Caroline McCarthy has posted the details of a new foundation that has been set up to “support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year as a way to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites.” The purpose of the new organization is to spread the concept that OpenSocial is not being managed by Google but is instead being supported by the community.

My biggest problem with the standard so far has been that it’s not easy! There are multiple standards that must be supported to launch your application on MySpace and other social networks so far. It appears that this new foundation will focus on bringing together the community to help further the OpenSocial standard. A statement from Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management, said “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”

The new foundation has the support of both Yahoo, Google and MySpace. This comes on the heels of the data portability news from Microsoft earlier this morning. Looks like the Google P.R. engine is in full swing. While I’m not sure about the significance of this news as it pertains to the future of the social web, this new foundation is paving the way for OpenSocial to become the social web standard as opposed to the licensing of the Facebook platform to other websites.

According to a Microsoft blog post today, Microsoft is expanding upon their Windows Live platform by releasing their Windows Live Contacts API. This new service is similar to that of the Google Contact API paving a path for increased data portability.

The biggest part of the announcement is a partnership with Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn to “exchange functionally-similar Contacts APIs” which will open a “two-way street for users to move their relationships between our respective services.” This is a significant step especially for Facebook who has so far been one of the most closed-off social networks. 2008 is truly becoming the year of contact data portability and while the average Joe may not yet understand what’s going on, they soon will.

It appears that the larger players are now realizing that data portability is a must and is no longer an option. We are witnessing a transformation of the web landscape toward cloud computing and data portability having a significant impact for many of the businesses that have been closed off until now. Do you think today’s news about Microsoft is significant? Why don’t the other social networks create two-way portability for anybody?

The future of D.C. technology meme has spread across all of the D.C. blogs and discussion is taking place in all the comments and on Twitter. One thing is for sure, there is a strong presence of social media professionals in D.C. I would argue that this segment will continue to grow naturally and doesn’t necessarily need management, unless of course you group it with the entrepreneurs which appears to have naturally occurred.

For those of you not in D.C. I’m sorry for continuing to talk about this so much but trust me when I say that it has future implications for your city as well. The supposed lack of funding and the inefficiently organized entrepreneurial community is something taking place around the country. If everybody was blogging and Twitter I think we’d all be good to go but unfortunately that’s not the way it is.

The Social Times will be launching a new platform over the coming weeks to enhance the community and help things grow. We have already seen a disconnected set of services online and events offline. What many have discussed is an “overreaching organization.” I don’t think this requires significant management by the participants, it simply requires one central location that can be referred to when anything is taking place.

Additionally, when entrepreneurs are in need of investors, or new startups are in need of lawyer or an number of other circumstances that take place in an entrepreneurial community, all the participants can reference one location. What I’d like to see happen is this D.C. technology meme end and we all simply become participants. Not just in D.C. but in entrepreneurial communities around the country. D.C. is just the first place where we prove that such a system can be developed.

Over the past few weeks I have been browsing around, calling people and attending events to find out what already exists in the community that we believe does not already exist. Additionally, I’ve been looking for services that actually don’t exist. What I found was a number of resources that most people simply didn’t know about. With this in mind I ended up revising the vision of the Social Times to “leveraging social technology to build local entrepreneurship communities.”

My theory is that most of the resources already exist we just need to make them more accessible to the community. That’s why I am working to build a platform that will help build this community. I’m hoping that others can help build it and benefit from it. My goal is not to promote our services but instead promote the members of the community. All for free. This will take place in a matter of weeks, not months.

I also believe that providing valuable media about leveraging social technology for entrepreneurship is important and as such we will continue to produce articles on a daily basis. You will see a number of new media channels on this site and new services to accomplish these goals. Media is no longer one-way, it is participatory and as such I believe the Social Times can succeed at accomplishing its goals.

I will give out details about the features of the platform in the near future but look for the services to be rolled out quickly. What features would you like to see? Is there something bigger that you think I’m missing here?

When I woke up this morning one of the first things I read was Mike Arrington’s review of Quotably. I went and checked out the site and was very impressed. Quotably enables users to track the conversations taking place on Twitter and view all the participants involved even if they aren’t following each other. This is substantial because so frequently we miss out on a large part of the conversation because we aren’t following everybody involved.

Thanks to Quotably you can view the entire conversation even if you aren’t following everybody. This is highly beneficial because now you can understand the context of everybody’s tweets. Aside from being useful for Twitter users, Quotably also has P.R. potential. Almost a year ago I was discussing with somebody about using a similar model to tracking the reach of various articles on the web and the impact on brands being mentioned in those articles.

It was a tool for P.R. professionals but ultimately a duplicate system for tracking the reach of any message on the web would be significant. Brands hire P.R. firms for providing monitoring services and those that monitor the conversation view the discussion from a somewhat disjointed perspective. This puts everything in context which is awesome. Do you see any other potential uses for this service?

Wow, my mother would be proud I am taking her threats and using them in my daily life. I never really understood how foolish the logic ‘all your friends’ argument really was until the other night. I was eating with some friends trying to convince one of them to join twitter and other social networks.

Certainly the romantic setting of an Italian restaurant isn’t the right place to get into a Facebook debate, but I have some nerdy friends. Anyway, one of my friends is stark anti-social networking hardliner and I am convinced she will never convert.

Several of my friends and I worked her over through the course of the night but we were unable to change her opinion. We tried several arguments and at one point in the night almost resorted to bribery in the form of a very expensive piece of cheese cake.

Our arguments ranged from building stronger community and creating business contacts to the afore mentioned “all your friends are doing it.” I don’t know if it was the Sambuca and coffee talking but that last one sent my friend off.

Her argument centered on two main points: Bandwagoning and time management. Basically she said this, she was tired of her ‘technologically superior’ friends telling her about the latest and greatest new thing.

On this point I looked around the table and noticed she was the only one who wasn’t texting and twittering all night. I also noticed she is by far one of the best conversationalist I know. I honestly believe there is a connection between the two. She engages in conversation instead of annoying A.D.D. way that most technophiles handle it.

Her point on time management really sent a chill down the collective spine of the table. She confessed that if she tried social networking she would have to give up something to fit it into her day. Her social schedules is by far one of the busiest I know of and she wasn’t willing to give up any real world connections to create digital ones.

Finally she looked at me and said, “if all my friends are on social networks why do I need to be,” she stated with cold eyes. “I already know all of you.” She had won the argument and she knew it.

At times I really do think my friend is right other times I don’t. The point is this, my friend fails to see any value in social networking and until she does no reason will ever be compelling enough to make her join. Doing something because all your friends are doing it really isn’t that great of an argument.

How many of you agree with my friend that there is still a lack of compelling reasoning to join social networks? How many of you think you could convince her to join the social networking ‘revolution’? If you send me an argument I will forward it along, I am always looking for a reason to bother her.

There are two upcoming events in D.C. that you should be attending. Unfortunately due to a miscommunication (or lack thereof), there has been a reshuffle of events for April. The first event is Refresh DC. If you don’t know what Refresh DC is, then you are definitely missing out. According to the event’s website, Refresh DC brings “together the best and brightest new media professionals in the DC metro area so that we may learn from one another.”

I’ve been to at least three of the Refresh DCs and they are definitely a great time. The last one filled a room with easily one hundred fifty people if not more. Due to the miscommunication, this month’s Refresh DC will be occurring as a happy hour. If you want to attend (which I highly suggest you do), go add your self to the upcoming event page. If you are looking for numbers though, look no further then Tech Cocktail DC.

The idea of Tech Cocktail is simple: help amplify the technology signal in under served markets and have fun doing it. I co-hosted the first Tech Cocktail in D.C. last May and we attracted over 200 people to the event. This is the second time Tech Cocktail is taking place in D.C. and it attracts a diverse crowd all looking to network. After speaking with Frank Gruber, this event may attract double the number of attendees. At each of the events there are demos of local technology startups.

Tech Cocktail D.C. 2 is being hosted April 24th at 1223. It is sure to be a good time so go register for the event and I’ll see you there. If there are any other events that I’m missing, please let me know and I’ll be sure to get them on this site. I’ll also be updating our calendar in the events section of our site.

Social networking sites are increasingly becoming a center of activity on the web. MySpace and Facebook have become the modern day portals. Last week, Sarah Perez suggested that social networks will soon become the next iTunes in that they will become the center of media distribution. Back in November I suggested that social networks will become the new T.V.

Ultimately Sarah and I are both saying the same thing. The real question I have though is will these sites continue to exist 5 years from now? If these sites fail to exist 5 years from now, how can they be the new television? Ultimately there are only a few components that are used heavily on social networks: user profiles, friend lists and search. More recently there is the addition of newsfeeds as well.

When I began to write this article, my initial argument was that all of these features can be theoretically abstracted and don’t need to exist within a the traditional sense of a “social network site.” Charlene Li has been saying the same thing for the past few months and while listening to a podcast last night on the future of social networks, pre-recorded at last year’s AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, many of the panelists seemed to agree. Last week I stopped writing this post halfway through though because I began to wonder if this argument is accurate.

Could social networks really be totally abstracted? Would Facebook, which is this generation’s phonebook, really be abstracted to the point where other people create other directories based on their social graph? Twitter already provides complete open access and with the addition of friend grouping features you have a completely open social graph. Somebody is bound to do it, but then again the site that decides to open will need to already have a significant portion of the worldwide social graph.

While this could happen, it will require the average joe to understand the implications of entering all their personal data into this massive (and open) database. Otherwise, I don’t see a reason for the average Facebook user or MySpace user to go recreate their highly complex networks on another site. While I believe openness should and will win, I’m not quite sure how this will take place. Many will point to Friendster and say that users then were willing to easily leave the site.

My argument for those individuals is that the users had not completely entered their entire network. For highly connected individuals, it is extremely difficult to move all of that information to another site. Then again, I use Salesforce.com to manage all my contacts and they provide an export feature. With a little bit of effort my social graph could become portable.

Every time I think about it though, I come back to the same question: would the average Joe understand and do this? Do you think this is destined to happen? Will social networks become just like air and totally transparent? Perhaps there will be two classes of people, those with completely portable social graphs and those that stay locked-in to one site. What do you think?

An article in the New York Times highlighted the challenge of making a business out of blogging. They suggested that you blog regularly but don’t expect a significant pay day. Ultimately, the blogging can lead to other things. The New York Times is completely accurate aside from a few blogs that are generating relatively significant revenue.

There’s not as much money in building a blog for most people because you need to generate a substantial amount of traffic before it makes a lot of money. This morning while getting ready for the day I realized that the real value is in the community. Gary Vaynerchuk is the person I always use as an example of someone that has successfully built a community. He also knows that building the community will reward you greatly. Check out his video:

So often I simply write content but I’ve realized that the real value is in building the community and providing them with a platform for discussion. I’ll be working on that for Social Times. If you own the platform for the community, there are many other things you can do to add value and generate revenue. The secret is not in the media but instead in leveraging the media to build a community.

I don’t know when it happened, much like people thinking the world was flat, the concept that a blog is an end all solution to marketing has become prevalent in today’s business world. I personally have never propagated this myth, but some out there really do believe it.

Like most of my post this idea this one came to me while I was talking with a friend of mine (I am really not all that creative) about his blog and his traffic. My friend writes an interesting blog but is failing to see any return on his efforts and has very few followers.

He recently purchased a camera to create video blogs in the interest of attracting new business. When he told me his idea I began to tell him why it was a poor decision but decided against it, he simply believes that a video blog is the wave of the future.

The problem is he is investing time and has no real channel to deliver any of his marketing efforts. His blog is decent enough but lacks any form of promotion or any content that is compelling enough to attract new readers. He is creating content with his blog but he is not marketing it.

I began to explain to him the basics of marketing, the idea of exposure over cost: the more targeted the exposure the greater the cost and return. The way I see it is this, each video post will take around three hours to make; three hours of time is very expensive.

Three hours to produce a video blog that will get you very little exposure and in turn very little return on your time investment is not a good move. Think about what you could do with three more hours, direct phone calls, secure some advertisements in a local magazine, send a personal letter to your target market, read about marketing trends or just relax.

I guess my problem is that I see to many smart business people believing that social marketing and social media equals do-it-yourself marketing. I hate to tell everyone out there but the only thing that has really changed with marketing is the tools, not the complexity or the process.

Successfully marketing, especially when using social media, needs to be clearly defined with objectives, tools, and a time line. I would love to see more small business take the leap into social marketing, but there is no need to go it alone, talk to a PR/Marketing firm to see how the can help.

Heck, email or twitter me and I will give you some advice, there is no need to try and figure it all out for yourself. Do any of you out there have friends who see social media and social marketing in the wrong light? Do you want to help them? Let’s set up an intervention.

Friends, this blogging and self marketing is out of control… together we can help. Do you want help? Then join me in the fight for a better world of marketing.

LinkedIn will be launching company directory pages today. The pages show employees from the company as well as company data which has been compiled by Capital IQ. Aside from the addition of company data, these new pages are pretty much the same thing as network pages within Facebook. The only difference is that other people can view the pages without being members.

I’ve discussed this before, social networks are transforming the way that businesses find new employees. A college student trying to figure out which company to go join when they graduate (if that’s what they want to do), can simply do a search in Facebook and find all the employees that work there. After browsing through some of the employee profiles they can get a pretty good feeling for if that company is a place they want to work.

While I think these directory pages are a great addition, I don’t think LinkedIn profiles give you much insight to the personalities of the individuals. Instead they are promotional tools to simply display how connected you are as well as what type of clients you have worked with (via their recommendations system). As such, I think a lot of these features would be better leveraged on Facebook. Do you think these new pages are useful?

Image via Caroline McCarthy