Saying that MySpace’s application approval process is far from being streamlined would be a serious understatement. I have been speaking with a number of developers over the past few days who have been listing off the multiple issues taking place with the recently launched MySpace platform. Applications have been mysteriously disappearing from the application directory, other apps have been turned off without warning.

The applications have been suspended and then the developers are taking their issues to the forums and on IRC. The largest complaint appears to be people who have their application mistakenly suspended. The most frequent cause is that the developers have improperly set the image and description for the application but for others the application randomly switches into suspended mode.

According to another developer I spoke with, there are still substantial security issues with the new MySpace platform. One issue was that the OAuth version being used by MySpace is not a standard version. As such, changes need to be made to the code to adjust for this. While I don’t know about the technical aspects of this, it definitely sounds like it would be a pain the ass.

There also appears to be other technical difficulties for an unfortunate few. After having their applications approved, they are not able to add it to their profile. For those that aren’t developers, many of these issues can be brushed off as technical difficulties but for those that are building the applications the issues can be seriously time consuming and in turn a poor use of internal resources.

One developer I spoke with today said that he wasn’t too concerned about the timely launch of his application because ultimately, a few thousand users “really isn’t that significant” when looking at the bigger picture. While I’m not sure if I agree with this argument, I do think that companies need to carefully assess whether or not investing significant resources in an unfinished platform that changes hourly is a good idea.

For those of you in the D.C. area looking to get in on the networking action, I have a great event for you tomorrow. There will be a combined event at Lotus Lounge at 6:30 P.M. It is being hosted by the New Media Meetup and NextDC and is being sponsored by Voxant.com, an increasingly active company in the D.C. web community. I hope to see you at the event tomorrow!

There are also a number of other events coming up in the approaching weeks. There will be SocialMatchbox DC 2 out in Tysons. That event is a recruiting/networking event for local tech startups and potential employees. While I didn’t make the first event I’ve heard great things about it. I will also be announcing the first SocialTimes pitch event in the coming weeks. Right now I’m aiming for April but I am also organizing a number of other events.

If you are hosting any other D.C. events please be sure to let us know! For those of you not in D.C. be sure to come visit!

All the buzz since yesterday has been about FriendFeed’s new search feature. Much of the discussion revolves around how Twitter has failed to add search over the past year. The critics are angry and now they’re embracing FriendFeed. For some reason I still can’t grasp the significance of the site though. I honestly don’t want to see every single activity that my friends are up to on the web. I’m sorry.

As I mentioned Sunday, the value is not in simply in the access of information but in the algorithm that filters that information. So far, Facebook has been the most effective at filtering through this information. Search is definitely a feature that adds a lot of value and also makes these feeds easier to monetize.

Facebook has not been very aggressive on search but there are rumors that search has become more of a priority over the recent months. When we see a startup with less than five employees add search to their product in a matter of months but competing services can’t offer similar features it makes you wonder what is going on at the other companies. Then again, smaller teams alway operate more efficiently.

Either way, I still don’t understand the value of FriendFeed but for some reason it has been my most active site over the past couple days since I joined. It appears that the site is gaining traction but I still don’t use it. Call me dense. Am I completely missing something here? Based on all the chatter it appears that I definitely am.

I’m not going to name names but yesterday I witnessed something that immediately grabbed my attention. An email from a local company announcing recent news for their company that could potentially have a positive impact on the entire local community. The only problem was that the email pointed me in the direction of a press release and this was the first I had heard of the news.

While some of you probably know what I’m talking about, the main point here is not what company made (what is in my mind) a bad decision, but rather that the mistake was made, and it was a decision that I’m sure a number of other companies regularly make. Building a community requires the collaboration of all participants. Whether you are an investor, a blogger, a company executive or simply a frequent attendee of local events, we all make our own contribution.

Personally, I felt side swiped when a local company that I have directly communicated on a regular basis decided to announce a press release without first privately announcing the news to local bloggers. While we may not have the same impact that the Washington Post or any other national publication does, we are the most active and most vocal group in the entire community. Cater to the desires of local bloggers and you will be handsomely rewarded.

Go against them, and you immediately have the most vocal group of individuals in the community building negative press for you business. Some might argue that all press is good press but honestly the bloggers and community activists take note of all of your company’s actions and having them spreading any sort of negative report for a startup can be devastating.

Perhaps my emotions have been irrationally exacerbated but as far as I’m concerned, cater to those that could become your company’s evangelists. The small things in business can make all the difference.

For the past few years, bloggers have been trying to game Digg to get a highly coveted homepage link. Frequently, a link on the homepage can drive 10k - 30k visitors to your site. That’s a significant number of visitors for any blog. Now imagine getting a million visitors to your site from a link on Yahoo’s homepage. That’s what Yahoo Buzz can provide websites with. Richard MacManus has rightly pointed out that Yahoo Buzz is eating Digg’s lunch.

While Digg has a highly dedicated user base, the demographics of that user base is fairly limited. The last statistics I saw placed Digg users at over 90 percent male with the average age between 16 and 35. Yahoo! on the other hand has a much more diverse user base given that it has the most visited homepage on the web. The emergence of this site also means that both Digg as well as D.C.-based Mixx has one less potential suitor.

Internet users that were previously never exposed to social media are now getting exposure through Yahoo’s new tool. I would imagine that we will see competing services launched by Microsoft and potentially Google. While Digg isn’t disappearing, it’s clear that the potential for acquisition is looking less likely. Perhaps Microsoft, who has already signed a large advertising deal with Digg, will end up being the final owner of Digg. Do you think Digg will ever get acquired?

Last week anyone who was anyone was at SXSW, I on the other hand was not. I decided to take the week of fun parties and great networking as a week off from social media. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Digg, no instant messengers, no form of social media or social news for the whole week.

The good news is I am still alive. The bad news is, well there really isn’t any bad news. I actually found the experience quite liberating. I maintained contacts with friends and business associates, and I even made a few new ones. So why was I frightened about stopping?

I began to see social media like smoking cigarettes. Sure It was a good time, and I had some unique friends who I smoked with… er twittered with, but those friends didn’t abandon me because I quit using social tools or told them I thought social media was bad for me.

The opposite happened. Many of my friends that I connect with through social media did something unheard of, they called me and some even asked to grab lunch just to catch up. Sure I wasn’t connecting to the same volume of people I was reaching the week before, but I was making better connections.

I began to realize some of the odd practices I do because I depend on social media. My biggest fault I found was I don’t pickup the phone as much when I was addicted to social networking. I sometimes let phone calls go to voice mail because I figured I would send them aim message or just reach out to them via Facebook instead of taking the call.

I also noticed I started reading news papers again. This to me was the biggest revelations, how dependent I was on social media for my news. I have several Google Readers set up, I get news stories sent to my Twitter directly and I read articles that people suggest to me via just about every form of social networks, but all the news is the same.

I had entered a closed circle of news and I wasn’t even aware of it. My news intake, while I was reading more articles, had actually become quite limited. I read about the same people doing the same things over and over. This is a very bad habit.

Stopping social networks all together is a little extreme, but my impromptu experiment taught me a few things. I really need to find a new balance with my real world connections and those on social networks.

Have any of you out there tried to limit your social media or social networking in the past? Have any of you noticed some of the problems that being addicted to social networks creates? Let me know.

I’ve wanted to write this post since I returned from South by Southwest last week but the entire weekend has turned into an endless series of naps followed by eating and more napping. Honestly, I can’t complain! I had the opportunity to attend South by Southwest (SXSW) for the first time ever last week. It was probably the best conference I’ve attended in my history of interactive/web/technology conferences over the past couple years.

It seemed that every single person that I had ever linked to or received a link from on any blog I had ever written was at the event. There were video blogging rockstars, twitterati, bloggerati and a collection of some of the most creative individuals from across the country. Rather then continuing to express my undying love for what has become my most favorite industry event, I will simply state the lessons I’ve learned from attending SXSW 2008.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a Rockstar
If you didn’t walk away from SXSW with a WineLibrary.com wristband, you probably weren’t at most of the event. Whether you were an A-List blogger or an intern at your local interactive agency, just about everybody I knew had come across Gary Vaynerchuk at some point during the event. At one point Gary was even pulled up on stage to be praised by Kathy Sierra during a keynote about how he has built a dedicated community.

In less than a year and a half, Gary has built one of the most dedicated fan bases on the web. I had the fortune of meeting him prior to him becoming a cewebrity when he sponsored the first D.C. TechCocktail. Gary is one of the most humble and grateful individuals I have met and this year’s SXSW appeared to honor him for his accomplishments.

Twitter is Still Going Strong
For anybody not at SXSW last week, following Twitter must have been hell. Practically every person I follow on Twitter was posting about the party they were at, what panel they were listening to and how they were finally getting up at 11 o’clock and looking for a brunch buddy. For my friends that weren’t on Twitter at the event, they had become members by the time they left and had suddenly become active users.

Twitter was born at last year’s SXSW and within one year it has become one of the standards for communication among the digerati (which anybody reading this blog is most likely a member of). Whether or not Twitter makes it into the mainstream, it has most definitely become one of the primary communication tools for interactive professionals. If you are reading this and you aren’t a member, go join (and then follow me)!

Be Loud and Proud
Dipping your toes in the interactive waters (pardon the horrible metaphor) is simply not enough. You have to launch a blog, join Twitter, get your profile up on Facebook and any other social site and become active. If you don’t make other people listen, nobody will pay attention. Embracing these new technologies may be a foreign concept for many but in order to reap the full benefit from the tools, you must become an active member.

While it is possible to succeed without making your cell phone or computer an extension of your body, embracing these technologies fully can jumpstart your career overnight. Just ask one of the hundreds of individuals who now find themselves in a secure job thanks to Twitter.

We Are Moving From Web 2.0
Practically everybody at the event was on Facebook or Twitter. Joining the conversation is nothing new. The festival has become a celebration of our new found tools of communication. Just as XHTML became the standard for developing sites, Microformats will rapidly become a standard that is built into platforms. If you don’t know about microformats, don’t worry!

Just know that one year from now, I believe that all of our digital lives will become even more interconnected and navigating the web will have become even more of a social activity, not an individual one.

What takeaways did you get from the event? Do you think I’m wrong about some of my conclusions?

There has been a lot of debate over the past few days about which lifestreaming service is better: FriendFeed or SocialThing. I think that this debate is irrelevant and both sites miss the point. There are definitely great features that both sites offer including the ability for me to export my feeds via an OPML file but ultimately neither performs what Facebook is working hard to perfect.

Everyday there are thousands of news stories that I filter through and day after day I am not able to consume all of the content that I would like to. This is a problem that more people are facing. One solution to this problem is to find things that are “socially relevant” to us. Facebook has build a filtering system that automatically removes the majority of our newsfeed stories on a daily basis and only displays what their algorithm has determined we want to read.

Watercooler Talk Remains Important
One of the major incentives for consuming content has always been watercooler talk. Not too long ago, watching the previous night’s episode of Green Acres or I Love Lucy was important if you expected to add something relevant to the conversation. Nowadays, reading your Facebook newsfeed is important if you want to keep up to date on the happenings of your friends and want to talk about it.

If you have more than 100 friends it’s going to be impossible to keep up with all of your friends’ digital activities (what events they’ve RSVPed to, their latest tweets, what article they recently read, etc), that’s why the Facebook newsfeed algorithm reigns as king.

Relational Relevance Algorithm
Since there are thousands of stories being generated by our friends on a daily basis, we need some sort of filtering mechanism to determine which content is most relevant to us. That’s why Facebook has a relevance factor for each story. If my best friend breaks up with his girlfriend, this information is important to me. If 20 of my friends just read an article in the Wall Street Journal I should probably take a look.

While Facebook has not perfected this “relational relevance algorithm,” the theoretical value of a perfect or close to perfect algorithm is priceless. When I can view my newsfeed and immediately know what news is important to me, I no longer need to go surfing through RSS feeds, check out 10 different sites or anything else. All the news that is socially relevant is right there in front of me.

Everything is Nothing
Seeing absolutely all of my friends’ digital happenings from one site has some value but eventually it becomes overwhelming. That’s why all of the value comes from the algorithm which determines what is actually important to me. Knowing that my friend bookmarked a random site may not be that valuable if I’m not close friends with them. Even then it may not be of much value to me.

That’s why each of these sites are going to need to develop a filtering algorithm. The only sites that are well positioned to develop this type of algorithm currently are the social networks. Facebook is currently taking the lead as they were the original innovators that developed the newsfeed and have had a significant amount of time to perfect their algorithm. Do you think the other newsfeed competitors have a chance?

One of the keynotes at South by Southwest was Jim Coudal, founder of Coudal Partners and advertising platform “The Deck.” Jim spoke about his theory on creativity and included one of his well known clips about the creative mindset. He believes that rather than fighting against the creative mind which doesn’t stay focused on one idea, it is better to embrace and manage. Overall I thought this was a great presentation. The first four minutes or so is a promotion of Coudal Partners but the rest is pretty good to watch. Take a look!

Want to track the rapid growth of MySpace applications? Now you don’t need to refresh the MySpace application directory. Thanks to the D.C. based HungryMachine team (who recently launched LivingSocial), you can now graph each of the applications. This is an initial revision and while the directory isn’t pretty, it gets the job done.

SocialMedia, the creator of the original Appsaholic which launched on Facebook early last year, probably won’t be too happy with this new application. The best part about the MyAppsaholic site is that it is already in leaderboard format, similar to Adonomics aside from the application valuations which many have criticized for being unrealistic. The HungryMachine team will be adding features as requested.

If you’d like to see more features go Twitter Eddie Frederick and he’ll add them. The next few weeks are going to be exciting as we watch one platform launch after the other. Many are betting that MySpace is the next top platform to launch on given their large user base. Conversely, I’ve heard many criticize statistics on MySpace’s user base claiming that the numbers are inaccurately represented due to the massive number of bots being used to spam users.

While Comscore and Nielsen may not be completely accurate, you can rest assured that MyAppsaholic is providing accurate statistics on MySpace application growth. Go check it out!