Last night I returned home to see a post by Jeremiah Owyang about online community best practices. Included in the post was the following image of the life cycle of a successful online community:

If you take a look at this graph you may think, wow this is definitely how I’d like my community to end up. My immediate response was “is this possible?” Thanks to “continual improvements” these online communities appear to have continued growth even past the standard maturation phase of the business. If you’ve read “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore you will immediately realize that this chart makes no logical sense.

When selling a client on why to invest in building an online community this chart is extremely useful yet it doesn’t make much sense that once the community matures it continues to grow. Back in August of last year Alex Iskold questioned if it is time to rethink the “Crossing the Chasm” phenomenon. The Chasm that Moore speaks of takes place between the early adopters and the “early majority.” This is where most businesses fail supposedly.

The chart that Owyang provides appears to ignore the chasm phenomenon and instead focuses on those communities that have been successful. My biggest concern with his chart is that it defies traditional logic. Even after the early majority have adopted the product (or community in this case), it continues to grow. Perhaps this is why Warren Buffet argues that creating a valuation for an internet business is completely ridiculous.

While valuation in internet businesses may not be completely ridiculous, suggesting that a community will grow indefinitely is absolutely ridiculous. My guess is that the length of analysis on this report is not long enough or suddenly online communities have defied business logic. Where do you think the truth lays in this circumstance?

When I got the information last night about Zynga’s developer network I figured that they were pretty much defining themselves as the leaders in the social gaming space. Apparently the Social Gaming Network was aware of the announcement and, according to Caroline McCarthy also decided to make the same one. At this point developers are getting spread thin across multiple platforms. Then again, developers have always been required to learn development for new platforms on a regular basis.

I think this is a great move but I also think that it will be difficult to attract developers en masse because of the development requirements of building a new game. Regular programmers were able to launch new applications and simple games overnight. Robust flash games on the other hand take a little more development time and also typically require design input. As such, the barrier to entry is already set higher then the average social platform.

Even still, this is a big play and for those companies that decide to create new flash based games, these platforms could prove to be extremely useful distribution channels. Caroline McCarthy has also highlighted the rivalry between the two companies (and founders):

Shervin Pishevar [who we previously interviewed] has been critical of Zynga’s games, which he claims infringe upon existing ones (Sea Wars, for example, is a lot like Battleship), and company representatives have said that they think Zynga’s popularity metrics are exaggerated. Both gaming start-ups claim to be “the biggest social gaming network.” It might not be HD DVD vs. Blu-ray, but this is a rivalry that could get ugly.

As I continue to say, this is one area in social technology to keep your eyes on. It’s going to be big.

Following the rumors surrounding Fox’s attempt at merging their interactive division with Yahoo, bloggers have been postulating about what MySpace would be valued at. Fred Wilson suggests that Microsoft is going to have to now pay a premium for Yahoo! thanks to their ridiculous $15 billion valuation of Facebook. Today Henry Blodget posts about Microsoft potentially increasing their bid.

Regardless of the valuation that Yahoo! receives, social networks have become some of the largest entities on the web earning them outlandish valuations without even having an effective revenue model. All of this has happened in just a few years and brings back memories of the web portal days when everyone and their mother was working on creating a new web portal that would become the next Yahoo! Fortunately we are beyond those days but I’m still receiving inquiries from people that want their own social network.

So do you think the billion dollar valuations being thrown around are currently justifiable?

There has been a ton of buzz today about Loic Le Meur’s new site Seesmic and how he raised $6 million. Apparently the majority of the funding came from Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis after a dinner conversation. I got on Seesmic a few months back but I haven’t been able to figure out what the main point of it is. It’s a video version of Twitter but personally I don’t have time to flip through a ton of videos in a conversation. That’s why Twitter has been so successful is that the messages are so short.

Seesmic on the other hand is not a micro-blog but is instead just another video platform for posting videos in a conversation. YouTube already offers a similar service via video replies. If you want a really entertaining review of this by Loren Feldman, check out the following video:

As others in the blogosphere have been saying, I just don’t get it. I’m not a big video person though aside from my weekly interviews and as such maybe that’s why I don’t understand what’s going on. With so many video solutions available on the net at this point, what makes this so different?

If you think about it, one of the greatest successes of Twitter has been the ability to easily communicate while on the go. You can view what your friends are talking about and participate in live conversation all from the comfort of your mobile phone. For those with little time, sites like Facebook and MySpace can be too time consuming to become involved on a regular basis. That’s why social networks are going to rapidly become more mobile.

Browse through Facebook and you’ll rapidly begin to notice that it resembles a phone book in the way that you can search through your “friends” and view all of their contact information. In a session at the GSMA Mobile World Conference, RIM’s co-CEO stated that social networking is the future of the company. He stated that social networking will soon become as pervasive within enterprises as instant messaging already is.

Mobile companies will need to either become “pipes or platforms.” As I wrote earlier this morning, Zynga has already launched a platform. It appears that the concept of building platforms that any developer can build on has extended beyond social networks and has moved into social networks and will soon enter mobile. So far the best mobile social network tool that I’ve used is Facebook for Blackberry.

There is a whole new wave of services being offered for mobile and soon enough we’ll begin seeing new mobile services appear at the same pace that new “Web 2.0″ sites have been sprouting up over the past couple years. Have you used any highly engaging mobile social networks?

This may not be as big as the Facebook platform but it’s pretty significant. Zynga Networks, the social gaming network created by Mark Pincus, has announced that they are opening their network to third-party game publishers and developers. When launching a game on this network, publishers and developers will gain access to social gamers on Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, Meebo and MySpace. This is the same strategy that Facebook took and this definitely has the potential to work.

If you think of Pogo.com, the online gaming site owned by Electronic Arts, they have had to develop each one of the games on their site. Yahoo had a similar game portal (they still do but it is not as active anymore) that hosted a plethora of games but it was limited to what Yahoo! developers could produce. This new service lowers the barriers for developers, grants them access to millions of users and also provides them with ways to monetize their applications.

This is a win/win situation for both developers and Zynga. Developers get widespread exposure and Zynga gains brand recognition as the go to network for social games. Zynga owns some of the most popular gaming applications on Facebook and other social networks and has been steadily increasing their reach over the past few months. We covered the network back in January and since then Zynga has continued to gain momentum. If there is one area to be bullish on in social networks, social gaming is it.

We have all seen it, kids go online, ad an interesting picture on their social network or download a song highlighting street violence. According to a CBS affiliate website gangs are turning to Youtube and other social networks to find new gang members.

The disturbing article by Joe Vazquez interviewed several teens hanging out in front of a movie theater on a Friday night. The teens spoke about how they add gang logos and songs to their online profiles and were soon approached by gang members.

One teenager said the possible gang members simply ask him what he is up to and try to start a dialog with him. What this teen doesn’t understand is that this is how criminal recruiting works. Start a simple dialog, befriend and create trust, then move the target on to some simple crimes to begin the snow ball of primal world.

Vazquez’s article references an anonymous spokesperson at YouTube that states that YouTube actively removes and responds to flagged illegal content. I wonder if it is even possible to flag something as illegal activity any more. The types of tools that these gang recruiters appear harmless at first sight.

Can YouTube even monitor for these thing? Can social networks start to actively ban gang insignia found online? I think the problem of gang recruiting could be a much larger problem for social networks than child sex predators.

Think about it. It is possible to identify and criminalize people who perpetrate sex youth crimes. Finding a gang member who is simply cultivating sympathy for criminal behavior is much more difficult, you can exactly arrest someone for posting a digital representation of a gang sign on their web page.

As criminals become more tech savvy both parents and police are going to have to find new ways to monitor and protect their children. The first step in this fight is education. Police need to take the offensive and hold seminars and online sessions that parents can log into and find out what all of these tags and gang signs mean.

I am the son of a New York City police officer. I have the utmost respect and admiration for law enforcement officials. I would like to see nothing more than police jurisdictions taking the lead in educating parents on how best to protect their children online from criminal behavior.

Do you have any input on how we could teach children to be wary of this new form of criminal predator? Should social networks monitor for gang signs and gang related videos? Who’s job is it to protect our children?

You have seen it. You are reading an article on a website about something you find interesting and you see that little “digg this” button down at the bottom. Heck most of us bloggers put it on our own sites.

While many of us complain about the digg effect we often, in some deep self loathing section, hope something we post gets dugg. Sure it means a ton of one time visitors that will clog our tubes, but we all want to feel special.

Now I twitter, I love twitter, it is a fun and interesting way to interact with people around the world. Today while surfing the web I ran into a button that said “twit this”. Finding out where the button went I ended up at a website called twitthis.com. The site does exactly what you think it does, makes it easy for you to tweet about a web page.

This concept both excited me and frighted me at the same time. Are websites now going to be competing for the twitter effect? Are we going to start spamming all our friends about random web pages via twitter? Is twitter about to be packaged and sold like digg?

The marketing side of me loved this idea, reach potentially thousands of people through some of their closest contacts. The twitter lover in me became scared, what if all I loved about twitter goes away. I am pretty sure that twitter won’t become as bad as digg, but who knows it could happen.

With this latest development are you scared of the direction twitter might take? Can you see people talking about the “twitter effect” in the future? Can twitter survive a mass flux of users? As we have seen, if usage goes up, twitter tends to go down.

The Social Times has partnered with Mashable and Ogilvy to bring MashMeet DC Remix on March 5th. The event will also incorporate presentations, food and music in comparison to the previous MashMeet which was simply a happy hour. The event will be limited to 170 people. I will have a few free passes to give away on this site as the event gets closer. Adam Ostrow, Adam Hirsch and Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins of Mashable will also be at the event.

This event is set to coincide with the Politics Online Conference which I will not be attending as I will be out in San Diego at the Graphing Social Patterns West conference. There is also the opportunity to sponsor so if you are interested shoot an email over to Adam Hirsch and he can give you the details. I hope to see you at the event!

We have all heard about internet dating and finding true love via a social network. Well Karen over at Cordarouns.com is about it hit the streets of San Fransisco looking for her true love.

Karen has enlisted a myriad of social tools to help her on her quest ranging from Facebook and the others to the video/picture/text streaming service Zannel. Karen is going to hit the streets in an 8 hour frenzy to find her man.

Karen, who happens to be way cute, will start the day with a police sketch of her perfect man. She will then hit the streets and use followers input to help her make a V-Day date choice. I think the idea is fresh and fun and I am going to follow it.

Don’t get me wrong, I know this is a marketing ploy but I love it. These are the types of fun social media events and tools that ALL marketers should be looking into. This is the Budweiser Super Bowl Commercial of the web 2.0 age.

Look I am stuck at my desk maybe 3 to 4 hours a day, I have a rough job, but many people spend 8+ plus hours in their cube with nothing to do but work (how much of that can you do?). Karen’s experiment will let them watch something fun, funny and let marketers get some product placement while it happens.

I say good show to all parties involved. Karen and Cordarounds, way to think out of the box. Zannel, good job with highlighting your service in a fun way. Social networks, well you guys don’t need any more praise you created a platform for all of this to happen on.

To bad Karen isn’t doing this in DC, I know plenty of single guys who would love to meet her. Is anyone else out there going to be following Karen? Do any of you out there know of any more fun, online social events like this that you could tell me about? If so let me know.

Follow Karen at Zannel.