I spend a lot of time writing about things related to the social web and frequently those issues are being discussed among a number of individuals who are also listed on Techmeme. I honestly spend way too much time reading Techmeme as my source of information. I think it’s a great tool but I saw something today which brought me pause for a minute. While many of you may be on Facebook chances are most of the readers of this site are not active members of hi5.

Honestly, most of the people reading this blog are not members of hi5. That doesn’t mean that hi5 launching a platform isn’t significant though. hi5 is the largest social network next to Facebook according to Alexa and is light years beyond Bebo in terms of traffic. The fact that close to 100 million people have created a profile on hi5 means it’s significant. For some reason Techcrunch, the leading site on Techmeme, decided not to write about it today.

Instead, the top of Techmeme is about Scott Karp’s Digg for journalists. Umm, isn’t that called a newspaper website? While not a completely ridiculous idea, the fact that this story got so much coverage just furthers the concept that Techmeme is filled with a bunch of people that have similar interests and not an unbiased source of new information. While I enjoy much of the content displayed on Techmeme (and enjoy anytime I’m on the site), I’m realizing where the system falls short. Then again, I don’t see the story on hi5 in the Wall Street Journal.

While I don’t intend this to end up a part of what M.G. Siegler calls Bitchmeme, I am curious as to what people use as an effective tool for filtering information. Everything has a bias but maybe the best source for new information should come from my Google Reader, the place where I have created my own little center of information that I’m interested in.

It goes to show how powerful Techmeme is though for people that read and write about technology and social media. What do you do to filter information? Is social media the most effective tool for finding relevant information?

Earlier today, Darren Rowse posted what I would assume is a great April fools joke. No he’s not wrong with the date, he’s simply hours ahead of us over in Australia. While I seriously doubt that they were able to get a follower base of 250,000, this brings up an excellent point and is something that I would expect to see launch very soon.

Tweets can drive a significant number of visitors to your site. I know that I get a significant number of visitors from Twitter, especially when a user with a large number of followers tweets about a post of mine. Very soon we will see pay-per-tweet offerings even if Darren Rowse is the person to come up with the program. This is a duplication of PayPerPost but for the microblogging world. So the question then arises if such a system would be ethical or if this would be frowned upon by other Twitter users.

Personally, I don’t think it’s the best idea. Posting advertisements into the stream of tweets could significantly clutter your feed depending on what percentage of your friends decide to accept pay-per-tweets. Additionally, such a system would reduce the value of overall links on Twitter. While the system doesn’t yet exist and I’m calling b.s. on Darren Rowse’s post, I think somebody will try this out and the question is what will be the response when that happens?

As I mentioned last week, two platforms will be going live this week. This morning hi5 went live and with it the opportunity to gain rapid traction for your applications. There are absolutely no limits on application invites currently sparking yet another gold rush for application developers. The only difference this time is that OpenSocial is the standard for development making it a little more challenging to rapidly push out a new application.

I have yet to figure out how to install an application but I’ll be sure to let you know when I do! According to hi5 more than 7,700 developers have joined the platform so far and it’s growing rapidly. It has been a big few weeks for OpenSocial and it will continue to be as Orkut is expected to launch this week. This launch is important particularly because this is the first OpenSource-enabled platform to launch with viral distribution channels.

All applications will go through a review process which will be done on a first-come-first-serve basis. As I mentioned the other day, one of the largest challenges with these applications is that they are not as easy to develop as Facebook apps which have an extremely simple library making it easy to rapidly launch new applications. Once the application directory goes live I will be sure to provide a link as we begin tracking the growth of each app.

Update
Below is an image of the unreleased hi5 application directory that was forwarded to me. It will be launched in the coming weeks according to hi5. Applications can currently be installed though and are distributed strictly through existing viral channels.

Looking to do some networking tonight in D.C.? Social Matchbox DC is the event you should attend. The event is an open mic hiring event for local startups. The event is three hours long with two hours of networking and an hour of startup introductions. The event tonight has a whole slew of startups including: TinselVision, ClearSpring, MobilePosse, Razoo, Webs.com, Intridea, FolioFN, ThreeSpot, Hungry Machine, Investors Without Borders, WhyGoSolo, Siteworx, Viget Labs, Zadby, Positive Energy, comScore, Publi.us, Loladex, FamilyOven, 100dimensions, Qloud, nClud, xyoom, BrowserMedia, Ozmosis, Searchles, and more!

This event is sure to be jam packed with web professionals from around the area. This is a reverse take on the Ignite events which have been popularized out west. Companies that are looking to hire are limited to 2-3 minutes for verbal presentations and 3-5 minutes for presentations with audio and visual elements. It’s a great opportunity to find potential job seekers and also a great opportunity to find out more about the numerous local companies that are active in the web industry.

The event is being held at TeqCorner, a community office center for technology companies based out in Tysons corner. I highly recommend the event and am hoping to actually show up later in the evening tonight. If you want to attend go register via the Social Matchbox DC registration form.

One of the most explosive areas of social applications is currently gaming. It’s also garnering a lot of media attention. Just this morning the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an interesting piece on the highly competitve and rapidly evolving space. Just about every leader in the social gaming space is interviewed in the article.

I did a little research myself to see how the gaming space is panning out. Right now Zynga Game Network, lead by Mark Pincus, is leading the pack. They have continued to experience growth on Facebook and now dominate the almost 10 of the top 20 applications on MySpace. This space is still in the infant stage though and naming a winner in the space would be absolutely ridiculous. Every day I receive a new press release from another new gaming platform.

Mytopia is one company trying to conquer the social gaming space. The company’s unique twist is that they are taking all the best components of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and integrating those features into their games. Just as many of the other social gaming startups offer, they too offer a messaging platform across all of their games enabling complete communication among your friends no matter what game you are playing.

Shervin Pishevar, CEO of Social Gaming Network, accurately states in today’s chronicle article, “We’re in the Pong stages of social gaming.” There is a lot of innovation that will take place over the coming years and we are going to see a boom in the social gaming player user base. Anybody can participate in social games and that’s the best part. Social gaming will succeed at targeting the same base of users that Nintendo effectively targeted with the launch of the Wii.

Do you have any favorite social games that you play on a regular basis?

Mytopia Screenshot

Zynga Traffic Chart

SGN Traffic Chart

Profiles are dead. If someone tells you of their new startup idea that involves the creation of user profiles, tell them to quit while they are ahead. It’s not that profiles are useless it’s that I’ve created a profile one too many times. I only need basic information about you to identify you and if I really wanted to know more I could check out your Facebook profile where you potentially placed more information on your interests and other personal information.

All we need is a centralized place of my profile information and that’s it. We can link to it wherever that is. That’s what’s so great about the Twitter profile. All you have is your name, your city and state and a link to a website of your choice. It could be your Facebook profile, your blog or anything else. The bottom line is that you get to choose where that is. There is another problem that arises when you start examining the usage and limitations of profiles and friend lists.

As Loic Le Meur discussed yesterday, we want a centralized me. Prior to all the social networks and other social sites, we had one website that was our own website. Now as we register for countless sites, our identity is getting spread around the web. We want one centralized location which we have ownership of where we can manage our contacts.

Perhaps Facebook will be the platform that enables us to control all of our contacts from within our own websites but that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon. In the meantime the DiSo project was created to develop a solution. The first platform for testing is Wordpress but the system is meant to expand. If you don’t want someone else managing your own content, this new platform will give you complete control.

There is already a combination of various services that can already be leveraged but unfortunately none of them have been perfected. In the meantime, new services are launching daily and a few of them are asking me to recreate my profile. Seriously, don’t ask me again for my information. I think limiting profiles to the information Twitter asks for is sufficient. What do you think?

Erick Schonfeld has a great post about his first six months working at Techcrunch. The reality of blogging becomes apparent when Erick describes their size and scale:

Despite our small size, we are a global organization. When not traveling, Michael and Mark write from California, Duncan writes from Australia, and I write from New York. Somebody is always online—often all of us. Michael literally never sleeps. It is really unhealthy.

Want to build a massive blog that gets tons of traffic and tons of regular readers? Get used to staying up all night every day. Even the once a day bloggers like Jeremiah Owyang get little sleep. Jeremiah is up in the early AM typing out yet another blog masterpiece on a daily basis. As you build a blog that gains traction the addictiveness of it rapidly sets in.

I launched AllFacebook last May and within a matter of months I was staying up until 3 or 4 AM to get the news still rolling in from the west coast and would get up by 9 AM. This is not a piece on my challenging lifestyle though. The reality is that social media will suck you in and you’ll find yourself producing content via Twitter, Facebook and your blog and suddenly there is not enough time in the day to respond to all incoming messages.

So when the competitors are ultimately willing to go without sleep for years and avoid all vacations, how do you create a balanced life? Is it even possible? Well, success never came easily so the solution is not easy no matter how you look at it. Fortunately though I think there is a way to balance your content, build a business and still have a life. Unfortunately, I’m not there yet but I can tell you what my thoughts are on how to get there and you can let me know what you think.

Churning Out Content is Necessary
Some people will tell you that once-a-day is good enough to build your brand. It really depends on how big you want your brand to be but if you really want to go big you either need to pack a lot of punch in every post (as Jeremiah Owyang or Gary Vaynerchuk does) or write like crazy. As Mark Evans points out, packing a lot of punch in one post a day may be more challenging then churning out content quickly.

Churning out content is also extremely useful for building up your search engine traffic rapidly. Take a look at Alley Insider as a perfect churn machine. They pump out content so fast that chances are you’ll never read all of their articles. This model is also extremely useful for taking up space in people’s RSS readers and forcing people to read your content. The bottom line is that content is still king.

Leverage Brand You
As Gary Vaynerchuk says, your legacy is greater than currency. The best thing to do is become well known for producing regular high quality content on a specific topic. Once you become known you can start to leverage your brand to generate revenue through both advertising as well as consulting (if you wish to do so). There is also the potential to earn revenue through speaking engagements (conferences, etc), hosting your own events and other methods as well.

Separate Op-Ed and News
One of the biggest problems when writing blogs is that there is a mesh of opt-ed and news. Each view comes for various reasons and as one Techcrunch commenter points out it eventually becomes to challenging to follow all of the articles. As such it is best to highlight those articles that have quality content and leave them at the top of the site or in a specific location for a period of time so visitors can immediately find the quality content.

Focus on More Than Blogging
Dave Winer screams that the end is near for tech blogging! While I disagree with Dave, the Techmeme pile on is an issue that will eventually be resolved. The reality though is that more people are becoming part of the conversation and that’s all there is to it. While building your blog to a minimal size is critical, once you start reaching a critical mass it’s a good idea to expand beyond blogging.

Unless you want to become a full-time blogger (which is inherently bad for your health), I suggest you expand into other areas outside of blogging. You were already willing to put in the time and effort to get your blog going, you might as well figure out some ways to profit from it. As I explained under “Leverage Brand You” there is more to this world then blogging, and some of it actually can make you money! So build up that blog but build it right because the last thing we want to see is the same old story.

Then again, we all love great stories so if you can tell it better, go for it! What do you think are some good ways to balance blogging and life? Do you think the end is near for tech blogs?

As confirmed with close sources, Qloud, the social music web service, has been acquired by Buzznet, the social media community which has a heavy music content.  This is the second internet company in the D.C. area to have news of acquisition within the past week.  The company which has a small team of employees went live back in 2006 but experienced explosive growth with the launch of the Facebook platform.

There is no word on the actual price of the acquisition price but Adam Ostrow claims that it was a “little over their last round valuation.” The details will be released shortly and you can be sure that we will have the details posted as soon as we hear anything new. While I’m not sure, their company could have been leveraged to close Buzznet’s most recent round of funding which was reported yesterday at $25 million.

A huge congratulations to the Qloud team!

If managing your applications on three platforms wasn’t already enough for you, two more platforms will be going live next week: Orkut and hi5. While there are few details as to viral distribution on Orkut, hi5 has provided details about their viral distribution channels. Of particular significance is that “there are no limits to how many friends a user can invite.” This sounds similar to the Facebook platform when it launched.

These launches will be more significant than the Bebo launch considering that hi5 and Orkut are the 8th and 10th (respectively) most visited sites on the web according to Alexa.com. With no limits on invitations for friends we may see a similar gold rush to those applications that launched on the Facebook platform. Both platforms will launch using the OpenSocial standard bringing the total number of potential users via OpenSocial far greater than Facebook.

Add together MySpace’s platform and Facebook’s viral distribution channels and hi5 is setting up to be a significant launch. Next week will surely be a big week as the reach of social platforms is set to almost double. For one person, attempting to monitor all the action on all the platforms is extremely challenging but extremely exciting. For development teams building on each of the platforms, being ready for launch on all sites is not only challenging but close to impossible.

This first quarter of this year has been transformational for the social platform space.

Today is mobile friday (I wanted it to be mobile monday but what can I do?). According to their press release, Verizon Wireless customers can now access MySpace Mobile on all Mobile Web 2.0-enabled phones. I’m not quite sure what Mobile Web 2.0-enabled phones are but apparently it is a Verizon service. The new service enables customers to access:

• Message Management - Just as it is called, users can read their messages as well as send in reply with all their friends as well as respond to friend requests. This is greater then the services currently provided by Facebook’s Blackberry application.
• View Photo Albums - You can browse through your albums on your phone. There was no comment on whether or not you can view your friends pictures.
• Viewing Friends - Just like on the standard version of MySpace, users can browse through all of their friends’ profiles from their verizon handled device.
• Friend Search - Not only can you browse through your friends’ profiles but you can also search for others. So if you want to spend time looking at random peoples’ profiles on your phone, now you can!
• Comments & Blog Postings - Just as you can do on your PC, you can post comments and update blogs. Also, “any new information entered will be posted to a member’s mobile and online MySpace profile simultaneously.”

From my recollection, this service is a premium service and users need to pay a monthly fee to access MySpace. It is most likely combined with their “Mobile Web 2.0″ service which, has a pretty horrible name. This news highlights the rapid growth of the mobile space for social networking. 2008 is going to most definitely see continued growth in the mobile space. Are you a “Mobile Web 2.0″ subscriber?