Last night MySpace launched a Karaoke feature for their site. I took a look and it’s pretty slick. Mike Arrington was highly critical of the service following a delayed launch of the service. I honestly think this as a really big potential. Considering that Fox is also the host of American Idol, I could foresee a potential integration.

Then again, most people don’t have high quality microphones, making karaoke fall slightly short of an in person audition to be on the show. One thing that would be a nice addition is some sort of multi-player with video. In the meantime it’s a pretty fun way to waste sometime especially if nobody else is around. If you want to bring in more people it’s a little more challenging but still possible.

I tried it out myself and I have to say it was pretty embarrassing to see myself sitting in front of a computer singing. One thing is for sure: I’m not going to be on American Idol anytime soon. Conversely, I’ll take anybody on if you think you can sing better than me Just post a comment with the song below and I’m sure I can record a better version. Perhaps this is the beginning of online karaoke face-offs!

Would you play karaoke online? So far there are some decent singers on the site but there also aren’t many people playing as of yet. Go check out MySpace karaoke and let me know if you want to challenge me!

Last night at precisely 11:30 PM EST, some computer was triggered somewhere in the world that began bombarding my site with spam emails. Within 30 minutes I had received over 3,000 spam emails. I was able to devise a system to block the spam but the bottom line is that spam is a serious problem for many of us, especially if you are a MySpace user.

When was the last time you received a friend invite from an attractive lady friend who really just wanted you to check out her cam site? It happens to all of us that are on the site and it was one of the primary reasons that many users ended up leaving the site. Well, according to News.com, one of the spammers, Sanford Wallace was ordered to turn over documents to the U.S. District Court in the Central District of California and failed to do so.

So it appears that the judgment against Wallace is simply a statement but there has been no monetary judgment as of yet. Wallace is never far from the hot seat though as he lost a number of previous suits and in one instance was “ordered by a federal court to turn over $4,089,500.” From the sounds of things it appears that Wallace is still running from the law. I’m not quite sure how Wallace is making his money but if my MySpace friend requests are any indication, he was probably selling memberships to webcam sites.

Aside from that, I’m not quite sure how some of these spammers generate money especially when they decide to bombard inboxes with thousands of messages in a relatively short span of time. While the fight against spam is nowhere near finished, this is one loss for the spammers. Unfortunately, there is no telling whether this will have any impact on future spam prevalence on the most popular social networking site on the web.

I have decided to be a media sponsor for the upcoming MashBash Tel Aviv. I had originally intended to participate in the festivities but after initial planning realized that I had a prior speaking engagement. I will be in Israel later in the week though to participate in other potential events. Either way, if you are based in Israel or will be in or around Tel Aviv on June 11, I suggest you check out the party.

Similar to the other MashBash events which have taken place previously, this will be the first international MashBash. Why Israel? It’s a hotbed for technology startups. Microsoft, AOL, Cisco and Sun each have offices, over 50 venture capital companies and over 15 incubators. While the country is known for leading in telecommunications technology, they have a fledgling web startup community.

The event will be limited to 500 people. Best of all the event will be hosted on the beach! I’m disappointed that I won’t be making this one as I will be flying in days later. Either way, if you are interested in attending, register for free via Eventbrite. It’s guaranteed to be a big event!

Looking to network with Russian billionaires? Chances are you won’t be able to unless you get invited to the new social network being launched by the Russian billionaire, Mikhail Prokhorov. According to Mark O’Neill, Prokhorov is in the process of launching Snob.ru. Yes, he went ahead and called the social network “Snob.” Not only is he launching a website though, the billionaire has plans of launching a television show as well as a magazine.

The intro (which you can view via Snob.ru), is mostly in Russian so I have no idea what the site says (let me know if you can convert it for us!). No word on if this site will support OpenID though. Chances are good that Mr. Prokhorov doesn’t know much about portable identities but then again, nobody in this network need to worry about that since network comes with its very own membership card. The demo also displays a touch screen which is moved around with the same technology used with the iPhone.

You can then pick out people in various locations and their photo shows up in a holographic format. Well maybe not, but they try to make everything look really slick on their website. So slick that they may slightly overdo it. This network requires that you have two members invite you to get in, one more than the relatively exclusive Small World community.

Thankfully we got the hook up and have invites for the next 50 people meaning you will only need one more to confirm you. O.k., not really but if you want to get it to the network … well let’s face it, if you are reading this post, chances are you won’t. Tough luck!

Mario Sundar, the community evangelist for LinkedIn, has posted a chart of Nielsen’s March ratings which shows LinkedIn surpassing Facebook in growth. According to Nielsen, LinkedIn grew a whopping 319 percent since last year. This is in comparison to Facebook which grew almost 100 percent.

Percentages can be misleading though and these numbers also can be highly inaccurate as show with Google’s recent quarter and Comscore’s blunder. The report shows that Facebook only had approximately 25 million users in March, whereas Compete.com says Facebook had 31 million unique viewers the same month. No matter what numbers you look at though, LinkedIn is experiencing phenomenal growth.

This could be a direct result of the growth of social networking sites into demographics that traditionally stay away from social networking. As I wrote about this morning, the Boomer generation has an increasing number of people on social networks. Users over 45 now account for a whopping 31 percent of LinkedIn’s user base. Which demographic is experiencing the most growth though is currently an unknown.

Whatever the case, social networking is still booming and LinkedIn has proven its ability to experience continued growth even in the face of Facebook where business networking in now pervasive. Perhaps not all social networks need their own platform!

Mike Arrington has just posted some new information released by Morgan Stanley regarding internet trends. The report, which is embedded below, states that the current trends online are the widgetization of content, social networking and monetization. One of the most impressive charts is of an Alexa page view comparison among Google.com, Yahoo.com, Facebook.com and YouTube.com. According to the chart Yahoo is losing substantial ground to YouTube and Facebook.

In comparing the top ranked sites between 2005 and 2008, there has been a substantial shift and now social websites make up the majority of the top 10, accounting for a whopping 7 out of 10 websites. YouTube.com, Live.com, Myspace.com and Facebook.com are the leaders and I would argue that Facebook.com may soon rank up there with YouTube.com given their dominance in social photos and social videos.

Another interesting statistic was that for users aged 17 and up the internet and personal sources ranked higher than television, radio and newspaper as for sources of information. Morgan Stanley suggests that this trend toward source of information accounts for the massive growth in social networks. The presentation also dives into how Facebook is experiencing insane growth and how the top application developers are faring.

One thing that the Morgan Stanley report attempts to explain is why Facebook is growing faster than MySpace. Their conclusion? Facebook has:

• Less intrusive ads
• A personalized newsfeed (which Myspace has recently added as well)
• A cleaner User Interface
• A more prominent friends section - I never thought about this but having a prominent friends section definitely makes a substantial difference. It’s one of the first places I look when viewing a user’s profile.
• A personalized ad platform - The Morgan Stanley report suggests that the Facebook pages are the “personalized ad platform” … I’m not so sure about this one
• Presence on mobile phones

Facebook accounted to almost 10 percent of the report, emphasizing the significance of the rapidly growing social network site. The report also points to major media integration with social sites including Facebook and YouTube. Rather than having the internet, television and mobile being competitive platforms, the report suggests that they are actually complimentary. This is definitely an interesting finding.

Overall, the report was amazingly optimistic on online advertising growth. Some of the numbers are surprising and makes me realize how hard it is to comprehend the significance of such rapid growth. Case and point: there are over 791 million internet users and close to 60 billion hours being spent online globally. Check out the presentation below for more information.

Continuing with the generational meme that I started this morning, I decided to post about an article that I came across on the Navigation Arts website. The article paints a portrait of what Graziella Jackson calls a “dot teen.” It describes Meghan as a 17 year old girl that is frequently on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Stumble Upon, Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and iLike.

Practically every large “Web 2.0″ site that you can think of, Meghan is on it. While I don’t consider any of the sites mentioned as the early adopter phase, one thing that stood out to me is that Graziella claimed Meghan (the dot teen) is twittering regularly. I found that to be surprising given Kara Swisher’s description of most people not being aware of Twitter. Nobody that Kara spoke to at a wedding in Washington, D.C. knew what Twitter was.

While Kara clearly wasn’t hanging out with the rest of us at Tech Cocktail DC, she may have a point. Most people don’t know what Twitter is even though the “dot teen” does as well as the rest of the early adopters. So approximately what percentage of teens are dot teens? Unfortunately this article doesn’t say but the article did provide few general statistics about general technology usage among teens.

While 93 percent of American teens use the internet only 63 percent own a cell phone. 90 percent use a family computer though suggesting that parents may have a substantial amount of control over teen computer use in the house. So as for my initial question: are most teens web geeks at heart? Well unfortunately the article doesn’t answer that question.

My interpretation was that those who are granted frequent access to computers tend to spend more time leveraging the tools that help them avoid information overload. Do you have a dot teen or know some? Are they any different than the early adopter web community? How do you think they differ from the majority of teens or are dot teens the majority?

Hutch Carpenter has posted an article suggesting that the attention of early adopters is migrating to FriendFeed. He uses quotes from Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk and Steven Hodson to support his argument that people are spending more time on FriendFeed. Robert Scoble for one is as early adopter as you can get.

I would argue that Robert Scoble is not always most accurate in determining future trends. Conversely, if Scoble ends up using a product on a regular basis, it may just eventually become a trend. I consider myself an early adopter but it definitely takes some effort to get me to become a regular user of a new product or service. For instance, I’ve been on Twitter for a long time but only started using it regularly back in December.

Robert Scoble said that FriendFeed is taking more and more of his attention away from RSS feeds. I don’t have the same issue but I can say that Twitter definitely has because I now find breaking news via my Twitter feed. I could see a similar transition taking place to FriendFeed if more of my friends were commenting on items on the site, but currently they aren’t. That doesn’t mean that my experience is the same as others though. I’ve included a poll below to see what peoples’ experience is with FriendFeed. Are you using the service more often?

Social networking sites initially gained traction thanks to Generation Y when Friendster launched 6 years ago. Then when Facebook opened its doors to the general public, the site experienced a surge in users that were over 40. I for one, now have two parents that are both active on Facebook. While it’s a weird feeling, I doubt it’s as weird as it is for middle and high schoolers that have their parents checking their online profiles to make sure they aren’t getting into trouble.

Generation Y has proven its willingness to switch social network sites on the drop of a dime. That’s what happened to Friendster when MySpace launched a few years back and many have begun to wonder if the same thing is destined for Facebook. So far, the older crowd has been successful at keeping themselves separate from the younger groups for the most part. That’s because its possible to use Facebook without ever interacting with people that you don’t know.

So what are the older Facebook users using the site for? Well, according to a Newsday article, they are using it the same way most people are using it: to find old friends. Professors are also using the site to connect with students. Not everything is the same for various age groups though. As the Newsday article states:

In addition to spending more time on social networks, young people will often have more than one MySpace profile or Facebook page for each of their personas, such as reflecting their artistic or musical tastes.

The older users on the other hand “have already developed fixed identities and are less likely to experiment with online identities.” There is also an interesting thing taking place between generations. One girl I spoke to yesterday said that one of her prior bosses will occasionally challenge her to a game of Scrabulous. As such, she feels it necessary to play the game in order to maintain their relationship.

While the generational gap makes for interesting studies of human behavior, one thing is definite: humans like to interact socially online just as much as they do offline. As to whether or not the boomers will chase away the younger users? So far everything points to a peaceful co-existence among multiple generations on the site. Whether or not that trend will continue, we will just have to wait and see.

Do you foresee any challenges arising due to the wide range of generations on Facebook and other social network sites? Do you have any personal experiences related to this?

Clay Sharky has written a blog post which is essentially a transcript of his much discussed presentation earlier this week at the Web 2.0 Expo. His talk discussed the transformation of media and how individuals are being transformed in to media participants after existing only as media consumers for the past 30 years. One of the core components of the discussion surrounds the following statement:

Media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. [This is in contrast to media in the 20th century which was run as a single race–consumption.] And what’s astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus [a cognitive surplus] and do something interesting, is that they’re discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they’ll take you up on that offer. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we’ll do it less.

Clay proceeds to jump into some back of the envelope calculations on total cognitive expenditure by humans via television and compares that quantitatively to the shift toward participatory media. One of those calculations concludes that if 1 percent of all time spent consuming television worldwide is used on participatory media, there is enough cognitive energy to generate 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year.

As Clay Sharky states, the concept of “I can do that, too–is a big change.” Andrew Keen is somewhat accurate when he complains (in “Cult of the Amateur”) that the quality of media being created by individuals is not on the same level of the media being produced by the professional media. While all the media being generated by users is not necessarily “good media”, it is still better than traditional media that has been given to us simply for consumption and nothing else.

Rather than spending our “cognitive surplus” on just the consumption of alcohol and television as we have over the past century, this century will have an increase in people using their cognitive surplus toward new media creation. Is this going to create the downfall of traditional journalism and media? Not completely. I’m still going to enjoy a good television show (even if it doesn’t come to me via the television), but I’m also going to spend a lot more time participating (as I do with this blog).

Given the shift of cognitive surplus allocations, how do you plan on using yours?