Yesterday afternoon Digg announced that they had secured yet another round of funding. This new round is for $28.7 million. Two things come to everybody’s mind: what are they going to do with all that money and did Kevin and Jay take some cash as part of this round? Is the company prepared to release the latest cure for cancer? Probably not.

I’m giving Digg a hard time. I mean Facebook was able to raise almost half a billion after all their rounds of funding right? While the site attracts over 20 million monthly users domestically and even more worldwide, the site isn’t exactly at the early stage of their growth. Are they? The site is preparing to launch support for the Facebook Connect service and they’re hoping that this helps transform the service and attract a broader audience.

Perhaps the site will become the social voting site for absolutely everything, not just news. After four years of operations, a lack of profit, and many unsuccessful exit attempts it appears that the next best option was to go for funding. I have to give it to the Digg team, they have some serious cohones! While I love using the site to find the latest tech news, I’m just not sure that the service is transforming the world the way that $40 million in total funding should.

Perhaps this is all part of the Web 2.0 mindset though. Give a lot of money to people that are building services that help us organize the nearly infinite information on the web. Do you think this round is justifiable? What do you think they could possibly be using all this money for?

This evening while watching the television I noticed an interesting advertisement show up: Comcast’s ad for their new “universal address book”. Immediately I thought that this must be part of the recent Plaxo acquisition. Sure enough after looking around I found the new Universal Address Book service site and it does indeed leverage Plaxo.

The goal is straight-forward: let everyone access their contacts and calendars from a central location. This is something that data portability is supposed to help accomplish. The one place where they can’t access all my contact information is from Facebook. I wrote about this issue earlier today. Facebook needs to open up their contact lists for this to work.

As I’ve been saying for a while now, the real battle for social networks is the race to our contact list. Unfortunately nobody has been able to accomplish this yet but Comcast is going to leverage Plaxo’s services, with the help of Joseph Smarr of course, to try to offer this service. Unfortunately Comcast couldn’t get the service to work for me.

Apparently I was one of the users being affected by some sort of email outage that I was unaware of. In the middle of my chat with a Comcast support person, the chat application crashed and my conversation was ended. Thankfully I was able to at least figure out a way to embed the following promotion presentation that was included on their site. We’ll see how long this stays live!

Once Comcast can resolve my email issues I will hopefully be able to try out a more thorough demo. It’s interesting to see how quickly Comcast has integrated Plaxo’s services into their own. I wonder how soon we can see these services directly integrated into our televisions rather than having to use the net to take advantage of this.

Earlier this week MySpace announced that they have released support for OpenSocial 0.8. The service will also be backwards compatible which means existing applications will still run on the platform as-is. With the release of OpenSocial 0.8 MySpace is also announcing a few new features including:

• New Permission Model (”OpenCanvas”) - Similar to Facebook who lets users visit an application prior to adding it, the new permission model will “allow users to control whether or not applications can read their Basic Info on the canvas page without having to intall or ‘add’ the application.”
• Upload Photos - In this new release, developers will be able to upload photos directly to a user’s photo albums. This is something Facebook has been offering since the launch of their platform. MySpace has finally added this feature.
• Publish Activities - Developers will now be able to publish the activities of users within applications to friends of a given application user. These activities are published through MySpace’s relatively new feed feature.

There are a few other notes that MySpace published in their blog post about the updates so check it out if you’d like to know more details. Given that MySpace is the largest implementation of OpenSocial, this is a pretty big deal for OpenSocial as a whole. hi5 was the first to support the new OpenSocial version but many developers have complained that the new implementation isn’t fully functional.

I’m sure MySpace developers will be pleased with this update. Having activities published also adds a new viral channel to the MySpace platform. I’m guessing that developers will take advantage of this immediately.

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On the heels of the MySpace Music launch, MySpace has launched a self-service advertising site which appears to be targeted specifically toward musicians. You can access the service by visiting advertise.myspace.com. The site functions similarly to Facebook’s advertising solution except that advertisers can create custom banners that are either 728×90 or 300×250.

The service also provides targeting by gender, age, location, and specific interest categories. The current categories are Auto, Books, Fashion, Health & Fitness, Miscellaneous, Movies, Music, Sports, Television, and Video Games. Rather than typing specific keywords, advertisers are forced to select from a pre-defined set of “Genres” within each category.

As the demographics are refined, the total number of users targeted is updated with an accurate estimate of the number of people that the advertisement will be visible to. Campaigns are run on a cost per click basis rather than a cost per impression basis. Users can also specify the dates that the campaigns are run during.

Advertisers then proceed to set up an account or user their existing advertiser account. These accounts are separate from other MySpace accounts. While all the ad templates were targeted at bands, it appears that anybody could use this new service. We will update this page with any statements from MySpace.

Note
You may want to be careful which browser you access the site in. The page crashed my Firefox but it seemed to run smoothly in Safari.

MySpace Ads Homepage

Ad Template Selection Page

Ad Creation Page

Ad Targeting Page

When Bebo launched their IM service one month ago, we were there to break the news. Unfortunately not many other people found that news to be very interesting. Within a month the service was apparently shut down. Over the weekend Mashable was the first to notice that the service had disappeared. I was going to write an article as it happened but I forgot.

Why did I forget? I forgot because I don’t use Bebo IM! Facebook chat has proven to become a central IM service. Within months, it has become one of the primary chat platforms for me (then again I write about Facebook everyday). There is no word as to why Bebo decided to shut down the chat application but our guess is that not enough people were using the service.

There could have also been an issue with abuse. Bebo was recently acquired by AOL who has been trying to cobble together their diverse social products. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, the majority of Bebo traffic comes from abroad. Have you used the Bebo chat service? Are you concerned about it disappearing?

Back in June I wrote about the New York Times launching their TimesPeople service in beta. The purpose is to add a social layer across their website and let users track what their friends are reading on the New York Times website. As I wrote the first time around, the one lacking feature is that the only news you are aware of using the feature, is articles that are already on the New York Times website.

One interesting thing that came with today’s news is that Venturebeat, GigaOm and Read/Write/Web will all have syndication deals with the New York Times. This emphasizes how blogs are playing an increasing role in traditional media. It sounds like the New York Times will continue rolling out new features to the TimesPeople feature depending on the popularity of it.

The company continues to be at the forefront of emerging online media strategy. I’m slightly critical of this new feature since it only works within the New York Times but at least this is one step forward. It will be interesting to see what type of response they get from their users.

Last week MySpace announced the launch of the MyDebates site which takes politics on social networks to a new level. There is an interactive quiz which lets users see where they stand on issues in relation to each of the candidates. There is also a section which lets users see results of the polls. So far the results are definitely interesting with 45 of 50 states going to Barack Obama according to the latest poll.

While I don’t know the exact statistics on the people that took the quiz, it appears that the 21-34 years olds appear to have the most influence over the poll currently. One of the coolest features of the site is that there will be live coverage of the national debates and the ability to talk with others that are following the debate as they happen.

I actually found the poll to be extremely useful for judging my position although I wasn’t completely surprised by the results. Social networks are rapidly becoming a central place for political discussion. Just last week CNN covered how Facebook is being used to encourage users to register to vote:

“We need your help more than ever,” the Obama campaign said in a Facebook update Thursday which touted an updated version of the campaign’s application on the popular social networking site. The revised application is now headlined by a large module that allows users to check whether they are registered to vote, to request an absentee ballot, and to locate their polling place. The new module replicates functionality available on a Web site launched by the Obama campaign soon after the Republican convention.

The Obama camp’s effort to encourage registration and absentee voting on Facebook comes less than a day after the McCain camp rolled out its own application on the site to encourage its supporters to vote early or obtain absentee ballots.

“Now more than ever, your vote is critical,” the McCain-Palin update said. “Voting early, or with an absentee ballot, is the best way to avoid the long line on Election Day and get your vote counted.” The new McCain application takes users to a page on the campaign’s Web site where they can fill out a form to request an absentee ballot or register to vote.

While it’s difficult to measure the impact of political activities on the various social networks, it’s clear that both parties are taking social networks seriously as they demand a large portion of young voters’ attention. It will be interesting to see how much traffic is generated to these sites as the Presedential debates take place over the coming weeks.

A little under a year ago, Yahoo! launched what was their attempt at an open social platform. The project was called Yahoo! Mash and in under a year the project was shut down. Simply put, trying to attract millions of users to yet another social network. Personally I thought the idea was stupid and it appears that Yahoo! came to the same conclusion in under 12 months.

Now the company is at it again trying to build their own social network but this time around they are targeting the youth. The site is called SpotM. What’s unique about this new site? Not much. Users can have “secret friends” which aren’t revealed publicly and you can have anonymous text message chats with other users. While these are two great features, they are nothing more than that: features.

It appears as though Yahoo! is falling victim to the same disease that many Silicon Valley investors have: the feature-as-a-product disease. Yahoo! expects to attract millions of youth to this new social network even though they have substantial competition on all fronts and all ages. Rather than attempting to acquire another social network, the company has decided to move forward with a site built around two useful features.

Will this site suffer the same fate as Yahoo! Mash? Well, it’s easy to say that it will since at least 95 percent of new products fail but it’s definitely a worthy attempt by Yahoo! If there is no longer a way to enter the social networking space as a broad social network that caters to everybody, they might as well attempt to start rolling out niche social networks. It also appears to be focused on the India market as Yahoo! India is the group behind this project.

Given that the product is called “SpotM”, I must assume that the company is focusing more heavily on the mobile component and less on the general social networking component. Fortunately for Yahoo! there is still opportunity in social networking for mobile but even they may be late to the game. The market is rapidly becoming saturated and many users may simply choose to stick with the mobile offerings of the larger social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

For now it’s too early to predict the future of this site but it’s definitely interesting to see that Yahoo! has yet to give up on the social networking arena. Best of all, the company isn’t afraid to start from scratch. Not so sure about the start from scratch strategy but then again, what strategy does Yahoo! really have anymore?

Bebo will be launching yet another new original program tomorrow about first year university students in the United Kingdom. They are going all over the country to see what these students do with their lives. Based on the trailer below it sounds like they drink, party and have sex and not much else. It also doesn’t appear that this show has much of a production budget.

The show’s host is Tom Thurlow who according to Wikipedia is “a British Schoolboy Entrepreneur, best known for epi-culture, a children’s book company which specialises in signed first editions.” Apparently he’s a popular guy but I’m not so sure about his acting career. I’m guessing that Tom will find other individuals that are actually doing work but based on the trailer I’m not so sure about that.

Bebo has been focusing on original content creation and this is a continuation of that effort. While there has never been follow-up statistics on what sort of results the original programs have produced, we assume that Bebo wouldn’t continue to produce the original programs if they weren’t successful. Given that social networks are one of the primary sources for media distribution, I’m guessing we’ll see more original programming come out of social networks.

Check out the video below for a sample of the show. While it probably isn’t targeted for your demographic, it definitely gives you a good sense of what’s going to be discussed.
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Last night BuzzLogic announced the release of their “Conversation Ad Network”. The new service uses Nielsen BuzzLogic’s influence tracking service to attract advertisers. It’s a pretty smart idea as BuzzLogic is one of the premier influence tracking services. The use of influence to determine effective advertising CPMs is a relatively new strategy and one that I’ve suggested could be used to produce the “personal CPM” on social networks.

While the solution sounds like a smart one, attracting the attention of bloggers has become increasingly challenging as the advertising network industry has become overly saturated. Saturation is not just happening within blog ad networks. Social networks have also seen an increase in saturation and based on people I spoke to at Social Ad Summit on Monday, things are about to get much more saturated.

One interesting thing about this new BuzzLogic ad network is how advertisements are targeted. According to the release, “Unlike vertical networks that target based on category, the Conversation Ad Network targets ads based on the trusted relationships formed between blogs engaging in conversations on specific topics, as well as each blogger’s credibility on that topic.”

To think that years after blogging took off we are still trying to develop effective advertising solutions, is somewhat surprising. Then again, this news emphasizes how social media is still a young industry. While social media as a whole is maturing, monetization is still something that many are trying to figure out. Unfortunately, I think we are going to see even more ad networks launch before consolidation starts to become widespread.