Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Murti Hussain, the President and Co-Founder of Peanut Labs about the company’s advertising strategy and the social advertising landscape in general. Peanut Labs helps publishers monetize their sites (largely game publishers) through survey offers from large brands. The company actually got started through their own gaming site which used peanuts as a form of virtual currency.
(more…)

 

 Interview with Murti Hussain of Peanut Labs [14:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Lauren Bigelow, the General Manager of WeeWorld. Recently I’ve become increasingly interested in following the ways that virtual worlds are generating revenue as virtual worlds and social networks have become increasingly integrated. I’m also interested in them because I want to know how social networks and virtual worlds are making money since that’s a fairly important factor in running a business.

While Lauren wouldn’t talk about the specific amount that the company is generating she mentioned that they have relatively strong monthly growth which is great considering the current economic environment. As with most other virtual worlds, WeeWorld generates revenue through the sale of virtual goods as well as advertising.
(more…)

 

 Interview with Lauren Bigelow of WeeWorld [18:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to speak with Kevin Marks of Google about the current state of Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and the future of the social web. Friend Connect was initially seen as one of the methods for “out opening Facebook”. In other words Google was concerned about Facebook’s growing ownership of users’ identities on the web. While the initial steps were made for competitive purposes, OpenSocial has become part of a greater movement to simplify the models for sharing our social data around the web.
(more…)

 

 Interview with Kevin Marks of Google [25:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yesterday, Playdom, formerly known as You Plus, announced their expansion from MySpace to Facebook. I took the opportunity to speak with them about their thoughts on the state of social gaming as well as the differences between building on the MySpace platform versus Facebook platform. One of the most interesting things about Playdom is that like other large social gaming networks, they have a large percentage of users returning on a daily basis.
(more…)

 

 Interview with Playdom Team [19:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today I had the opportunity to interview Tim Schigel, the CEO of ShareThis, about the new ShareThis service they released today and what the future holds for the company. We had an interesting discussion about the future of sharing and how Facebook and Twitter are gaining traction at the expense of other “sharing distribution channels”.
(more…)

 

 Interview with Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis [17:21m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Last night Meebo announced a slew of new partners for its white-label instant messaging service. The announcement also included statements that the company now has almost 73 million monthly users which is most definitely a bold statement. I took the opportunity to speak with Seth Sternberg, CEO of Meebo, about what these announcements mean for his company and what the future holds.

We discussed Meebo and potential integration with mobile platforms as well as how his product fits on the social web. Meebo offers a product which is nearly identical to Userplane and heavily resembles Facebook’s new chat client. I spoke with Seth about these similarities and what all of the recent chat services means for the future of chat on the web.

Check out our interview below to learn more about the future of Meebo and chat on the web!

 

 Interview With Seth Sternberg, CEO of Meebo [18:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Chris McGill, the founder of Mixx.com. For those not aware of Mixx, the company provides a social content discovery service. The key offering is that users get to categorize their content via tags rather than have their content forced into pre-determined categories as Digg and Yahoo! Buzz currently do.

I also discussed yesterday’s opening of Yahoo! Buzz with Chris and what he though the impact on Mixx was. He suggested that Buzz does not target the same group of users that his site does. Chris also mentioned that the site continues to experience spectacular growth, attracting over 3 million users this month. Much of the growth has been attributed to organic sources (friends telling their friends) as well as the launch of the new Mixx communities.

I asked Chris about their monetization strategy and received the expected “we’re not currently focused on monetization” response. This afternoon I also posted that this has become an all too familiar response. If the site can continue to grow by leaps and bounds, the company may be justified in their delayed monetization strategy. I also spoke with Chris about a number of other things, so I definitely suggest listening to the podcast below!

 

 Interview With Chris McGill, CEO of Mixx.com [16:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Sebastien de Halleux, the Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Playfish, one of the top social gaming companies currently out there. The company also has some of the most engaging gaming applications currently on Facebook. Sebastien also discussed plans to expand beyond Facebook to other social networks as well as the iPhone.

I also had the opportunity to ask Sebastien whether he thought social gaming deserved the separation from casual gaming. Sebastien argued that it does deserve a clear distinction and that the term means baking social into the game design and making the game an object of social interaction. The games also get incrementally more fun as you add more friends to the game.

The social gaming space has been heating up most recently with Zynga’s $29 million round of funding. Currently the cost of social games has been low in comparison to traditional video games which have budgets in the six and seven figures as Sebastien points out. It’s an exciting time to be part of the social gaming space and Playfish is definitely one of the leaders. To learn more about Playfish and Sebastien’s thoughts on the social gaming space, listen to the podcast!

 

 Interview With Sebastiend de Halleux, Playfish [15:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Hadi about the new services being offered by iLike that they announced a couple weeks ago at f8. I actually did an interview with them at f8 but for some reason my recorder didn’t seem to work. This time it worked great and I’ve included my interview below. During the interview we discussed the impact of Facebook Connect on iLike as well as the launch of the new Great Apps program recently announced by Facebook. Hadi also was pleased by the new change in Facebook metrics that was announced today.

The company recently surpassed 30 million users on their applications across all of the sites that the are on including Facebook, MySpace and their destination site iLike.com. iLike is also preparing to release a developer API that enables developers to embed the entire version of various songs. Hadi gave the example of an application that creates a wedding playlist. I’m sure there are countless other examples of applications that can be built with this new API.

iLike, which was originally built out from GarageBand.com, is now the most popular social music service on the web. Listen to my podcast with Hadi to learn more.

Update
imeem contacted me to informat me that my statement about iLike being “the most popular social music service on the web” is in fact inaccurate. imeem is also the largest social music service in the world based on rights, reach and traffic.

 

 Interview With Hadi Partovi, President of iLike [12:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yesterday I had the opportunity to chat with Michael Dalesandro, CEO and Craig Ulliot, CTO and Founder of Where I’ve Been. The company has been building out a travel destination site off of Facebook and now also has offering on MySpace, Bebo, hi5 and Friendster. They also raised $1 million from angels a few months ago which apparently went unannounced. We are actually the first to publish this information.

Additionally the company is looking to raise another round of funding to help expand the company’s efforts to become the social travel vertical across the web. I asked Michael and Craig about their thoughts on the new iPhone platform and they said that they are working on launching the first version of their iPhone application. I’d bet that most companies in this space are working at building something on the iPhone as well.

Michael also said that Where I’ve Been is looking for a new round of funding. Listen up VCs! Here is a chance to get some skin in the social web game. Where I’ve Been has over 7 million active users and they are growing daily, not bad stats for a company with $1 million in funding. I also asked them if they plan on tackling the Where Am I Going issue that a number of other web startups (such as WAYN) have already begun tackling.

They said that they plan on providing this service as well but under the amount of resources they currently have available it has been challenging. Listen to my podcast below to hear more about where the Where I’ve Been team is going!

 

 Interview with Craig Ulliot & Mike Dalesandro [16:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download