I made a mistake. Honestly, I make mistakes all the time but when you make the mistake in your blog it is public and occasionally can be pretty devastating. Luckily this one wasn’t devastating but I definitely got to see the beginning of a potential disaster. On Wednesday evening I received an email from another blogger/journalist notifying me of a post they wrote. Apparently they had found a Facebook page pertaining to film. I checked out the page and also noticed a link for music.

The pages appeared as though Facebook was preparing to launch both a music and film service. Being the overly-eager blogger that I am, I posted an article proclaiming that “Facebook Music and Movies Goes Live!” Aside from the questionable grammar of the headline, I had jumped the gun and suddenly both my article and the other article were posted on Techmeme.

The reality was that Facebook was simply encouraging musicians and filmmakers to use their pages service. While I honestly think this was a cop-out on their end, it was a necessary political move. They want to ensure that this isn’t viewed as an attack against iLike, one of the most popular applications currently on Facebook. Soon enough Mashable jumped on the bandwagon and the rumor snowball had begun.

I learned two lessons from this. First, do a little more homework prior to rewording another article. Second, social media can instantly reward anybody with a catchy headline. While the reward may be short-lived, rumors can instantly snowball and can be reposted for Google to devour within a moment’s notice. Next thing you know, somebody is searching for “Facebook Music” and some unknown blogger (or myself) has proclaimed that Facebook music is launching.

This is the fault with social media and perhaps with computers in general. While people can create content and software systems can process them there is no determination of truth by the systems and it is up to the reader to determine them. Perhaps this is the fault with news in general because even trusted sources can get a story wrong. The next day it will end up as a correction but let’s be honest, who actually reads the corrections?

Do you think there is a problem with the system? Is it the reader’s job to determine what information is right and what is wrong when they are constantly consuming content? Have you made a similar mistake?

Update
Apparently the rumor that began with us found its way into PC World.

Today, MyBlogLog pushed out the new version of their site which includes a personalized newsfeed made up of all of your contact’s activities across the web. This is a similar service to what is being provided by FriendFeed and Facebook. The key difference from Facebook’s newsfeed is that Facebook hasn’t completely opened up their newsfeed yet although it is rumored to be opening soon.

I logged in and after checking it out, I have to admin that it’s pretty useful. The best part is that I’ve already added a number of my contacts directly through MyBlogLog. I have a feeling that this functionality is going to become ubiquitous across other social sites in the near future. Look for sites like MySpace, YouTube or any other social site to try and pull-in your contacts as well.

This new service brings up yet again the issue of data portability. As other services begin to try to pull in data from external sites, the issue is going to be over who owns the data. Ultimately, individuals want to be the owners of data and in the end what really ends up being the true value is the media being provided and how it is delivered to the end user. If your site has engaging content and presents it in a unique way, there will be intrinsic value.

Unless one company can effectively own our relationships (as Facebook is attempting to do), there will ultimately be much less value in owning user data since it will be the user, not the company that owns it. Enough of my rant, what do you think of the new MyBlogLog service?

Marshall Kirkpatrick has pointed out that Wikia has launched the open source version of their SocialProfile toolset. This toolset provides the basic features of a social network profile including “avatars, friending, foeing, user board, board blast and basic profile information.” If you install MediaWiki on your servers, you will immediately have access to the social network features. Alternatively, you could hack up your own social network with the social network database structure and functions provided by MediaWiki.

This is a similar model to Ning who has opened up their code and has made it available for others to use. While I’m not quite sure that having a wiki is critical to all social networks, having social features embedded within them definitely is. While I’m not sure that this new release is as big of a move as Marshall Kirkpatrick has hyped it up to be, I definitely think that the movement toward open sourcing all of the social components of a site definitely is.

This is part of the overall trend toward data portability and I think that we will see other companies make similar moves. The concept is simple, you can use “our” company’s data to make your tools more useful as long as you don’t compete. If you ever come within striking distance of us, we will force you to sign an agreement stating that you will not compete. I have a feeling that this is what Facebook will do when they eventually open up the social graph. I’ll leave that concept for another post. For now, check out some screenshots of the SocialProfile service:

Upload Photo

Profile Page

Edit Profile

User Board

Last night Mark Hendrickson broke the news that LinkedIn would update their design. The new design heavily resembles Facebook’s design including the color scheme. There are some critical differences but for the most part, these changes reflect a shift toward the addition of features that have been native to Facebook since the beginning. LinkedIn will add status updates, more granular privacy settings and more prevalent group features.

So are LinkedIn and Facebook going to end up being direct competitors? Potentially. Facebook started with college students and LinkedIn started with professionals but both of their networks are now overlapping. When I return from a conference I add new contacts to both LinkedIn and Facebook as well as my own personal database because I have no idea which social network I’ll end up using 10 years from now.

Elliot Shmukler of LinkedIn has posted a video of the new changes (which is posted below) on the LinkedIn blog. The new features are moving toward a similar interface to Facebook. Facebook is known for its clean user interface and it may soon become the standard interface for social networks in general. Check out the video below for more details on the interface changes to LinkedIn:

Social media and social networks are in a strange place today. While social media and social networks have had an unarguable amount of success they have still failed to become main stream. Why? Because there are inherit problems with social media that the general public still can’t get by.

No Clear Direction:

Social media and social networks exist, but why? How many social networks have been created because people simply could create a social network? Too often a social aspect is added to a standard web product and hailed as a the next great thing in social. To be honest if being social doesn’t add to the product it shouldn’t be created.

Where Are the Innovators:

Social is the new black, that is fine, but it seems to be growing stagnant already. We see sparks of genius but rarely have we seen a fire that sets the social world ablaze. Twitter is a great example; sure it is an amazingly fun and useful experience, but try to explain it to your family. Try to explain the value and get members of the general public to use twitter.

The People:

Narcissism and confusion. Why are you on a social network or why do you blog? Some people blog just to blog, like keeping a live journal. Some people are on social networks to promote their self-brand, thats fine. These are not the motivations of the general public. For social networks to become the norm they need to have traditional goals and outcomes.

Bloggers:

I know this is a bit harsh to say, but bloggers are one of the main reasons social networks and media are failing to reach maximum potential today. This is a brash generalization, but bloggers are a critical bunch, they are the new critic and we are mean. We sit at our desk and feel a level of impunity that allows us be so critical that we turn away less jaded or biased readers.

It is still work:

Becoming more social online still isn’t easy. To be honest I don’t think many people could do it alone. Much like climbing a mountain you need a digital Sherpa to tell you where, why, and how to best use social media and networks. It is sad to say, but no one joins a social network alone, they need to be nudged and guided by friends or family. Being digitally social needs to become second nature, more intuitive to be a true success.

That’s it, that is what I see wrong with “the social” today. I think there may be some more deep rooted problems with social technology today, but in a nutshell I think I have outlined the problems.

Social is a good thing, it allows for connections and opinions to reach where they have never gone before. But is it right? Do we need everything to go social? Does my grocery list need to be made public so everyone can see what type of bread I eat?

Some day everyone will look back at today and laugh at how social media struggled become mainstream. Late adopters will be seen as the ‘old guard’ and everything and everyone will be socially connects. All I am say is this: Do we need that, am I wrong, have I missed the point?

Last week I wrote a post that got a lot of buzz going about the D.C. technology and entrepreneurship community. I’ve been thinking heavily about what the best next steps are and I think I’ve come up with a pretty good first step. The Social Times is going to launch a monthly pitch event. At the event, one entrepreneur will be chosen to do a 7-minute pitch to a board of local entrepreneurs, executives and technologists. That entrepreneur will take questions from the board for 15-minutes and then receive questions from an audience of no more than 150 people for another 10 to 15 minutes.

There is the potential to expand this to more than one pitch per event but we are limiting it for now. I will also be partnering with the entrepreneurship clubs at local business schools so that MBA students also have the opportunity to pitch. This is simply a first step to building the buzz around D.C. It is our duty to attend these events and foster an environment in which risk taking and failure is accepted. While that community may not be for everybody in D.C., it still exists.

Following the event there will be a happy-hour where people can network and discuss the future of the D.C. technology scene. There is one requirement of you attending this event: you must blog about it! D.C. is in need of amplifying the signal. Many people commented that D.C. will never be like Silicon Valley or “The Alley” in New York City. I agree but this doesn’t mean that we can’t have a loud voice.

The focus of the Social Times is the convergence of social technology, advertising and new media. The primary participants in this convergence is investors, entrepreneurs, journalists and advertisers. This event is focused on the investors and entrepreneurs. Of course since I’m in D.C. this will be the first city that the events take place and I hope that this contributes to building the technology and entrepreneurship community that we are all hoping to be a part of.

I will be announcing the date, time and location in the coming weeks so stay tuned. If you want to participate, we are looking for sponsors to support, entrepreneurs to pitch and experienced professionals that would like to advise. Send all inquiries to contact [at] socialtimes [dot] com. Also, if you have any location suggests or would like to host it yourself, please inquire via the email address provided!

Any suggestions? Post them in the comments and let’s keep the movement going!

Yesterday, Google announced that OpenSocial has been delayed yet again. Rather than launching the Orkut platform immediately, they have decided to enter a testing phase during which time they will begin whitelisting applications to be placed in the Orkut directory. After the pre-launch which will be a four week period, OpenSocial and the Orkut platform will finally go live.

For those that were expecting Orkut to go live next week, you will be disappointed. There is no word on whether or not this will also delay the launch of the MySpace platform which is also supposed to launch next week. The launch of Orkut and MySpace will launch the beginning of the platform wars during which time we will see if Facebook can maintain its dominant position or if the larger MySpace user base will prove to be a tough competitor.

Ultimately, the future of transportable identities will be partially dependent on the success of competing social platforms. If the other social platforms fail to attract massive user installations, we will see a decrease in the hype surrounding social applications. The most likely scenario involves slower yet steady growth on competing platforms due to spam filters already in place at launch time. This is not a bad situation, it just means that the social platforms will take a longer time to see widespread adoption.

I am a self-admitted Yahoo fanatic. I have been an avid Yahoo user since the mid 90’s and have integrated most of its services in my life.

Yahoo, a company that is supposed to be in financial troubles, has been launching all types of new applications lately. I think it is smart for Yahoo to do such, the reason they are running into market share problems is because they have grown stagnant for too long.

Yahoo has just announced the launching of its new service, Yahoo buzz, and it looks very nice. Buzz is a social news source, much like Digg, but with all the flash of Yahoo. The page is very sleek and the interface is quite simple.

The comparison to Digg is inevitable but Yahoo has the chance to bring social news to the main stream. Yahoo’s users typically tend to be slightly behind the adoption curve compared to Google. Unlike Google users they tend to be less likely to leave a service once they have adopted it.

I see potential in Yahoo’s social news service for two reasons. First, the more mainstream backing of Yahoo users. Secondly, Yahoo’s backing of Open ID is going to make all of its new services that much more accessible to late adopters.

My one hope is that Yahoo takes a little care to make sure that Buzz doesn’t fall the way of Digg. I would hate to see Yahoo’s new service turn into a trash filter like Digg. Don’t get me wrong, I like some of the stuff that comes across Digg, but much of it is just fluff and filler.

Take a look at Yahoo Buzz. Do you think it is just a Digg clone or will Yahoo finally be able to take social news mainstream? I personally think there is potential here. Am I wrong?

Just this morning I twittered how my guinea pig (Kathrine) was squeaking up a storm and I wanted her to twitter what she wanted. I thought this was a joke until I came across the oddest post on webware.com about plants learning to use twitter.

The group is called Botanicalls and they have created a pretty awesome DIY kit for twitter services. The circuitry seems almost to simple and the idea is just dumb enough to work. I say that because in the military we are taught KISS (keep it simple stupid) as a way to solve the most complex problems.

The basics are this: Your plant sends you a message via twitter that it needs watering. You can reply by sending a message that waters it. Thats it… it’s that simple.

I see the implementation of twitter in this regard as a step toward the future! The type of future where I can water my lawn from the internet, feed my dog from my cell phone, raise my kids from around the world. Honestly, the potential here is almost limitless.

Imagine when some of those creative DIYers get a hold of this. I really can see an amazing use for private twitter accounts doing things like turning lights on, opening car doors or just about anything else you can get your mind around.

Projects like this are exactly the type of thing twitter needs to get accepted by the main stream. Creating twitter bots will allow for mass syndicated distribution of commands for work. I mean this, the more people find a utility for things like twitter the more we are going to find everyone using it.

I am really racking my brain about some of the neat things that you could do with twitter and this DIY project. Do you have any low level tasks that you would like to see accomplished via twitter? I am going to find a way to twitter to my Roomba to clean my apartment before I get home.

Let me know if you can think of any cool projects that you would like to see “twitterized”? Let’s brainstorm some cool ideas and hope they get made. Now if I can just find a way to twitter me up a sandwich life would be perfect.

Glam Media must have some lofty goals for their women focused media network. Today they announced that they’ve raised an $84.6 million round combining $64.6 million in Series D financing and $20 million in debt financing. This is one of the largest rounds of financing for a “new media” company. Glam Media is a large ad network across over 450 lifestyle websites and blogs. Just about every week I receive a news alert about Glam Media hiring another executive to their management team. Apparently they don’t like to run things lean.

Last August, Mike Arrington asked if Glam is a big sham. Matt Marshall disagreed but also pointed out that the majority of Glam’s traffic comes from larger websites such as MyYearbook.com, Meez and Dogster. Having most of their traffic based on a few key partnerships is highly risky especially considering that even larger such as Fox and Google have the potential to split their ad deals.

One of Glam’s largest competitors is iVillage which is owned by NBC. The most interesting aspect of this round of financing in addition to previous rounds is how comScore data is consistently used to prove their lofty valuation. Month after month Glam Media is listed among the fastest growing websites. There are rarely any other statistics provided and it makes these deals a little bit sketchy. With almost $85 million in the bank you can bet that Glam’s investors have done their due diligence and have verified that these numbers aren’t all smoke and mirrors.