Have you been plotting the next productive application that would transform the way people work together via social networks? If so, you might want to give up on it. I’ve spent the past few hours browsing through the MySpace application directory and Facebook application directory and I simply can’t seem to find a single productive application with a lot of users.

This is why gaming applications are some of the most popular apps on Facebook. These sites are what humans connected to the internet use when they want to go waste some time. While there are a number of other sites that have found ways to attract your attention and waste your time, social network sites appear to be the leading source of poor time management on the web.

It caters to the same sort of escapism that we seek when we spend time watching the television. While we occasionally use these mediums to transmit important information the majority of it appears to be conversation centric. While the medium has transformed the way that we interact in the virtual world, I’m beginning to think that most public social network sites are simply virtual playgrounds.

Facebook has been trying to avoid such categorizations for the longest time and emphasizing their existence as a social utility. Unfortunately it appears that most of the users do not want to use it for much more than entertainment purposes and it is rapidly becoming a media entity similar to MySpace. While I believe that there can be social utility (as found through sites such as Intellipedia), much of the business-centric utility is lost in public facing social network sites.

Do you see long-term utility based value coming from the larger social network sites? Do you think the new external facing platforms will help solve this or will it simply amplify it?

Richard MacManus noticed an interesting phenomenon which has begun in the past few months: Google has been opening to bloggers and to developers. MacManus mentioned that both of these things suspiciously happened around the same time. This week the Google I/O Conference is taking place out west. The event was only announced a month ago making it difficult for people (including myself) to make it to the event.

What seems to be happening is that Google has finally realized that they are competing for developers’ time, even those that they are not employing. After seeing thousands of Facebook developers build over 26,000 applications in a year, it’s no wonder that the company has become heavily invested in the fight for developer attention.

It is a battle not just for developers but also for alliances of developers among the various clouds or numerous “miasma” as Bill Thompson describes. These virtual storage centers are becoming their own nation states seeking alliances with none other than the developers. It’s as if the developers will pledge their allegiance to a single company even though they are not employees of the company.

It’s a battle for the hearts of people like Jesse Stay who is probably one of the most enthusiastic developers I have met. If they can win the hearts of people like Jesse, who have figured out a way to survive by building applications on Google and Facebook’s platforms, they will be further along the path for dominance. It’s a battle over attention and it’s being fought in the media and at conferences. This is why Google has opened up and it’s why we will see the continuation of this open embrace of media and developers.

This past weekend, while most people were away enjoying the beginning of summer, uber-geeks sat around and discussed the ongoing troubles facing Twitter and how FriendFeed would deal the final death blow. If FriendFeed was consuming most of my discussions nowadays I might agree but unfortunately it has yet to win me over. While FriendFeed is beginning to drive traffic to my sites, Twitter still reigns king and Facebook still beats FriendFeed.

Unfortunately for the early adopters who believe that FriendFeed will become the online leader, there is still the majority that needs to be convinced and currently those people are spending their time on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube. I completely understand the benefits of using FriendFeed but isn’t it really just a feature that other social networks sites can easily embed?

In the battle for attention, FriendFeed comes nowhere close to Twitter. Just take a look at the chart below and you’ll notice that the early adopters such as Robert Scoble, Steve Gillmore have an argument which is not based on reality. Conversely, while writing this tirade, I’ve received 5 comments on one of my FriendFeed items. I still just don’t see FriendFeed going mainstream though.

Do you use FriendFeed actively? Do you see FriendFeed successfully competing with Twitter? Are they even competitors?

The Financial Times had an interesting article this morning which suggests that Web 2.0 has substantial problems with generating revenue. I’m not sure that this news is much of a shocker given the increased discussion recently about revenue generating businesses. Another highlight of the article is the discussion about ridiculous valuations being given to some of these companies.

One of the most infamous investment which produced a sky-high valuation is Slide who was able to obtain a $500 million valuation. According to some insiders though, the investors in Slide are not sure why they produced such a crazy valuation. RockYou, a competitor to Slide, has also been facing difficulty in raising a new round of funding and instead opted to raise $1 million while continuing their search for favorable terms.

Regardless of valuations, social features will continue the trend toward ubiquity as the new social data “portability” services begin to launch in the coming months. Nobody has yet to develop a large scale sustainable model of monetization and given the current economic environment, it is likely that the trend continues. This trend leads to the question of: what are web 2.0 entrepreneurs expecting out of their investments?

I think that most of these companies were hoping for future acquisitions by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo! Others were intending to generate revenue from advertising but unfortunately I don’t see that as a long-term sustainable model since inventory is practically infinite at this point. Do you think we’ll begin to see more legitimate business models or do web 2.0 companies not need substantial revenue?

Want to attend the upcoming Graphing Social Patterns conference here in Washington, D.C.? The people over at O’Reilly have provided us with one free ticket. There are going to be some amazing speakers at the conference including people from Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google, RockYou and more. I will be moderating a panel at the event about developing engaging applications.

If you’d like to attend the event, we’ve been provided a 20 percent discount code that you can use. When you register for the event, use the code gspe08nof. We are limited to this one pass so to win it, you need to answer two questions accurately via a reply to my Twitter account or post the answers via a comment on this post.

Here are the two questions:

1. What are the names of the three programs recently launched by Facebook, MySpace and Google that look to further social data portability?
2. Who was the most recent investor in Facebook?

The prize will not be transferable and the conditions of the competition were defined by Social Times Inc. You cannot sell the pass and cannot transfer ownership to anybody else. The pass will be subject to terms and conditions set forth by O’Reilly Media.

Remember the days when it meant you were a drug dealer if you were young and wearing a pager? The same thing went for cell phones at one point. Eventually everyone had one or the other and it became a normal thing to have. Email came about and at one point it became “uncool” to not have an email address. At this point it is no longer cool or uncool, you must have an email address if you are going to get a job.

I would argue that the same thing now goes for social network profiles. I stumbled across an article entitled “Attention Boomers: Generation Y Expects to Find You on Social Networks.” As a member of Generation Y I can definitely say that I agree with this. Whenever I touch base with a new contact, the first thing I do is look them up on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Having access to that individual’s profile helps me to learn more about them and helps me learn a little more about their personality. It also provides more of a human element. The only excuse for your company to not have your employees on Facebook or other social networks is if you are in intelligence and keeping information classified is of utmost importance.

The argument against employees having social network profiles is that new recruits should be able to interact with employees in a completely professional environment. While I agree with that, I think that it is possible to have a professional interaction over a social network. I for one do so on a daily basis. Do you think everyone in the company should have a social network profile? Do most people in your company have one?

Last night the big news in the blogosphere was that FriendFeed added rooms. I have to admit that I rarely use FriendFeed even though I have an account. I just don’t see enough reason to use it yet. Even though I don’t use it, I can understand how FriendFeed can be used as a valuable tool. What I don’t understand is why is there so much discussion about being able to privately share things.

Can’t you already do that on a wiki? How about a whiteboard in basecamp? How many ways can you cut a pie? While I don’t consider the stuff that I write about everyday of the utmost importance and typically have fun while writing it, when we see much ado about nothing it occasionally frustrates me. Our over obsession with efficiency tends to drive the web industry to come up with more efficient organizational systems when they really should be focusing on getting real work accomplished.

I sometimes fall victim to obsessiveness over organization but the reality is that sometimes it’s better just to keep on trucking with the work. How often do we talk about more efficient delegation and management practices that help us to reduce our workload? I can already bookmark something on del.icio.us and save it for one of my friends. I can also email a blog post directly from my Google reader to an internal company list.

Is it wrong to think that sometimes the applications just aren’t solving real problems? Am I just becoming a pessimist and a cynic?

Twitter has been facing serious downtime problems over the past few days and it sounds like things may be getting worse. Not only is the company facing substantial scaling issues but they are also having general customer service issues. Twitter currently has a highly dedicated base of users that notice every second that the site is down. They also tend to voice their opinion on sites like Get Satisfaction, which I wrote about earlier today.

One such person is Ariel Waldman who has been harassed on the site. She was driven to post on Get Satisfaction following Twitter’s decision to not block a user who was making abusive comments toward her. The result has been a long interaction which resulted in Twitter’s decision to not take any action against the abusive user even though they have the right to.

Twitter is extremely expensive to maintain and without a top tier engineering team working on scalability full-time, it will be a challenge for the site to continue for much longer. Luckily the site has raised another $15 million in funding and will be able to buy more servers to handle the increasing load. This isn’t a long-term solution though and as Nik Cubrilovic points out, “Twitter will require not only a new architecture approach and a big injection of the best minds they can find.”

For now users will need to live with shoddy service. This isn’t going to work forever though. Something has to give and it will either be a larger competitor offering a scalable version or Twitter hiring a top-tier team of engineers to handle the problem. What do you think Twitter should do?

Get Satisfaction is an online site where customers can voice their complaints and companies are given the opportunity to respond. It makes the entire dialogue public in turn making the dialogue a database for future frustrated customers. I’ve been to a number of conferences where an attendee has brought up the site.

For the longest time I just didn’t get it but the site’s new overheard feature makes a lot of sense. As MG Siegler pointed out this morning, the Overheard feature integrates a Twitter stream (via Summize) centered around your product right into your company’s Get Satsifaction page. There are a number of companies using Get Satisfaction but currently those companies appear to be limited to web based services for the most part. That appears to be expanding though as Chase bank,Comcast and Verizon Wireless all have their own pages.

So far Comcast, O’Reilly, Seesmic and MyBlogLog have signed up to leverage the Overheard service but a number of others will be joining soon. One other product that Get Satisfaction just announced is the Help Center which enables companies to put a support area directly on their site while still using the Get Satisfaction service. What’s great about this is that companies who don’t know about Twitter can immediately take advantage of it just by using the Get Satisfaction service.

Previously, I had not been very active in Get Satisfaction forums but I’m definitely going to become a more active user. Have you used Get Satsifaction? What do you think of this new service offering?

Last night Eric Eldon wrote about 51.com’s new $50 million round of funding. 51.com has 25 million active monthly users and intends to launch a developer platform similar to Facebook’s. As Eric Eldon points out, this is one of the first Chinese social networks that have publicly announced their intention to launch a platform.

At this point it has become standard for any large social network site to launch a platform. We are now on to the next phase where all social network sites make their information accessible to third-party sites. What is somewhat incredible about this is how the social network phases are now 12-months long and shortening rapidly.

So how much revenue is 51.com currently generating? According to Eric Eldon, they generated $44 million, “70 percent of which was from virtual goods.” Considering that only a small percentage of Facebook’s and MySpace’s revenue is currently generated from virtual goods, we either have a long way to go or alternatively domestic social network site users are not interested in virtual goods.

In China, virtual goods are a serious source of revenue for social network sites. 5 years ago when I was helping a local startup program a social network, the CEO was intent on generating revenue from virtual goods given his experience with South Korean social network sites. The bottom line is that Asian social network sites have been generating revenue since the early days via virtual goods.

This is emphasized in Eric Eldon’s statement that “the largest Chinese social networks are hesitant to open up too much to third parties because they want to make sure they’re the ones who make money from virtual goods.” Fortunately for the U.S. based social network sites, virtual goods haven’t been as substantial a revenue generator or we may not have been where we are today.

While I know little about 51.com, there is increasing buzz coming out of China and social networking. It appears that they have caught the social networking bug and now investors are throwing money at these websites. It will be interesting to see if these sites continue to follow behind the Silicon Valley startups or if they start to pave the path toward a more open social networking environment.