There was a lot of hype surrounding the launch of OpenSocial. Mike Arrington reported about a “select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries [who] attended a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the ‘Facebook issue.’” As the post unfolded it began to sound like a Hollywood movie, or at the least a television drama series. Google is planning to take on Facebook!

At the time that post was as attention grabbing as “Facebook gets shut down!” given the hype surrounding Facebook. Since then we have learned that OpenSocial may not really be that social after all. Not only is it not social but four months after it was announced it still isn’t ready for primetime. The social features of OpenSocial rely heavily on the support of the social networks that support the standard. As Marc Canter writes, “many–if not all–of the OpenSocial participants did not intend to open up their networks at all.” So then what is the point of OpenSocial?

OpenSocial is simply the expansion of the Google Gadget standard across platforms and was announced in such a way that social networks are beginning to support the standard. This is not to suggest that Google secretly wanted to simply expand Google Gadgets though. I’m sure they believed they could attempt to take on the Facebook platform. Until I see OpenSocial successfully implemented within a social network and embracing the social and profile components of a site (friends, gender, age, etc), I’m going to remain as skeptical as Marc Canter who states that in reality, OpenSocial appears to be “OpenGadgets.”

I think the only hope left for truly open and portable social networks is the DataPortability workgroup. Even that could soon end in failure. Do you think OpenSocial has a chance of succeeding? Is it going to be more then a Google gadget standard?

Many critics of social media claim that it is the masses screaming to be heard, not in a good way. At its core that is a major problem for social media. Many of the blogs and news feeds that get the most traction aren’t always the most newsworthy or the most important.

I friend of mine asked me to check out a website that was trying to incite change through web 2.0/social media tools. The site, ondayone.org, is trying send a message to who ever the next President is that these are the the issues that he/she should try to solve on day one.

I am a huge advocate of non-profits using social media and web 2.0 as a tool for helping spread a message. I have written about it several times in the past and I will continue to follow non-profits in the hopes that they see social media as the catalyst it can be. The site is being backed by several non-profits, most notably the UN Foundation.

I have never been one to talk politics in public. I have my political views and I have always respected those of others. What I would like to hear a discussion on is if you think what ondayone is doing can be accomplished. Young voters, typically the early adopter crowd, have a history of failing to come out and vote. For some reason they have failed to show poll numbers that make them a target for winning politicians.

For ondayone to be a success it needs to link voters with activism. The site needs to use social tools to send a message to those on the campaign trial right now that these are the issues we are interested in seeing covered. I applaud ondayone for what they are trying to accomplish. I wish more non-profits would try to elicit change by using social media.

Take a look at the site, give it a once over, and let me know what you think. I am interested in hearing a discussion on if you think the tools that ondayone is using will make a difference. Lets not make this into a discussion of which issue has the most merit, there are plenty of political blogs for that, lets have an open discussion on the feasibility of their mission and if we think there are any other tools they could be using to get their message out.

There has been a bunch of conversation about using Twitter as a serious tool for communication. Josh Catone performs a relatively thorough analysis of the pros and cons of using Twitter as a platform for discourse and discussion. Twitter has definitely been rising in popularity and just in the past few days I have seen a drastic increase in my Twitter followers. I now keep my Twhirl application open more frequently then I have my AIM client open.

Twitter isn’t the only platform for communication in my life though. It is competing with at least 4 or 5 other forms of communication including instant messaging, text messages, email, social networks, blogging and hugging. Twitter is a unique tool because it enables me to choose who I’m conversing with. It’s your own private chatroom that you can join or leave at will. One of the best features of Twitter is that I find out news prior to any other source. It frequently provides me with content to post about in my blog.

As Josh Catone points out though, there are some definite problems with Twitter. The most obvious is information overload. How many message can I possibly respond to in a given day? How do I figure out which messages I want to respond to? With an RSS feed reader I can quickly flip through post titles. On Twitter, every message is practically as short as a post title and as such there is no filtering process.

The biggest problem with Twitter is that it goes down on a regular basis. For some reason, the Twitter team cannot figure out an effective way to keep Twitter up during moments of high usage. Even when Twitter volume is low the site goes down. Whatever the reason for it is, this is one issue that the site needs to resolve immediately. While Twitter may have its flaws, I think Twitter is definitely tipping and becoming one of the major platforms for communication on the web.

Do you think 2008 will be the year that Twitter goes mainstream? Also if you are on Twitter, go follow me.

We all know about the Digg effect, very similar to the Slashdot effect. When something is Dugg, and reaches the front page, a swarm of traffic comes to your website that can crash your servers. A massive amount of people and bots will view your ads and your content like never before. Marketing gold right?

I started the morning by reading an article over at E-Consultancy about why it is a bad idea to pay for a spot on Digg. I didn’t know this but according to Patrick Altoft, the article’s author, there are companies out there that will guarantee you a spot on Digg’s front page for a small fee.

I did some looking around and I found a few sites that promise to get you on Digg for as little as $35 to as much as $150. I was all set to upload my latest masterpiece video of my friends trying to jump a moving car on a tri-cycle when I asked myself what would I be getting if I paid for a spot on Digg.

I would probably get tens of thousands of visitors to my site. My site would probably crash but I would reach people sitting at their desks trying to do anything but work, score! These people would think about me and my tri-cycle for maybe 4 seconds until the went on to the next article. Then my article would get buried because those who control Digg, the users, would realize I payed to get on the front page.

I then started to think what would happen if I earned a spot on Digg’s front page. I would slowly earn exposure, probably have to submit several articles, and actually learn what my targets were after. I would also have to invest a large amount of time and money (money=time) to figure all this out.

What this argument comes down to is time and investments vs speed questionable results. After reading several more articles on how to ‘earn’ a spot on Digg I realized that buying a spot does present a certain value; it is like paying for a press release for the wires. Tons of quick exposures and some lasting traffic if you have quality content.

I am still up in the air about paying for content on Digg. I see the value of ‘flash’ exposure but I also see the value of earning a spot on the front page. What do you think about this? Is paying for a quick exposure worth it on Digg or do you think that the only value can come from earning a spot? Let me know.

I am forever trying to get my head around this social media thing. Some days I think I understand it and then other days I am dumbfounded by what I see. Just yesterday I was in a discussion with a friend if social media was marketing or PR. Coming from the world of PR I instantly said PR, my friend, coming from marketing said it was a marketing tool.

Being rational adults sitting over a nice dinner of burgers and beer we decided to give each other one chance to convince the other of our argument and a rebuttal statement could be made by each. I looked my opponent square in the eye and knew I was about to have to make one concise and convincing argument.

I began as such: Social media is PR at its purest form. Social media allows poeple and buisness to build third party credible at a direct target level. The targets then become either evangelist or nay sayers of a company, product, or service. All credibility and comments are earned through creating relationships with targets.

I was proud of myself, I had summed up my argument in one concise paragraph that made sense to me and to my opponent. My advisory took a bite of his burger, took a sip of his beer and smiled. I was frightened by this look because I knew I would soon be bested.

He began as such: PR is based on targeting experts in a field, typically journalist and editors, with a secondary focus on targeting the general public. I will give you that most bloggers are experts. Marketing positions itself by creating exposure through placements and creating a need out of a want. I show people that since their friends have something, they not only want it but need it to be on the same level as their friends.

I started to think about what my friend had said and how it pertained to social media. A good deal of connections and networks were based on the ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ model of friends. Could I have been wrong this whole time about the focus of social media? Could it all be based on making people feel like outcast for not participating.

The argument continued for several courses of dinner and round or two more of ale. While we couldn’t come to agreement we both saw the merit in the others argument. It left me with an unsettling feeling about what social media really was. I was convinced I was confused on social media again.

I was wondering what all of you out there thought about social media as a tool. Is targeting social media the next step in PR or just a faster route for marketers to hit their targets? I know the answer isn’t simple but I would love to hear all your thoughts on this topic.

Peter Kafka has pointed out some pretty depressing numbers about user engagement on social networks across the board. Kafka’s post was based on another post by Business Week’s Spencer Ante who has an early look at the Comscore numbers. While Facebook had fantastic growth in their overall user base, the total amount of time spent on the site decreased month-to-month.

Keep in mind that engagement levels typically drop off in December but many have been noticing the decreased engagement levels of even the most popular applications on Facebook. The bottom line is that overall engagement levels are dropping even though the user base is increasing, suggesting that users are simply getting bored. So where are they going? Your guess is as good as mine but perhaps people have decided that their time is better spent actually engaging with people in real-life rather than via social networks. What is the impact on the bottom line? Spencer says it best:

For starters, slowing and/or decling growth will make it harder to generate sales and profit growth from these sites. That will put more pressure on the advertising programs to deliver results. Of course, they could offset the declines through overseas gains. But so far, advertisers have been leary of marketing on social networking sites outside of the U.S.

All eyes will be on the News Corp. earning announcement on Feb. 4 at 4pm. Then we’ll find out how the slowing growth has actually impacted the sales and profit potential of these sites. My hunch is that the numbers won’t be as rosy as the company would like.

Bored users is the last thing we want for social networks. You could have foreseen users getting bored from sheep throwing just as they get bored from novelty items won at a carnival. My hunch is that we are going to see more engaging applications over the next 12 months but then again I’ve been surfing for the golden application for a while now and nothing seems to appear. Where are you spending your time on the web? Are you bored with social networks? Maybe you have gotten bored with the internet as a whole.

I logged into Bebo today to check out any new applications that had been added to the platform and I was prompted with a friend request. This time I was asked how I knew one of my friends just like I’ve been prompted by Facebook since the beginning. As I wrote in my definition of a social platform last week, social platforms must have a model for defining a user’s connections. As far as I know Facebook and Bebo are the only platforms that currently provide this functionality.

This new feature by Bebo shows how far of a lead Facebook has in the world of social platforms. Log into MySpace and you’ll see that they have begun copying just about every feature that Facebook has built into their platform. MySpace has added photo albums, photo tagging and even a newsfeed. The main problem with them (or any other social network) not having these features from the beginning is that there will be no way to measure the strength of the bond of any connection.

Over the course of the next twelve months we are going to witness a number of the top social networks mimic most of Facebook’s feature sets. I also believe that we are going to start seeing the opening of platforms thanks to the DataPortability workgroup. Eventually you will be able to add your contacts that have joined MySpace from your Facebook profile. For now, it is happening one step at a time and this update by Bebo is simplyt one event in the history of social platforms.

Update
It appears that this functionality has been present on Bebo for a while now. This was just the first time I had been presented with this box. Regardless, social platforms will still strive to mimic a lot of the features currently offered by Facebook and beyond.

Caroline McCarthy has posted a couple articles over the past week about a number of social shopping sites that have raised new rounds of funding. As McCarthy wrote, StyleFeeder raised $2 million and then today ThisNext raised $5 million in a second round of financing from Anthem Venture Partners and Clearstone Venture Partners. This news emphasizes the increasing popularity of social shopping with venture capitalists and rising expectations of a future social shopping boom.

We have previously covered at least two social shopping sites and a search in Google for “social shopping” yields a wide array of competing sites vying for a piece of the pie. I would argue that most of these sites are going to crash and burn because they are missing one key component: sizable communities. A few of the sites, including ThisNext have attracted a relatively large audience but I would argue that they aren’t large enough to compete with the mainstream social networks that will eventually enter the social shopping space.

Facebook has clearly stated their intent to get involved with the social shopping market by providing developers access to their existing payment system: wallet. Once Facebook extends their payment system API to developers we are going to witness a massive spike in social shopping activity. Ultimately Facebook Beacon was the beginning of the site’s push to conquer the social shopping space which unfortunately for Facebook, resulted in a P.R. disaster rather than a technological revolution.

Over the next 12 to 24 months I would expect competition to heat up in this space as Facebook (and eventually MySpace and other social networks) begin to open their platforms and integrate e-commerce features. Do you think social shopping is the next big thing? Do you even know what social shopping is?

Adam Ostrow is breaking the news that MySpace is going to be launching their developer platform on February 5th. This is huge news for those in the social platform space. MySpace is currently the largest social network on the web and continues to grow at a decent pace (although it is currently being outpaced by Facebook). So what does this mean to companies looking to leverage the new platform?

For developers it is going to mean many sleepless nights as they rush to take advantage of a clean slate yet again. For businesses it is going to mean another distribution channel that they can expand their reach into for advertising and marketing purposes. One question that remains is how viral will this new platform be? We witnessed the launch of the Bebo platform and since then there have been a number of applications that have launched but the rate of growth has been slower than Facebook.

One interesting aspect of this launch is that MySpace will support OpenSocial from the beginning. This may give OpenSocial a much needed boost but it will be difficult to tell what type of impact this will have considering OpenSocial is still in beta. It also appears as though MySpace may leverage their advertising network to help developers monetize their applications from the get go. This has been one of the biggest issues for applications on Facebook and Bebo.

Social Platform experts and advertising professionals will be eagerly awaiting the launch of the MySpace platform. If you want to be one of the initial developers on the platform, you can soon pre-register at http://developer.myspace.com/ (must be logged in to view). 2008 is shaping up to be the year of social platforms and data portability.

I am by all accounts a world traveler. I have been nearly 30 countries in my life, countless cities, and thanks to the Navy could probably be claimed as a resident to some of the worst countries on the planet.

I am a huge fan of social media. I love social networks and I think bloggers , if they work properly, can really give traditional media a run for their money in the field of content.

When I heard about Citiport being previewed at Demo I jumped at the chance to start fiddling around with the application. I mean think about it, residents of a city telling me the best places to go, amazing! My dad always said, “if your afraid of getting a rotten apple from the barrel… get it from the tree.”

I have to say at this point I am a little more than just disappointed in the application. Let’s start at the beginning. To get a decent review of the application I started looking a few cities I had visited while I was in Spain, Italy and France.

First problem: I do not speak Spanish, Italian (my grandparents hate me for this) or French. I know what you are saying, “how can you be a world traveler and not speak these languages?” Well if I tried to learn the language of every country I have ever been to I would still be in school.

The problem with total user generated content is that the users typically compose it in their native language. Citiport offers no way for me to translate what these people are saying. For all I know they are telling me to stay away from some lake because a huge monster lives in it and eats tourist.

Second problem: There is no uniformity in the information being provided. Some pages have pictures, some have long winded descriptions, and some don’t even tell me why I would want to visit. At first I thought the minimalistic approach was so the page would look good on my mobile. Well they don’t.

Third problem: Are locals really the experts on their city? Probably not. Think of any New Yorkers you know. I will take my family. If you put four of them in a room, ask a simple question, “best place for a slice of pie,” you will get four different answers and a fight will most likely break out.

I like Citiport’s model, it has some real promise but the system is going to need some heavy moderating to assure it doesn’t fall into a name calling contest and that marketers don’t become to influential. Citiport is also set to jump into some really fun areas.

Imagine if Citiport begins opening up their application to third party developers. I could see a real use for Citiport if they started doing things like GeoTagging, allowing for twitter updates, and the host of other tools that social networking allows for.

I am interested to see what Citiport will do in the future. I think with a little nurturing the Citiport web page could be come an amazing tool.