As I have mentioned before I come from the world of PR and Marketing, a world I will be getting back to very soon. Something that always was top of mind as a third party communicator (some who is hired to provide communication support) was managing expectations.

Look I love the entrepreneur spirit, I love to see companies taking a leap to provide the best service possible. However, when I was hired to provide PR/Marketing support the first thing I always did was try and manage my clients expectations. Every client thinks they have the greatest product since sliced bread, it was always my job to remind them that not everyone was going to think that out of the box.

I am bringing this point up to prove a fact, who is managing many of these social start-ups expectations? If part of your business model relies on using social media as a vehicle, shouldn’t you have some way of deciding if the social world wants your application or service?

A traditional model for analyzing value often involves PR people reaching out to analysts and setting up product demos. These analysts would then create a very objective look at the value and services a product provides. They also add third party credibility to what ever they are reviewing. This is the old model of doing things.

I know many of the new companies out there want to be seen as “ground breaking” and “changing the way we do business” but receiving an outside, non-bias, voice about what you are doing is incredibly helpful. I am sure many of the social start-ups out there are trying to do this with a Beta testing or something similar to it, but I think the messages are getting lost somewhere.

I say all of this because I have to wonder who says some of these social applications and social networks are a good idea. Every day I am sent emails and letters from CIOs and CTOs of these tiny social start-ups who are offering no real point of difference from the thousands of social applications that do the same thing.

Often I am compelled to write them and ask them why their product is diffrent. On the occasions that I have asked this I get some standard email back stating that company X is going to reinvent the wheel and is completely diffrent from company y and z.

Consider this an open letter to any social media start-ups out there. If you want an honest opinion what your product or service can do in the social market place email me or leave a comment on this post. I will give you honest feed back and try to offer any advice if I can. Just don’t complain that I lack vision or I am a “complete F-ing idiot” (I was actually called that in an email) if my opinion doesn’t match yours.

I look forward to hearing from you.

This afternoon I was reading an editorial piece by Adam Cohen in the New York Times. Adam makes a great point about the need for granular privacy settings, “Users should be asked if they want information to be viewable by others, and by whom: Their friends? Everyone in the world? Privacy settings, which allow for this kind of screening, should be prominent, clear and easily managed.”

What I’m a little confused about is why he said Facebook hasn’t made enough steps to empower users to control their privacy settings. Currently, Facebook offers the most granular privacy controls of any website. The existing problem is not with Facebook but instead with users’ identities across the web. The interesting part of this is that suddenly bloggers, journalists and the general web community appear to believe that privacy controls are something they have a right to and it should be included with all websites.

Aside from the Beacon fiasco, I’m not quite sure why Facebook receives all the blame for failure to provide granular privacy settings. In fact they are one of the few sites that provide such detailed selections. Regardless of whether or not Cohen made an appropriate accusation, we are headed toward a virtual world in which we have more granular controls across all the websites that we participate in. As communication between the multiple services that we use becomes commonplace we will see the emergence of the identity control panel.

We have yet to determine the exact location of that control panel. Right now sites like Facebook and FriendFeed appear to be ideal locations for managing our identity privacy controls. Just as there is a race to develop a singular Social Graph API, I think the next step is a standard for expressing our privacy settings. While I may be ahead of myself on this one, a basic level of privacy settings (make certain friends private, others public) should be eventually build into the social graph API.

Of course a standard for identity management needs to be adopted prior to a standard for privacy. Something eventually needs to get put in place though. I previously suggested that perhaps this is where government should step in. What do you think? Should there be a global privacy standard?

This weekend I was pondering the existence of many of the niche social networks that exist out on the web. A quick look at the growth in traffic for Ning.com shows that there is a huge demand for sites catering to specialized interests. Can’t all of the discussion that takes place on the niche social networks just as easily take place on a site like Facebook or MySpace? Why do we need to have distinct websites for each of these conversations?

Ultimately even a blog can be a social network in theory since it assists in connecting people but in this instance I am referring specifically to social networking websites that enable users to present public profiles of themselves. My online identity has become so distributed that it is occasionally overwhelming. As we age and obtain new priorities, the time available for socializing via the web decreases dramatically.

Wouldn’t it be much more useful to keep all of our conversation contained within one location? It would make for easier management and better organization. While I know that this won’t be happening anytime soon (this is the internet, a distributed platform), perhaps we will see conversation consolidation. Do you think there really is a need for niche social networks? Are you an avid participant of any niche social networks?

Rob Walker has a great article in Fast Company about the differences in our social profiles versus our real personalities. He accurately suggests that our social profiles are not completely accurate images of our selves but are instead tools used to “promote our own agendas.” Personally, I have adjusted all of my social profiles to be used for self-promotion instead of simply using it to share fond memories with my friends and family.

Given that our information is not completely accurate and can be frequently misleading, will marketers be able to accurately target us given our false information? On sites like MySpace, the problem becomes even more complex given that many individuals’ profiles are alternative identities that they choose to express landing further from reality (or perhaps simply an alternative reality). Whatever the case, the theoretical maxim of social advertising is far from accomplished in contrast to the historical transformation of advertising that Mark Zuckerberg suggested was taking place when Beacon launched.

We know which way the industry is going but the expected changes may not be taking place as fast as we once expected. The marketer’s dream of being able to instantly access the consumers that want to purchase their product and the consumer’s dream of being marketed only things that they are interested in remains a distant concept. There is still much work to be done and no single company has come close to winning the race.

Last night Ian Kennedy of MyBlogLog sent out an email to users notifying them of new features coming to their website. This tool will automatically aggregate all of your publicly available information on sites such as Last.fm, Twitter, Del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, YouTube and other sites. I think MyBlogLog may be stepping up their activity due to an unforeseen threat: Facebook. Although it hasn’t been created yet, someone is bound to launch a MyBlogLog competitor in the coming weeks. Given that Facebook has an even larger user base, MyBlogLog is seriously threatened.

The race is no longer to get users to choose your website as a primary location but instead to have a central location of identity. Even Google has joined the race with the launch of their Social Graph API. The exploration of the implications of managing individuals’ social graphs have only begun but the race to own it is in full swing. We will see once lucrative companies collapse as the battle rages on. In the past 9 months we have only seen the beginning.

MyBlogLog is clearly one of the threatened entities. Honestly, I’m amazed that it has taken this long for them to realize that their company is in the business of identity management. Even still, MyBlogLog risks some backlash as Leslie Bradshaw points out. When launched, the “New with Me” feature will be opt-out instead of opt-in. Creating a feature as opt-out is a no-no in the web world and is seems that MyBlogLog may not have learned from the Facebook Beacon fiasco. I have a feeling that they may learn their lesson soon!

Do you think MyBlogLog should change this new feature to opt-in?

Looking to advertise your business? You will soon have a limitless selection of ad networks to choose from. There is search advertising, social advertising, banner advertising, video advertising and a number of other ad solutions. Media companies are typically the primary driver of these new ad platforms because they need to offer their advertisers alternative channels for exposure. Just today I’ve seen a number of new advertising solutions announced.

Michael Learmonth has posted that four of largest newspapers will be launching a new web based ad network. Comcast has also announced that they will be launching their own ad network as well. All of these ad networks are attempts at diversifying into the booming online ad space which currently accounts for 7.7 percent of domestic advertising expenditures (TNS Media Intelligence).

In terms of attention share, the internet has a far larger share then is currently accounted for in ad spending. As a result you see journalists and entrepreneurs flocking to the web space to try to get a piece of the $35 billion domestic advertising market. A lot of these web based ad networks are going to fail miserably but then again right now it’s nothing but growth in the web based ad world.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that they will be cutting 100 newsroom jobs this year. That’s because the attention is no longer on newspapers or new sites but it going to other forms of media including social media (blogs, twitter, social networks, etc). As attention turns elsewhere I can’t help but think that the quality of news will drop.

Then again, one might argue that the beginning of 24-hour news channels was the beginning of the end of high quality news sources. I have stopped spending as much time on sites like the Wall Street Journal and CNN and now instead spend my time reading through thousands of blogs that write about topics that I’m interested. I also think that I am part of a minority group and so are the active readers of this blog.

Even still, statistics are showing that traditional television viewers are going to YouTube and MySpace Video to find their video content. That means that it isn’t just the social media advocates that are becoming converts. Ultimately though, it is easier for an individual to pump out editorial content then spending time investigating a story. As result we are seeing a decrease in the quality of content being produced. Is this a bad thing? I think so. What do you think?

Launching a social platform can be a daunting task especially if you build it in less than a year. That’s exactly what Bebo did when it launched its platform last month. Since then thousands of developers have contributed close to 1,300 applications on the site and it has become the second largest platform (then again it’s the only other alternative platform to Facebook currently). As a result of their platform launch, the site suffered increasing downtime.

It appears that the site is on pace to surpass their downtime from the previous month after suffering more then 190 minutes of downtime this month so far. It’s well known that the launch of social platforms rapidly reduce a site’s performance. Last month reports were released that showed Facebook being the slowest social network.

At this point slow social networks appear to be a fact of life. If you can recall back to when MySpace experienced their exponential growth, the site appeared to be down for a substantial amount of time on a daily basis. Looks like Bebo is suffering from the same illness. It appears contagious so hopefully Orkut doesn’t catch the same cold when they launch their social platform.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to sit down with Sebastian Traeger the CEO of Razoo.com. Razoo was initially launched as the social network for social good but since its launch last year it appears that Sebastian has decided to switch business models. During our interview Sebastian discusses the challenges of building an online community and where they are headed over the next few months.

I am completely addicted to twitter. In the short time that I have been on twitter have nearly sent a 1000 messages and made some great contacts. I ran across a blog by Mike Stopforth claiming he doesn’t get the point of twitter. He proclaims that twitter demands too much of his time and he has no time to spare.

Mike complains that he needs to be online 90% percent of the time to really benefit from twitter. I say that is fine. I am online 100% of my awaken hours. I hate to admit it, but my phone keeps me online and mobile 24 hours a day. I pay a hefty phone bill to have this feature but to be honest I couldn’t go with out my mobile internet.

As for the complaint that twitter takes up too much time. Twitter is an after the fact form of communication. I can spend as little or as much using twitter as I want. The key benefit I find in twitter is I can access it as little or as much as I want. No one on twitter gets upset if I don’t respond to them right away because they understand that twitter doesn’t mean I will give an instantaneous response.

People who view twitter as a form of communication like chat or standard sms are missing the point. Twitter is a microblog, it is an ongoing chronicle of what I think and do. Like any blog the goal is to have a conversation with your readers, but that conversation isn’t always guaranteed. At best I can hope that someone finds my twitter musings interesting enough to respond.

I have said it before and I will say it again, to really get the value out of twitter you need to find a way to go mobile. Using it when you can find time to use it really makes twitter fun and interesting.

I have to admit, I try to get some of my friends using twitter and none of them seem to be ready to make the jump. Is twitter to far removed from standard communications services to gain a real following? Have any of you had problems trying to convince your friends to explore the world of twitter? Maybe you think twitter is useless, let me know.