Comscore has released statistics ranking the top widget providers for November 2007. The statistics are impressive and also a little confusing. At the top of the list is MySpace, which reached over 57 million users. Slide.com, who provides widgets on both Facebook as well as Myspace ranked second with over 39 million users. Slide also is the proud owner of the most popular widget in November, Top Friends, that recently surpassed over 3 million active daily users. Washington D.C. based Clearspring was a stone throw away from Slide.com also reaching over 39 million users but 100,000 unique viewers shy of Slide.com.

According to comScore, they are basing their numbers on the number of users that “actively engage with the application.” After checking out the numbers, I have to say that I am relatively impressed with Google who’s gadgets reached close to 20 million users in November. Combine those widgets with social applications via OpenSocial and suddenly you end up with some pretty significant engagement projections.

According to comScore, in November alone widgets were used by over 80 percent of Americans. I’m not sure how they came up with that number because according to Nielsen/NetRatings, only 70 percent of the U.S. population was on the web in November. I would guess that the sum total includes a significant amount of overlap. Regardless, one thing is for sure, the addition of social applications has helped to significantly boost a number of these widget providers.

The title of this post seems a little redundant, social tools make you more social its common sense. Too often users of social media and social tools forgo social networking for social networks. The people I interact with digitally are important but every now and then you have to interact with people physically.

Over the past two nights I have attended two separate events. From the get go I was able to use social tools and social networks to help my networking. The first event I attended was sent to my be a Facebook friend, who I had never meet in person, that knew I was interested in media and PR.

Through my Facebook association I was able to connect with PR and Media people and participate in lively discussions. Afterwards, I was able to look people up, via Twitter and Facebook, and solidify the connections I made. I can now keep in contact with the these people and maintain strong relationships.

Last night I found out about an interesting tech event through the tweet of a friend. Unsure if I wanted to attend the event, I found the events invite on Meetup and started digging. On the invite page I could see photos and occupations of the 100 or so attendees. Seeing we had similar interests I made my way to the event.

I am currently trying to find contacts and online personalities of the people I meet last night and add them to my growing list of social contacts. This model of attending and adding has been increasing my online presence exponentially allow for both personal and professional growth.

The point of all of this is a reminder to all of us out there in the online social world that what we do online is to compliment what we do in the real world. We should never pass up opportunities to make personal connections to enhance our digital ones.

Do any of you out there have any more tips on how to use social networking to be more social in the the real world? I would love to hear them and I am pretty sure our readers would too.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Ben Katz, CEO of Dial A Geek. This interview isn’t among my typical interviewees but given that Ben Katz is active in the D.C. Technology Community I figured that I’d give him the opportunity to speak about his company and what they do. DialAGeek, provides on demand computer support for both individuals and businesses. They also have a national team of technicians that can actually come to your place of residence or office and help fix any issues you are having. Check out the video to learn more about them.

Social media offers an amazing set of tools that can be utilized by anyone to increase their presence. I attended a media event last night and ran into several comm people who worked for non-profits and had delightful conversations with them. We exchanged cards and talked for a bit about how best to approach the media, gain public support, and generally build a culture of advocacy.

The discussion quickly turned to social media and I began making suggestions on how best to use social media to help promote a cause. The discussion was long and involved but generally boiled down to these ten suggestions:

1. Personify your agency

Create a public profile about your agency that people can relate to, create an identity for your agency and begin discussions from its point of view.

2 Poll the public

Use open social networks to figure out if people are interested in your cause and how best to attract them to your agency.

3. Use social networks to create followers

Once you have found a public, and you agency has a personality, create social profiles of your agency and allow people to befriend it.

4. Provide a friendly face that people can associate with

Avoid generic contact information, people are more likely to reach out to a real person than info@yourdomain.com, allow someone in your agency to monitor and reply to all queries generated from social media.

5. Create a simple blog on your site or post on other blogs

There is no simple way around it, you have to start writing daily about what your agency is trying to accomplish. Create insightful post on your blog, and comment on other blogs that cover your issues.

6. Use RSS

All of your blog traffic needs to have an RSS feed. These simple tools allow for your information to reach your audience through their preferred media.

7. Twitter about your agency

Dedicate someone in your office to be the voice of your agency on twitter then take these tips and run with them.

8. Connect with other groups

Once your social presence is up and running invite other non-profits to follow your model and aggregate your connections.

9. Network in the real world

Use your social connections to have tweet ups or quick and easy events that your social media followers can attend in the real world.

10. Never be afraid to ask for help

There are tons of people out there who love social media, find a person you think could help you and ask. You would be amazed how many of us out here would love to help you.

I am certain I missed a ton of things here but I think I covered the basics. Let me know if you can think of any other ways non-profits could use social media to benefit themselves. If you work at a non-profit, and have social media questions, drop me an email or give me a tweet… I would love to help

The Wall Street Journal has a great article about the shutdown of the Second Life banks. For those unaware of what Second Life is, it is a virtual world in which users can create their own custom avatars and participate in all the same activities that they do in real life. It is currently the most active virtual world on the web with over 187,000 active users in the U.S. alone and tens of thousands of active users in countries across Europe, Asia and South America.

In the whole scheme of things, Second Life is still extremely small in comparison to the massive social network behemoths MySpace and Facebook but there are some extremely dedicated users on the site. One of the key components of Second Life is the virtual currency that can be used to purchase products and services throughout the virtual world. A few groups took it upon themselves to open up banks within the virtual world and promised extremely high interest rates, one of which offered a 200 percent yearly interest rate.

That bank currently owes depositors $20,000 and claims that they will be repaying depositors the remaining amount. While $20,000 is absolutely nothing for a real-world bank, $20,000 is substantial for a bank owned by one individual. Linden Labs, the creators of SecondLife, announced two weeks ago that they would be shutting down the privately run banks and as a result there was a run on the banks. It appears that rather than the same thing that happened prior to the great depression, these virtual banks are actually capable of honoring all depositors requests.

The Wall Street Journal describes one of the individual bank owners, Joshua Zarwel, who is a 29-year-old graduate student in New York:

Mr. Zarwel’s avatar, named Teufel Hauptmann, used the deposits — averaging $25 per user — to buy and sell Linden dollars on the Second Life currency exchange, known as the LindeX. He says he parlayed his currency arbitrage into about $15,000 in actual profit. “It started as a hobby and grew into something more,” he says.

Joshua was able to pay depositors a significant 24 to 30 percent per year, far beyond the interest rate provided by any real-world bank. It appears as though the Second Life banks have become more of an educational experiment for financial buffs rather than significant institutions. For the time being, Second Life will be able to avoid a great depression while in the real world we try to stave of a significant recession.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted that Microsoft will be joining the Data Portability work group. Marshall and the Read/Write/Web team appear to be huge advocates of this work group. I am a huge advocate myself even though there are more questions then answers. It appears that 2008 is rapidly shaping up to be a ground-shifting year in regards to data portability. Just last week Yahoo announced that they would begin supporting OpenId as a login standard.

That has been just one of the massive steps that have taken place. For the uber-geeks, data portability is theoretically beautiful but will face significant challenges. It needs to happen though. As we become members of countless websites, it becomes increasingly challenging to track where we are registering as well as finding all of our friends on each site that we register for. This results in the need for data portability standards.

OpenSocial has attempted to define itself as one of the leading standards. There are also other standards including XFN, FOAF and many more. None of these have gained much traction though except for a few fringe advocates that embrace these standards and build them into their new projects. Chances are that none of them except OpenSocial and OpenID will gain traction. I previously argued that SNAPI will defeat OpenSocial and that still may be the case.

There are going to be many challenges facing the evolution of data portability but the creation of the Data Portability workgroup, will surely help to make 2008 an interesting year. Is data portability something that you care about? Do you think 2008 will actually bring change or is it just hype?

Target, Engage, Dominate

This isn’t the mantra of some F/A-18 pilot flying off the deck of the USS Ronald Regan, but in actuality it is the mindset of many PR professionals in today’s market. Starting today communications professionals are going to have a new tool for targeting and engaging new media sources and social media should start listening.

Viral communication is amazing. When it works well, information is shared between individuals at an alarming rate across more borders than I can imagine. People engaging other people on an unprecedented level to provide insight and information like never before. This is great, unless you are a PR firm.

PR firms were the managers of information. They helped shaped public opinion by helping to manage and ‘wrangle’ the gatekeepers of information, the media. As social media begins to grow helping shape public opinion it is becoming more difficult because the public has a much LOUDER opinion.

A company by the name SSA Public Relations has released a press release regarding a new automated social media monitoring system. Why should this frighten the social media community? Well it shouldn’t, but it will. Bloggers are going to be pitched by an ever growing number of PR flacks until the blogger opinion is questioned much like standard media.

On the other side of the coin perhaps this will create a dyad between PR and bloggers like we have not seen before. I worked in PR for many years and I never ‘pitched’ a story that I felt a journalist wouldn’t want to cover. Lets hope that when PR types begin tracking bloggers they use this information to pitch bloggers who would care to cover what they are selling.

The real danger from PR folks pitching bloggers isn’t even the PR worlds fault. The worst thing that can come from improved blogger relations is that the bloggers become lazy and stop thinking for themselves. In the PR world we can provide you with a ton of information and great quotes, all that favor our client, and you as the blogger can just copy and paste them into your blog.

People read blogs for opinionated post and information that is not found in traditional media. By all means bloggers use PR folks when they approach you but remain ever vigilant, check your facts, question quotes and keep blogging like you have been. PR folks can help you find interesting stories that you want to cover, but remember their opinion is biased.

Just don’t stop digging for your own stories. When some poor low level Account Coordinator pitches you over email with “I have been reading your blog and I like what you have to say,” give her a minute and read what she has to say, you might find it useful.

Are any of you out there afraid that when PR begins taking a stronger hold in the blogging world that bloggers will lose their credibility? Do any of you have any other fears regarding PR folks and their targeting practices?

Rafe Needleman has published a scathing review of the soon to be released Netvibes “Ginger.” The new version has become much more social by providing users with a “universe” page that is “a public, shared collection of widgets and tabs that anyone can access.” When speaking with Tariq Krim, CEO of Netvibes earlier last year, I had mentioned that this would be a great feature and I still think it will be.

Google recently released the social version of Google Reader and I have to admit that I have found that feature to be extremely useful. Enabling me to view content that my friends have read is extremely valuable. Given that I have thousands and thousands of feed items but only a few hundred items from my friends over the past week, it makes it much easier to cut through the noise.

There is more content on the web then any of us can consume and crowdsourcing models have become one of the most effective models for filtering the content. Sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and other social news sites provide valuable services to people with limited time (all of us). The only flaw in the crowdsourcing model is that if the crowd doesn’t have similar interests to you, the content that makes it through the system may not be to your liking.

As a result, you can turn to your friends who share similar interests. In turn, your content will be more more effectively targeted and you can rapidly find interesting content that is of interest to you. It’s pretty straightforward and I think Rafe missed the ball on this one. Do you think filtering content socially is most effective?

A few days ago, it was announced that the Library of Congress initiated a pilot project to put the government archive’s copyright-free photos on Flickr. The project, aimed towards gaining “a better understanding of how social tagging and community input could benefit both the library and users of the Library’s collections,” is launching small, putting up a mere 3,000 photos (they’ve got millions) to test the waters.

Although we are unsure of how effective the project will be, it is needless to say that a government institution’s movement to leverage Web 2.0 phenomena to increase the online presence and general availability of information is an important one. Not only is the concept of a central location for valuable visual content compelling, but even more intriguing is how this media could then be shared and mashed-up through the millions of distribution channels on the web.

The metadata associated with the photos’ numerous distribution points could lead to new paths and networks that could dramatically enhance the image search process.The idea of a sea of metadata attached to the LOC’s photos inevitably begs the following question: Could social metadata eventually become a more effective search and data organization tool than traditional metadata?

For those of you who have not heard the term before, metadata, put simply, is data that is used to manage other data. If you have ever been to the library to check out a particular book, you may have tried to search for it by call number, author, title or keyword; those search items are the metadata you used to search for the actual data (the book) you were looking for.

Standardized metadata was institutionalized to help us successfully find, but is it possible that the arguably less reliable but slightly more instinctual social metadata such as tags could drive us to the content we want (as well as other relevant content) faster? Will humans be more comfortable and successful searching, finding and viewing within a standard system or one that is generated by their peers?

These are questions that will hopefully be answered in the near future. Until then, donate some of your procrastination time to a good cause!

Miles Lennon is an entrepreneur and innovation enthusiast.

While the market may not be very rosey today the venture market still appears to be hot. Today, MixerCast will announce a $6 million round of funding. Initially launched as a widget based slide show player, MixerCast provides a robust suite that enables users to inlcude video, music, interactive ads and third party widgets into a single application. This can then be deployed across multiple social networks.

MixerCast appears to be entering an interesting space. It sounds as though their new suite is a sort of meta-level in between traditional widgets provided by Clearspring, RockYou and Slide and social applications. It’s truly impressive how fast this space is expanding and with their second round of funding, MixerCast stands out among the other well-funded players. Peter Kafka reported yesterday that the social networking space will continue to be hot in 2008.

MixerCast appears to be providing a solution extremely similar to Clearspring and other widget distribution solutions. As their company bio reads, “MixerCast,” is “the creator of the MCast Suite of social media marketing tools and services, enables content publishers and advertisers to reach audiences across all social networks.” As Duncan Riley pointed out last year though, MixerCast’s primary differentiator may be their incorporation of licensed content.

While MixerCast may find it challenging to stand out from the crowd, their new round of financing will surely keep them afloat while they try to find new expansion models. MixerCast expects to benefit from OpenSocial once they finally launch and given their extremely robust suite of tools they may just succeed. This is an early stage market though and the stakes are high. It will be interesting to see if MixerCast can position themselves as a leader in the space.