site, he said.

In coming months, his company plans to disperse tens of thousands of computer servers from California and Texas to countries around the world in order to improve the site’s performance. Also, he said, this will make activities on those servers subject to laws of the host countries.