Wow, my mother would be proud I am taking her threats and using them in my daily life. I never really understood how foolish the logic ‘all your friends’ argument really was until the other night. I was eating with some friends trying to convince one of them to join twitter and other social networks.

Certainly the romantic setting of an Italian restaurant isn’t the right place to get into a Facebook debate, but I have some nerdy friends. Anyway, one of my friends is stark anti-social networking hardliner and I am convinced she will never convert.

Several of my friends and I worked her over through the course of the night but we were unable to change her opinion. We tried several arguments and at one point in the night almost resorted to bribery in the form of a very expensive piece of cheese cake.

Our arguments ranged from building stronger community and creating business contacts to the afore mentioned “all your friends are doing it.” I don’t know if it was the Sambuca and coffee talking but that last one sent my friend off.

Her argument centered on two main points: Bandwagoning and time management. Basically she said this, she was tired of her ‘technologically superior’ friends telling her about the latest and greatest new thing.

On this point I looked around the table and noticed she was the only one who wasn’t texting and twittering all night. I also noticed she is by far one of the best conversationalist I know. I honestly believe there is a connection between the two. She engages in conversation instead of annoying A.D.D. way that most technophiles handle it.

Her point on time management really sent a chill down the collective spine of the table. She confessed that if she tried social networking she would have to give up something to fit it into her day. Her social schedules is by far one of the busiest I know of and she wasn’t willing to give up any real world connections to create digital ones.

Finally she looked at me and said, “if all my friends are on social networks why do I need to be,” she stated with cold eyes. “I already know all of you.” She had won the argument and she knew it.

At times I really do think my friend is right other times I don’t. The point is this, my friend fails to see any value in social networking and until she does no reason will ever be compelling enough to make her join. Doing something because all your friends are doing it really isn’t that great of an argument.

How many of you agree with my friend that there is still a lack of compelling reasoning to join social networks? How many of you think you could convince her to join the social networking ‘revolution’? If you send me an argument I will forward it along, I am always looking for a reason to bother her.

LinkedIn will be launching company directory pages today. The pages show employees from the company as well as company data which has been compiled by Capital IQ. Aside from the addition of company data, these new pages are pretty much the same thing as network pages within Facebook. The only difference is that other people can view the pages without being members.

I’ve discussed this before, social networks are transforming the way that businesses find new employees. A college student trying to figure out which company to go join when they graduate (if that’s what they want to do), can simply do a search in Facebook and find all the employees that work there. After browsing through some of the employee profiles they can get a pretty good feeling for if that company is a place they want to work.

While I think these directory pages are a great addition, I don’t think LinkedIn profiles give you much insight to the personalities of the individuals. Instead they are promotional tools to simply display how connected you are as well as what type of clients you have worked with (via their recommendations system). As such, I think a lot of these features would be better leveraged on Facebook. Do you think these new pages are useful?

Image via Caroline McCarthy

One week ago AOL announced that they were acquiring Bebo for a whopping $850 million. The blogosphere was surprised by the acquisition and now one week later talk of AOL making a horrible decision is returning. Is this surprising? Not really. While Bebo was the second social platform to market, growth has become relatively stagnant.

According to Henry Blodget, executives at AOL have had some internal conflict over the acquisition. The primary issues highlighted were the inability for AOL to monetize social-network inventory, Bebo’s flattening growth and the belief that the Bebo founders will hit the road. If I was the Bebo founders I definitely would hit the road! We’ve heard stories of how expensive it was for Fox Interactive to keep on the MySpace founders on board.

I have to agree with Henry Blodget when he quotes Glengarry Glen Ross, “first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado, second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you’re fired.” Many believe that the social networking space is a two horse race and that’s how it will remain. While maintaining a site with millions of active users can be a steady business, you won’t see the type of growth that the leaders are experiencing.

This was a last ditch attempt at joining the social networking game and as I said last week, join the social graph race. What is confusing to me though is why doesn’t AOL simply focus on leveraging their instant messaging service? Building out instant message services that are comparable of competing services such as Trillian or even Facebook’s new IM service would help them to rebuild the failing AOL community.

Then again, I’ve been wondering about why AOL hasn’t reinvented their instant messaging service for years. Do you think AOL’s acquisition made any sense? Do you think leveraging their instant messaging service could prove valuable?

According to the Guardian, the Financial Times is launching an exclusive social network that will cost members up to $4,000 a year. This membership comes with the benefits of networking with “peers and luminaries operating within the digital, new media, mobile and telecoms sectors.” Benefits include tickets to one Financial Times conference, offline networking events and a 12-month premium subscription to the Financial Times website.

For those looking to take their social networking to the next level, this may be a great opportunity as long as you can afford the $4,000 price tag. Other social networks such as A Small World successfully used the exclusive model to attract a highly select group of individuals. Previously, there were rumors floating around that the Wall Street Journal may be launching a similar service in conjunction with LinkedIn. So far nothing has been confirmed.

Niche social networks tied with exclusivity provide a highly valuable service to its members. There is almost an infinite number of “exclusive” groups that could be targeted so I would expect to see these types of networks continue to pop up. One thing that I think would be useful on this network is to name a few of the participating members or at least the companies they represent. This would help some executives make a more informed decision about purchasing a membership.

Would you pay $4,000 for an exclusive social network?

Everyday countless new social networks are launched and there are new entrepreneurs that are brainstorming the next hot social network. The development of a social network is only the first hurdle in obtaining a critical mass. Chance are when you set out to develop the site it is going to take at least twice as long as you were originally planning. I’ve personally developed a social network from scratch so these are wise words from a once over-confident developer who thought he was building the next big thing.

The majority of social networks crash and burn before they ever reach the tipping point. The real challenge with social networks (and most businesses in general) is knowing when you are beating a dead horse or when you simply haven’t gained enough exposure. There is no perfect science for deciding what state you are at in the business cycle and all you can do is go by your gut. For most people reaching critical mass is the biggest challenge. So here are a few thoughts on how you can reach the tipping point for launching your social network:

• Find a niche that hasn’t been targeted that also has a high demand and dominate it - This one is pretty much left to seeing an opportunity and going after it. Timing is critical. I can thank timing for the success of my AllFacebook blog. One extremely useful tip I would say is use freely available tools to simply test out your concept before heavily investing in building a custom solution. The site doesn’t need to be perfect to determine that there is a strong deman.
• Have a big name investor - Want to get a great kick start? Launch your social network and announce that Peter Thiel invested in it. That should get you an article in the New York Times and the longtail resulting from that single article should get you an initial base of users.
• Get a marketing budget - For those social networks that are not an instant success you’ve got to market it! One of the standard marketing practices I see with these sites is giveaways. I don’t think that’s necessarily the ticket. When I launched my social network years ago I made a script that crawled the web and collected band names and phone numbers. That’s definitely a spam tactic but close to 5 percent of recipients registered for the site. Pick and choose your marketing tools but make sure not to overspend in any one area. Diversification and repetition is key in marketing.
• Participate in the conversation - Rather than trying to get people to come to your site, go to where they’re talking. On blogs, at events and on other community sites, directly target people that would be perfect members of your site. If everybody is your target market then your market is too big and you might want to go back to the drawing board.
• Hire a community manager - Conversation is critical if you are going to build a successful social network. Get someone who is actively engaging all new users. You also need to make sure that the person who you hire is interested in talking with your community members. Not every community manager is fit for your social network.
• Define what success is - Make sure you have tangible goals set. Don’t aim to have 200,000 users if your market size is only 20,000. Create a time line with obtainable goals and go after them. When you go to your investor and are explaining why you only have 5,000 users explain that it’s because your market size is only 150,000 If that doesn’t work for your investor use the advice of my good friend Shipigler:

Have any other useful tips that have worked for you in obtaining users to your social network?

This weekend I was pondering the existence of many of the niche social networks that exist out on the web. A quick look at the growth in traffic for Ning.com shows that there is a huge demand for sites catering to specialized interests. Can’t all of the discussion that takes place on the niche social networks just as easily take place on a site like Facebook or MySpace? Why do we need to have distinct websites for each of these conversations?

Ultimately even a blog can be a social network in theory since it assists in connecting people but in this instance I am referring specifically to social networking websites that enable users to present public profiles of themselves. My online identity has become so distributed that it is occasionally overwhelming. As we age and obtain new priorities, the time available for socializing via the web decreases dramatically.

Wouldn’t it be much more useful to keep all of our conversation contained within one location? It would make for easier management and better organization. While I know that this won’t be happening anytime soon (this is the internet, a distributed platform), perhaps we will see conversation consolidation. Do you think there really is a need for niche social networks? Are you an avid participant of any niche social networks?

Following the rumors surrounding Fox’s attempt at merging their interactive division with Yahoo, bloggers have been postulating about what MySpace would be valued at. Fred Wilson suggests that Microsoft is going to have to now pay a premium for Yahoo! thanks to their ridiculous $15 billion valuation of Facebook. Today Henry Blodget posts about Microsoft potentially increasing their bid.

Regardless of the valuation that Yahoo! receives, social networks have become some of the largest entities on the web earning them outlandish valuations without even having an effective revenue model. All of this has happened in just a few years and brings back memories of the web portal days when everyone and their mother was working on creating a new web portal that would become the next Yahoo! Fortunately we are beyond those days but I’m still receiving inquiries from people that want their own social network.

So do you think the billion dollar valuations being thrown around are currently justifiable?

You have seen it. You are reading an article on a website about something you find interesting and you see that little “digg this” button down at the bottom. Heck most of us bloggers put it on our own sites.

While many of us complain about the digg effect we often, in some deep self loathing section, hope something we post gets dugg. Sure it means a ton of one time visitors that will clog our tubes, but we all want to feel special.

Now I twitter, I love twitter, it is a fun and interesting way to interact with people around the world. Today while surfing the web I ran into a button that said “twit this”. Finding out where the button went I ended up at a website called twitthis.com. The site does exactly what you think it does, makes it easy for you to tweet about a web page.

This concept both excited me and frighted me at the same time. Are websites now going to be competing for the twitter effect? Are we going to start spamming all our friends about random web pages via twitter? Is twitter about to be packaged and sold like digg?

The marketing side of me loved this idea, reach potentially thousands of people through some of their closest contacts. The twitter lover in me became scared, what if all I loved about twitter goes away. I am pretty sure that twitter won’t become as bad as digg, but who knows it could happen.

With this latest development are you scared of the direction twitter might take? Can you see people talking about the “twitter effect” in the future? Can twitter survive a mass flux of users? As we have seen, if usage goes up, twitter tends to go down.

Yesterday, Ann Handley posted an article on The Huffington Post about how it’s rapidly becoming too much work to maintain all the contacts that she amassed on Facebook. This is become a serious problem for many of us as we now have social tools that enable us to stay connected with a much larger number of contacts than ever before. We end up with hundreds if not thousands of contacts spread across our email, social networks, instant message clients and countless websites.

On Friday I discussed how social media is overwhelming. This has become a serious problem. This isn’t really a new problem but is instead a problem that more people face thanks to the new technologies that make it easier to stay connected with others. A simple wall post on Facebook, tweet reply to someone on Twitter or web based purchase of a gift package for that special client can be all it takes to maintain a relationship.

Now multiply that activity by hundreds and you suddenly end up with a lot of time being spent in order to stay connected. There are definite trade-offs for staying connected. On one end you can stay connected with people that you care about as well as those that will bring you future business. On the other you now have a visualization of relational opportunity (a phrase I’ve made up to represent the added value of maintaining a connection) and decide that it’s better to maintain hundreds or thousands of connections to avoid the missed opportunity by not keeping in touch.

So how do we handle the overload after overbuilding our personal networks (which is inevitable on social networks)? I personally haven’t come up with a perfect solution but here are a few ideas I’ve come up with:

• Understand your personal threshold - Rather than obsessively commenting on everything that any of your friends or family post be selective about what you take the time to discuss. Ultimately the discussion has only begun once you make a statement in response to any of your contacts’ actions.
• Limit your social network activity - Rather than spending hours a day on Facebook or another social network, limit the amount of time you spend on them and specify the times of day that you will surf through your contacts.
• Outsource your life - Personally, I don’t like this option but Tim Ferris claims to have been successful at it. If you want to try this route there is really no limit on how large your network can get. The alternative to this is hiring your own personal assistant but I’d assume most of us cannot afford such a luxury.
• Leverage the newsfeed - Rather than browsing across all of the sites you have activity on, personal newsfeeds such as FriendFeed and Facebook’s newsfeed will help us to filter out what is important and what isn’t. While we aren’t there yet it is coming soon.

Have any other useful tools for managing social networking activity? Do you think it’s possible to maintain a large digital identity? I surely haven’t figured out an effective way yet. I’d love to get any advice you have.

WooMe, the online network for fast, virtual introductions recently secured another sizable round of funding and is closing in on 100,000 users just a few months after its launch. The site offers a place to host or join back to back speed sessions with people, live in voice and video.

WooMe is very easy to use and gets right down to its business: making people introductions faster and easier. Access to rich profiles prior to discussions, a privilege competitor Speeddate does not grant, makes the selection process slightly less hit-or-miss. In addition, within sessions, users can list their interests or preferred discussion topic keywords so that other Wooers can instantaneously relate.

This feature certainly facilitates discussion and alleviates some of the awkwardness of speed dating. When thinking about first dates or introductions, one often conjures up the agonizing memories of nervously firing questions, desperately searching for common ground. WooMe displays that common ground just as the first word is uttered.

Furthermore, much like the Facebook application Define Me, Wooers can choose words to describe each other. These tags are used on personal profiles to build reputations. These basic networking tools provide a decent amount of metadata to make the process of meeting people more enjoyable and relevant.

As others have suggested, WooMe has the potential to expand beyond speed dating. Interviewing for all sorts of purposes seems to be the logical step toward advancing the service, but I’m not convinced that it is the right environment—at least not currently. When I began interviewing for jobs, I made sure to update my various social networking profiles accordingly, removing information I felt might be deemed inappropriate by company insiders.

Access to my profiles is permission based, but there was always that looming “But what if…?” If WooMe is to become a site for professional recruitment, access to profiles, defining characteristics and interests is going to have to be regulated because I don’t see an employer particularly appreciating an interest in “foreplay” or “kinky” as a defining characteristic. Or maybe he or she will, depending on the company—only kidding.

The point is, if WooMe is to become a trusted platform for meeting other professionals, it will have to address the issue of the service’s inherently casual nature. I doubt LinkedIn or Monster would be the success it is today if social or more personal information were readily available to users within the service.

But in the meantime, if you are into speed dating or other types of quick and casual conversations, give WooMe a spin.