Married on MySpace. It’s got alliteration, but does it have your vote of confidence? In partnership with Endemol, the production company behind a number of reality shows made for television and the web, MySpace is taking vows to give users the wedding of their dreams.

The new interactive online series is set to air in May, with 13 episodes and a live wedding ceremony concluding the show in August, but submissions for the show open up today. The deadline is April 17th and the finalists for Married on MySpace will be announced on April 24th. Similar to wedding shows seen on morning news programs or the Lifetime Network, its the viewers (in this case, MySpace users) that determine which lucky couple will get an all-expenses-paid wedding.
Read the rest of this entry »

Cliqset, which officially launches its public beta today, is one of the several companies looking to make online networking easier for the individual. With goals as grand as OpenID, Cliqset is actually working in tandem with the established methods of “portable profiles” in order to push the trend forward, providing an ever-accessible omnipresence for end users that benefits the participating publishers and site owners as well. With such a seamless concept for site accessibility, Cliqset presents itself as an immediate socialization tool, providing instant networks for sites, while bridging the gap between computer-based and mobile applications as well. Below is an interview with Darren Bounds, co-Founder and President of Cliqset.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the past hour or so we’ve noticed an increase in the number of Twitter users that are seeing AJAX update refreshes on their Twitter home pages. Is Twitter experimenting with AJAX for tweet updates?

I haven’t witnessed it myself but the Web Distortion blog has grabbed a screen shot of the new option; at the bottom of the profile page the “Older” button has been replaced with “More.” Clicking on “more” will load new tweets on top of the old ones, without refreshing the entire page.

The “more” button’s sporadic appearances lead us to believe that Twitter is still in the testing phases for a new AJAX feature, which would be quite helpful for a number of users that stick to the main website for the bulk of their Twitter activity. It would also be a rather big update for Twitter, which has remained a largely basic and unchanged service since its launch.

It’s been the third party developers that often create valuable added features such as AJAX updates, but perhaps the infringing competition from Facebook is encouraging Twitter to push out more features on its own, especially if they’ll enhance the user experience directly on Twitter’s website.

Red Herring Global – Top 100 Tech Startups in the World – San Diego 2009

Qualcomm is driven by a vision of ubiquitous Internet connectivity, and sees itself as a key enabler for the wireless ecosystem that will bring global scale web access into reality. Qualcomm innovations will drive the Internet’s fundamental usage model of accessing information, people, services and content – adding wireless and location specific variables to the equation. Qualcomm prefers to maintain its role of “standing behind” the business models of telecom companies and handset makers. Qualcomm will leave the challenges and opportunities of creating LBS (Location Based Services) driven mobile social media experiences to social networking companies and start ups.

These are our key takeaways from Paul Jacobs, Chief Executive Officer of Qualcomm, in his keynote conversation with Alex Vieux, CEO and Publisher of Red Herring. Alex and Paul discussed his leadership experience at Qualcomm and the company’s vision for pervasive, global Internet access. The SocialTimes conversed with Paul afterward to probe more deeply as to how Qualcomm will help shape the global social media landscape .
Read the rest of this entry »

Many of you may have seen the star-studded concert last night in honor of President-elect Barak Obama, but the celebrity support goes far beyond last night’s performances. Katalyst Media, an original content production company that was founded by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg, has teamed up with MySpace Celebrity to promote celebrity pledges of service to Obama.

The videos, which were directed and produced by Demi Moore, feature messages from a plethora of celebrities that have all stated ways in which they plan to help lead the nationwide call for change that Obama’s presidential campaign inspired for so many. The videos, exclusive to MySpace Celebrity, are available beginning today, and have messages from Eva Longoria, Diddy, Nicole Richie, George Lopez, Ashlee Simpson, Courteney Cox, Dakota Fanning and many, many more.
Read the rest of this entry »

A new product called elements launched this week from the team behind Lunarr, and elements bears the same simplicity and effortlessness that its parent company is known for. At first glance elements may appear to be a media-updating tool akin to Twitter or Tumblr, but at its core lacks a specific design that evokes a method of fluid and continual sharing that can also be used for very specific ways of giving and gaining information from a select group of people.

To get a better understanding of what elements is, how it works and how it’s different, I interviewed co-founder Hideshi Hamaguchi.
Read the rest of this entry »

In private beta until today, the MixedInk collaborative writing platform has launched the public beta version of its product. This is a democratic writing and publishing platform that takes the Creative Commons license to the next level, enabling entire communities to work together on a single document or publication.

While this isn’t the first time this concept has been approached with an online tool, D.C.-based MixedInk is using a new angle for automating much of the process, essentially eliminating the need for wikis in the traditional sense, or even editors. As MixedInk promotes a democratic process, each document submitted by a member of the community can be voted upon, which pushes that document up in rank.
Read the rest of this entry »

CES 2009 (Consumer Electronics Show) – Billboard Digital Music Live

Soulja Boy Tell’Em Social Media Success

Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em launched himself to success through social media. Soulja Boy is generating tens of millions of dollars in music and online digital revenue based on success achieved in social media. Soulja Boy told his story today at the CES‘ Digital Music Live, to a crowd of traditional record executives and digital media start ups. Soulja Boy started on SoundClick.com at the age of 16, uploading tracks that were downloaded 35K times a day at their peak.
Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting trend has started over the past couple days. This weekend Jason Calacanis announced the he was no longer blogging and was instead switching to a newsletter. Initially he suggested that he was limiting the number of subscribers to 750 but soon enough that number was surpassed and there is no sign that it’s stopping. Then today Caroline McCarthy published that Glam Media would be joining the newsletter market.

Blogs clearly have there limits when it comes to revenue and as such most blogs extend into events, as I wrote about the over the weekend. The other model is newsletters and while the majority of people stuck in the social media bubble argue that this in a bad idea due to e-mail overload, my guess is that the average person doesn’t have the same problems that many of the readers of this blog do.

Even if they do have e-mail overload, it’s clear that e-mail newsletters remain to be a viable business model. Just take a look at Daily Candy or Digital Media Wire. Both have developed substantial business models around newsletters and events. The best part of the newsletter business is that once you have subscribers they are much more locked in than a blog where you need to encourage readers to come back on a daily basis.

In the world on new media, developing a sustainable revenue model continues to prove to be challenging. Even still, numerous companies are trying to take a shot at it as the business models for traditional media outlets become shaky. All of this is a race toward what appears to be inevitable acquisition of the best developed new media companies.

Do you think newsletters will continue to be a legitimate business model or do you think the trend is toward blogs and other platforms?

Over the past few months, Twitter has been plagued with downtime. They even went so far as to turn of their replies feature, turn off their API and turn off IM integration. The result was that some of the most vocal community members started running elsewhere. Whether it was Plurk, Identi.ca or FriendFeed, there was immediately conversations going on all over the place.

Last night new numbers came out showing that Twitter wasn’t on the decline though and instead it was actually rising in traffic. Those numbers were provided by Quantcast. I’m not so sure about Quantcast numbers though and will be waiting to see what the Compete stats show when they are released in the next couple days.

What is important here is that there appears to be a vocal community which is now active across a ton of sites. How do they maintain their activity? Well, managing their social media identities has become a full-time gig. There is no possible way to be active on all these sites and also have another full-time job. At this point I would say that the social media evangelists and thought leaders have over evangelized the products out there.

I have been evangelizing Plurk, but with FriendFeed and the multiple other sites, I no longer know how to maintain my micro-blogging livelihood. Will the evangelists kill Twitter by running to another site? Probably not. As MG Siegler puts it, “the only thing Twitter has to fear is Twitter itself.” I think sometimes we get a little too carried away with the next shiny object. If Twitter can manage to continue running and can get their act together, I think they’ll continue to be the leading micro-blogging service.

In the meantime, you can figure out if you want to follow the thought leaders off the cliff into micro-blogging bankruptcy. I took the jump. Will you?