Yesterday, the Rudy Giuliani campaign launched a brand new social network to encourage supporters to recruit others. The tool is definitely well designed. Personally I think it looks a lot better then the Barack Obama counterpart which I’ve been receiving spam from since I registered to test out when it first launched. I’m a bit skeptical of the impact of some of these social networks. Given the ubiquity of social networks like Facebook and MySpace, why not build a Facebook application and invest in advertising to increase exposure. Facebook’s advertising system even enables detailed targeting based on political views.

I’m not quite sure why the Giuliani campaign waited to release this so late. It is definitely a great time to get started though given the backlash he has been facing from quoting inaccurate statistics. Grassroots campaigns are always a great model for gaining support especially during moments of fierce opposition. The social network that the Giuliani team has created tracks your individual impact on a countrywide basis.

Hard-working volunteers are also rewarded for inviting users as well as in person volunteering. According to the site overview, “As your Personal Impact^TM increases, the campaign staff is informed of your progress. Top volunteers are also recognized among their peers through Team Rudy. Your rank is a combination of your personal work and that of the volunteer team you recruit from your family and friends.”

I hadn’t realized the impact that these grassroots site actually have in the scheme of things but after looking at Compete.com’s statistics of My.BarackObama.com, I have to say that I’m impressed. The Barack Obama social network is pulling in close to 300,000 users a month. It would be great if Giuliani experienced the same sort of response. Do you think political social networks are a useful campaign tool?

Are you trying to get onto Seesmic? A lot of people have been trying to get on to the site and invite codes are a hot commodity nowadays. Well if you want to know what has been taking them so long, look no further then a video that they made explaining what has been taking so long. It’s pretty entertaining!

In the spirit of Social Media, Rana Sobhany will be live streaming tonight’s Social Media Club at Viget Labs. The topic of discussion appears to be Twitter. I won’t be able to make it but I’ll be tweeting my activities via my twitter account. I am including the live stream below. The event starts at 6:30. I will be posting a recording of the event afterwards.

If you want to learn more about Jim Long, the speaker at the event, you can go check out his blog Verge New Media.

Over the past few days I’ve been thinking more about this site as I begin to ramp up. In particular I’ve been trying to figure out all of the topics that I’ll be covering on this site. As I previously said, this site will cover everything that’s social on the web but what does that mean? For me it means social networks, social media, mobile and more. Then I stumbled upon the social starfish and all my questions were answered. The social starfish was recently developed by Darren Barefoot for Robert Scoble.

It is an excellent depiction of all that’s social on the web. While it doesn’t encompass all the social sites it does accurately depict what each of the social segments of the web are. Those segments are:

• Social Networks
• Microblogs
• SMS
• Email
• Video
• Audio
• Photos
• Events
• Blogs
• Collaborative Tools and
• Wikis (which are also another collaborative tool)

While this diagram is not perfect, it is the best depiction I have seen so far of the social web. There are sections that overlap and there are brands that have gone missing from the diagram. Regardless, I plan on covering all that encompasses this diagram and more so look for a broad array of content to come in the near future. I also will be posting my first interview in the coming days! Do you think the social starfish is an accurate representation of the social web?

Update
One thing that I noticed missing from this diagram is social news sites like Digg and Mixx. Shouldn’t those go on here as well?

Earlier today Techcrunch posted some comscore statistics regarding social networks on the web. There are a few interesting numbers that are revealed in the data (as pictured below). As I previously posted, LinkedIn is indeed growing at a faster rate than Facebook. That doesn’t say much though because in absolute numbers Facebook is dominating the social networking space, beating all other sites in growth.

Another interesting statistic is that Wordpress.com has almost surpassed all six apart sites in traffic. While Wordpress is the most popular open source blog platform, their Wordpress.com site which provides hosted blogs only recently launched and is rapidly chasing after Blogger to become the leading blog platform on the web. Confirming data that I presented this morning, Classmates.com traffic has been stagnant. Not a bad time for them to try to get out while they still can!

Finally, Digg has experienced phenomenal growth becoming the fastest growing social network over the past year. I knew that Digg was able to drive traffic but it appears that the Digg effect may have tripled in the past year. Perhaps other social networks should come up with their own equivalents of the “Digg effect.” What do you think?

Classmates.com is preparing to be the first social network to ever file for an IPO. The company is expected to raise between $120 and $144 million when they go public. That’s pretty good for a company that lost close to $2 million last year and close to $8.2 million the year before. While it appears that the company is on track to soon move into the black, much of the money being raised will be used to pay of the significant debt that the company has amassed in growing their user base.

Classmates.com may not be the hottest stock though. While their user base has grown, Compete.com shows that the number of active users each month has stayed relatively stagnant over the twelve months ending in October of this year. Back in February, Classmates.com was roughly the same size as Facebook in terms of active users. Since then Facebook has doubled in size while Classmates.com has apparently grown by a marginal amount.

I would guess that the investors are looking for a way to wipe out their debt and reduce their overall risk exposure. I’ve never been a member of Classmates.com but then again I’m not a member of their target demographic. Additionally, Classmates.com has lost the long-term battle to Facebook who has more than 90 percent of all university students registered on their site. Would you buy Classmates.com stock?

Eric Eldon has posted an update regarding a rumor that was written on the Techcrunch UK site last week. Apparently, News Corp is now in serious talks to acquire LinkedIn. Why on earth would they do this? Apparently the rationale is to integrate the professional social networking site with the Wall Street Journal. Whoa! This is seriously a genius move.

Additionally, integration into the Wall Street Journal site might be able to help fend off Facebook from becoming a serious center of social networking within the business community. Given that social networks are becoming the new distribution channel of media, LinkedIn and the Wall Street Journal are a perfect fit. Video and high quality news can be distributed directly through the social network. I have been highly critical of LinkedIn on my Facebook blog, but with a few upgrades LinkedIn could be revived.

Currently LinkedIn may only have 2 million active users a month compared to Facebook’s 25 million but LinkedIn members tend to be part of a select social group. They have higher incomes and are more educated just as the average Wall Street Journal reader. All I can say is that this is a genius move by News Corp if the rumors turn out to be true. I wonder what the acquisition price will be. Are you an active member of LinkedIn? Are you a reader of the Wall Street Journal?

I’ve been spending a lot of today working on my overall strategy for Social Times and it has increasingly become apparent that video is going to play a big role. I read Robert Scoble’s article about Mogulus.com and immediately got excited. I immediately went over to the Mogulus website and checked out their service. I have to say it’s pretty impressive. I watched their demo video which was equally impressive. All of this got me thinking about these new tools and the impact on traditional media. You can be located anywhere and break news, stream a show or do anything related to the various channels that you end up managing.

These tools are creating a revolution. I could ultimately reproduce (in low quality) an alternative version of CNBC’s Squawk Box by inviting professionals in the financial industry to login to the service and speak live via the web. Instead of talking about financial issues, we could instead discuss issues related to the social web. Ultimately such a show could be reproduced for any given topic. That’s the benefit of the web. So is this part of the social web? Of course!

The social web involves anything pertaining to communication among individuals via the web. Video is definitely one form of communication. Loic Le Meur’s new startup, Seesmic, is a great example of communication via video. Seesmic is ultimately the twitter of video. There are obviously a number of other video services on the web but the latest ones have got me thinking about how they are not only changing the face of media but also changing the social web. Are there any cool new video services that you’ve been taking advantage of?

According to a report being released tomorrow by Veritas Communications (available tomorrow at this website), almost 50 percent of business owners in Canada believe that social media is becoming more important than television, radio, newspapers and magazines. 36 percent believed that that social media will never be as powerful as traditional media. One interesting statistic from the report shows that a majority of business executives believe that social networking sites are time wasters and employees shouldn’t be using them while at work.

I honestly can’t disagree with the executives unless of course your job revolves around social media. If your work involves social media, the findings of company expenditures next year on social media probably won’t excite you. According to this survey, 12 percent of executives plan on spending more on social media marketing next year. 39 percent will spend the same amount and a whopping 32 percent “don’t spend any money on it at the moment and don’t intend to in the future.”

One other interesting finding of the survey was that a majority of executives had added a profile to a social networking site and check it at least occasionally. The lesson learned here is that many executives are on sites like MySpace and Facebook but none of them are spending money on advertising on the sites. I wonder if these findings would be significantly different among U.S. executives. Do you think these findings are encouraging?

Next week I will do my first video interview. On a weekly basis I will be interviewing the individuals that are changing the social web. First up is Hooman Radfar of Clearspring. I’ll let him describe what Clearpring does but I’d like to get some input from the readers about what types of things you’d like to know. A few that I’ve come up are regarding the details of the interviewee’s company and how OpenSocial, Facebook and other influences within the social web are impacting their business.

One other thing that I thought would be interesting is to find out what drives these individuals as entrepreneurs and business leaders. Is this something that you would be interested in hearing about? I want to know what the readers want to learn about. I’m extremely excited about covering this space. If you or your company would like to be featured in an interview, let me know. I’m hoping to cover as many people as possible but unfortunately I can’t cover everyone so please don’t be disappointed if we don’t feature you.

I would appreciate all the feedback that I can get. Thanks!