For the past week Twitter has been having serious problems. Jack from Twitter posted a cry for help and admitted that the company has no idea what’s going on with the site. That definitely doesn’t sound good and soon after the errors took place, people started complaining about how they feel lonely without Twitter.

Allen Stern of CenterNetworks posted a pretty entertaining video of him singing for the revival of Twitter. It looks as though some people had no idea what to do with themselves. Personally, I kept checking Twitter on my Blackberry only to receive no response. Is this the end of the world? Not really but for those who are hyper-connected, it definitely has caused some stress.

While I think Twitter should be more reliable, it’s honestly not the end of my life when Twitter goes down. Mike Arrington seems to differ and appeared absolutely flustered by the Twitter downtime. Mike states, “I’m in a particularly bad mood because I have food poisoning and Twittering it was going to make me feel marginally better because a bunch of people would say something nice in a reply.”

While I’m not as reliant on Twitter for emotional support from others, I definitely see this as a useful way to leverage Twitter. It looks like people have become emotionally attached to Twitter. Just check out the video below.

I recently held a poll on Social Times about whether or not users believed that social networking sites would eventually become “like air” as Charlene Li of Forrester Research has previously asserted. Most people didn’t believe it but after seeing the new Facebook profile design, I’m pretty confident that social networking sites are dead in the way they currently exist.

The idea that I need to go to another website to see what my friends are up to is absolutely ridiculous. Why do I need to go to Facebook to get updates on the relationship statuses of my friends or to find out that my friend John recently uploaded a photo of his trip to Hawaii. FriendFeed already accomplishes some of these things but the idea that I need to do all of this from one website is ridiculous.

Within the next two years we are going to witness the proliferation of desktop social control panels which leverage various networks the same way that IM clients like Digsby and Gabtastik currently let users leverage any of their chat systems. There will soon be a social protocol developed for updating your social data via Facebook and eventually other sites including MySpace, Bebo, etc.

Think I’m crazy? You have a right to think so but this is my blog so I can make any assertion that I want! This isn’t that crazy of an idea when you think about it though. There’s already FriendFeed support within Twhirl, we are only a few steps away from Facebook support. Can you think of any other ways to extend social networking features to the desktop? While I don’t think that social networking is dead by any means, I think that the existence of stand alone sites will soon be passé.

D.C. based Clearspring, raised a third round of funding for $18 million led by New Enterprise Associates. The company has raised $35 million so far and is expanding rapidly. The company also recently launched an ad network which displays dynamic advertising on the millions of widgets that it currently displays around the web. Widgets are a hot item right now, almost as hot as social applications.

Joseph Weisenthal asked Hooman Radfar, CEO of Clearspring, about his thoughts on the health of the current ecosystem. Hooman’s response was that, “You literally can’t have as many companies that there are.” So what is Clearspring going to do with the cash in their bank account? They’ll be making acquisitions of a number of companies.

There will also be a strengthening of alliances among the leaders in this space. Currently, Slide and RockYou are the other leaders but they also extend over to social applications. There has been buzz surrounding RockYou’s latest round of funding as they try to get a serious amount of cash on the heels of Slide’s $50 million round. The word on the street is that they are having some trouble getting favorable terms and will have to consider doing a smaller round.

Look for a substantial amount of consolidation in this space over the coming months.

I had a potential client make an inquiry to me yesterday afternoon. They asked me about developing an application which would ultimately be used to gather phone numbers. The one problem with the model is that the proposed system didn’t provide much value to the user in exchange for them providing the phone number. Somehow though, the application was supposed to spread virally to the masses who would all in turn enter their phone number. It didn’t make much sense to me.

Society is Focused on Overnight Success
I can’t tell you how often someone calls me to request the development of an application that will instantly spread to the masses. When I ask them what the application is going to provide to the user, they say that they don’t know but they just want it to spread virally. People are focused on being successful for the sake of being successful. Too frequently they don’t think about the value being provided to the user, just that they want to be “successful” and get lots of users.

This is clearly the wrong attitude and I choose not to work with people that focus on the end game and not how they’re going to get there.

Marketing Just Got Harder, Not Easier
For large organizations, marketing and advertising used to simply consist of large advertisements plastered on billboards, printed in magazines and newspapers and played on radio and television. While this is an oversimplification of marketing and advertising in the past, one things is for sure: marketing is no longer simple.

There are now countless channels to interact with the consumer and choosing which one to use is a balancing act. Social marketing requires building relationships with the customer. Building relationships is not easy, it takes time. Anybody that thinks they can simply slap up a simple application and have millions of users that eventually become paying customers is definitely misguided.

There’s Still a Huge Opportunity
While marketing and advertising may now be more complex, there is also more opportunity to directly interact with your customers like never before. By leveraging social marketing via social applications, blogs and blog outreach, Twitter and other social tools, you can directly reach out to your potential customers and existing customers to help build brand awareness.

Twitter versus Facebook
One thing that I’ve been thinking about recently is leveraging Twitter versus Facebook for marketing purposes. Let’s say that there are customers talking about your product on Facebook and Twitter. How are you going to find those people on Facebook? You can do a search for groups and fan pages but that’s about it. How about wall posts and status updates of people on Facebook? Unfortunately you can’t track those.

On Twitter though, you can find each individual that has mentioned your company and reach out to them directly. I have previously written about my experience with Comcast on Twitter. Zappos and a handful of other companies are also playing it smart when it comes to Twitter. The best part is that you can reach out to every individual that ever mentions your brand.

Can You Control It?
As I mentioned at the beginning, too often are people focused on instant success while not focused on providing amazing value. The benefit of social marketing is that products and services spread virally. This is really nothing new given that word of mouth marketing was around prior to the internet, it’s just that we have new ways to spark word of mouth campaigns and track what people are saying about us.

The reality is that you can’t control social marketing, you can only participate in the conversation and participating frequently means starting the conversation. Provide value and amazing customer service and people will talk about your company. You can then use web-based social marketing channels to monitor the spread of your brand and help magnify the signal by interacting directly with your customers. Do you think it’s possible to control social marketing?

Tom Anderson, President of MySpace, has posted about new changes to the MySpace developer policy for which limits and prevents misleading tactics for the sole purpose of “viral distribution.” One of the biggest changes is the limiting of incentives for sending communications in an application. Here’s what the updated guidelines state:

No incentives may be given to a member for sending a message, bulletin, comment, or any other form of communication. This includes “points,” “bucks,” increased standing, or even features within the app.

In one move MySpace has prevented virtual currencies from being used for the pupose of getting users to spam their friends. I will be posting more in depth about this issue tomorrow morning but there is a significant problem with developers wanting to take advantage of as many viral channels as possible no matter what the decrease in user experience is.

In my opinion, these aggressive strategies mimic the ones used by other sites including the Reunion.com spam that I posted about this evening. MySpace applications now have two weeks to make adjustments to their applications prior to being banned from the platform. MySpace is showing concern for the users over application developers which is a different dynamic than currently being provided on Facebook.

The bottom line is that viral distribution is not a right of developers on social platforms. This only leads one to ask: why build applications on platforms then when there is no viral distribution? While it’s in a company’s best interest to be in as many distribution channels as possible, the first channel may cease to be social platforms for many developers. Do you think the incentives for social application developers are starting to be reduced?

Plaxo.com, the company acquired last week by Comcast for a rumored $160 million, was launched back in 2001. The company faced heavy criticism for aggressive spam techniques which used user contact lists to send out false invites to users. Reunion.com has decided to leverage a similar tactic in hopes of rapidly expanding their user base.

While the tactics have appeared to work (based on Alexa statistics), this strategy is not a long-term solution and is a quick way to lose users faster than you gain them. Take a look at the screenshot below from a search for “Reunion.com” on Summize. The majority of comments are from angry people complaining about how Reunion.com abused users’ trust.

Only one of the users thought it was a genuine email but chose not to respond to it because he prefers to communicate via Facebook and Twitter. Screw using Facebook to spread your website or application virally, you can import peoples’ Gmail contact list and spam the hell out of them! Honestly, this has to be one of the most misleading tactics for a website to leverage.

Following stagnant growth through February it appears that the site decided to take drastic measures. Unfortunately those measures are going to end up backfiring. Reunion.com staff: drop the spam tactics or witness a mass exodus from your site. Then again I’d guess that the exodus has already begun taking place as users move to Facebook.

Have you received these emails? Do you see any benefit of using these tactics?

Sample Email 1

Sample Email 2

Twitter Search Screenshot

Josh Catone has a great post up about mobile social network usage according to a survey completed by the mobile browser, Opera. The numbers are staggering for Opera. A whopping 41 percent of all mobile browsing is to mobile social networks.

The most surprising numbers in Josh Catone’s article was the incredible results being generated via ad campaigns on mobile. According to the article, “UK ad-supported mobile service Blyk, for example, saw an amazing 29% average response rate on ad campaigns — with one campaign — for a book, no less — receiving an incredible 67% response rate on the service.”

These sorts of response rates are phenomenal. Whether or not these numbers will continue as mobile social networking use increases is currently unknown but considering the horrendous response rates on sites like Facebook, mobile may just be the answer. I’ve been predicting continued growth in this space and I wouldn’t be surprised if the large social networks start turning more of their attention to mobile.

I currently use my phone for a substantial amount of social networking activities. I read my messages via the Facebook application and view my friends’ Twitter updates via the TwitterBerry application. Are you an active mobile social network user? Do you access social networks via mobile or desktop more frequently?

There is a lot of discussion taking place currently over Facebook’s various exit options. Yesterday, Reuters quoted Mark Zuckerberg at a press event in Japan:

You can tell, from our history and what we’ve done, that we really wanted to keep the company independent, by focusing on building and focusing on the long-term

This was following John Furrier’s post which got the rumor mills running yesterday. Now the discussion surrounds Mark Zuckerberg making a great decision. While it was bold of him to turn down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo and later a $5 billion offer from Microsoft, one has to wonder if turning down a $10 - $20 billion offer from Microsoft would be absurd.

Kara Swisher seems to believe that this opportunity is Facebook’s golden ticket opportunity. Zuckerberg has a lot to consider but currently it appears as though he isn’t even considering it based on his statement to the press yesterday. Still in his early twenties, Mark Zuckerberg would have between $3 billion and $7 billion depending on the offer presented by Microsoft.

That would make him one of the richest people in the world and one of the youngest billionaires as well. So what would you do in Mark Zuckerberg’s shoes?

The invite only social network site for worldwide jetsetters, a Small World, has been trying to go public for the past few months but unfortunately has not been able to. According to the founders, the market was too choppy and will stay that way for the next 12 months. The challenges facing the four year old company is a sign of challenging economic times.

Then again I’m not so sure that the public offering of a web-based social network is a bellwether for the overall economy. A Small World would be the first substantial social network site to have a public offering which would make it a somewhat historical moment for the industry. It would also be helpful for companies like Facebook and LinkedIn, both of which are expected to eventually make public offerings, to see how the market treats the company.

The revenues currently being generated by A Small World pale in comparison to the social networking behemoths MySpace and Facebook. According to Reuters, the company generated $3 million in revenue in 2007 and aims to generate $15 million in 2009. It will be interesting to see if the company can finally pull off a public offering one year from now.

I’ve been on a bit of a data portability binge over the past few days. I wasn’t going to write anything more about it until I came across Andrew Chen’s post arguing that Metcalfe’s law is “a DIRECT reason why these networks want to get as big as possible, and have a social graph that’s as comprehensive as possible, and why they should ultimately be opposed to Data Portability.”

Andrew is echoing my original thoughts that I posted on Saturday but by the end of the weekend my perspective had been transformed. While I agree that social network sites want to have a social graph that’s as comprehensive as possible, I don’t think that opening up will prevent them from getting there. If each site opens up, it means that the users are free to move around as they please.

Right now they can move around freely but transferring data is typically impossible. At every event I go to I always here the statement “a rising tide lifts all boats.” If the application developers are living by this motto why not the big players? It appears as though Facebook, MySpace and other competing sites want to protect that which made their site so valuable in the first place: the users.

As I wrote this morning, it’s not just about the data stored in the system, it’s about the flow of the data. The more that Facebook lowers their walls, the more that data can easily flow through. I have finally begun to believe that Facebook’s user base will not decrease due to data portability. Instead, it will continue to thrive as it becomes a completely open marketplace.

Do you think data portability will kill social network sites?