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!

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!

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.

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!

Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak with Jia Shen, the CTO of RockYou about his thoughts on the new platform design and Facebook Connect. RockYou is well positioned to adapt to a changing platform given that they have operated in much more volatile environments in the past. RockYou was launched on MySpace before social platforms even exist, putting their company at the mercy of MySpace who would shut down their applications without notice or explanation.

While RockYou recently had one of their applications shut down on Facebook, they now operate in a much more stable environment driving over 1 billion impressions a month. Jia sounds prepared to adapt to the new platform changes and is actually excited about where the platform is going. I also briefly discussed RockYou’s expansion on to other platforms outside of the U.S. Jia said that they are currently on Xiaonei and things appear to be going well there.

I discussed much more with Jia so if you’d like to hear more about the future of RockYou and Jia’s thoughts on the Facebook platform announcements, listen to the podcast below!

I gave a pretty thorough overview of the Mark Zuckerberg keynote over on AllFacebook earlier today. If you missed it and would like to listen to the audio version, I’ve included the podcast below. Some of the audio is not that loud but it should come through clearly. I’ll be posting more podcasts over the coming hours. Stay tuned!

Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak with Mike Jone of Userplane. We had time to discuss Userplane’s recent partnership announcement with Converdge. I also explored what services Userplane currently offers, what sort of monetization models Userplane currently uses and how Mike sees chat platforms evolving over the coming months.

One thing I brought up during the conversation was the recent launch of Meebo’s competing platform and what his thoughts were. I also suggested that AOL work on acquiring Meebo to integrate into Userplane. Mike couldn’t confirm that an acquisition was in the works unfortunately!

Mike took time to discuss some new features that Userplane will be releasing in the coming weeks as well as discuss his thoughts on how Userplane fits into the social application space. Listen to my podcast with Mike to hear more!

This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Ian Swanson, one of the founders of Sometrics, a social analytics company. Sometrics help developers track additional information about their users in addition to providing a robust ad serving platform. The company is actively building strategic partnerships to expand across multiple platforms and is rapidly increasing their product offering.

During the podcast, Ian and I discussed what the current trends are in the social platform space. We also briefly discussed the privacy issues facing social platforms and analytics companies in general. Ian stressed how Sometrics focuses on ensuring that user data is always protected and remains anonymous on their platform.

Ian also mentioned future plans for the company as well as some interesting news items that will be released in the coming weeks. Definitely listen to my podcast with Ian Swanson to learn more about Sometrics.

This afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with Jim Benedetto, the Senior Vice President of Technology over at MySpace. We discussed the new MySpace Data Availability which launched yesterday. Jim and I discussed MySpace’s position in relation to competing platforms as well as some of the underlying technical issues pertaining to the new service.

The podcast was probably one of the shortest one ever since Jim was very concise in responding to my questions. Earlier I asked people on Twitter, Plurk and Facebook what questions they would like to have answered and most of them were responded to. One reader asked if the iPhone works with the new MySpace Data Availability service.

While I assumed that the service works with pretty much any web-based technology, Jim confirmed that the new service does indeed work with iPhones. Does this mean we’ll soon see a number of mobile implementations? Probably but I’m not so sure how soon we’ll see this being implemented. I’ve already spoken with a number of mobile services who said that they plan to build software around the new services being offered by Facebook and MySpace.

Check out my interview to with Jim to learn more about the new Data Availability service.

This week I had the opportunity to speak with Scott Rafer of Lookery. Lookery is a social media ad network which launched when the Facebook platform launched. Scott and his business partner began building a basic backend to connect the advertisers and the inventory. In contrast to one of my previous podcasts where the ad network was focused on generating the maximum CPM, Lookery focuses on filling bulk inventory.

In turn this means that their CPMs are closer to the bottom than the top but the bottom line is that they can fill inventory and in a world of limitless inventory, that’s an important role. Scott was very straight-forward during our podcast with Lookery’s model of generating revenue and what their business model is.

One of the things that stood out to me during our inventory was that Scott suggests that focusing on trying to target people with demographic data really isn’t working currently and this is something they aren’t focused on. While they do try to provide a basic level of targeting, they are not trying to revolutionized the advertising world with their business model. They simply fill inventory and fill it effectively.

Check out the podcast below to here more about Lookery’s business model and Scott’s thoughts on the future of advertising on the social web.