Bebo Puts SocialThing to Work. Is It Too Late?
Posted by Kristen Nicole on December 11th, 2008 4:06 PM
Yes, Bebo has joined the ranks of the larger social networks out to take your soul. Yesterday’s announcement from Bebo revealed its new Social Inbox, which not only lets you log in using their AOL and AIM credentials, but will aggregate social feeds, mail and media recommendations from a host of services including witter, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Gmail, Yahoo, and AOL (of course).
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(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
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Do We Need a MySpace Toolbar?
Posted by Kristen Nicole on December 11th, 2008 2:23 PM
There’s a lot of connectedness going on lately. And MySpace is looking to stay at the forefront of it all. After announcing MySpaceID along with a new partnership with browser Flock and authentication service, it’s pretty clear that MySpace wants to make its features as easily accessible as possible. Today, the new MySpace toolbar continues these efforts, with a browser add-on that gives you omnipresent access to your MySpace account and quick links to various features.
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(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5) Loading ...hi5 Takes on Virtual Gifting
Posted by Kristen Nicole on December 10th, 2008 5:00 PM
Virtual gifting worked for Facebook. So hi5 is trying its hand at the virtual economy as well. Today, the hi5 social network is announcing a new gifting application called hi5 Gifts. Similar to a recent application launched by Facebook, hi5 Gifts revolves around holiday-related virtual presents. With an initial offering of 36 virtual gifts, each present will represent a particular world custom or culture. These gifts will be based on holiday traditions and other customs, such as a virtual “Rosca,” a cake that Mexicans eat on January 6th to celebrate Three Kings’ Day.
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(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5) Loading ...Watch Full Season of The Office on Splashcast
Posted by Kristen Nicole on December 10th, 2008 2:10 PM
Media aggregator and distributor Splashcast has teamed up with Hulu for a distribution deal that automatically updates Splashcast players with available Hulu content. This includes popular shows such as “The Office” and “The Simpsons.” With distribution options on social networks like MySpace and Facebook as well as embeddable players, Splashcast’s new partnership with Hulu will lead to entire seasons being made more available to end users and viewers from joint broadcasters NBC and FOX.
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(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5) Loading ...Branded Social Applications Come Under Fire
Posted by Nick O'Neill on December 10th, 2008 9:00 AM
Back in November I wrote that the new GlamApps program validated the business of branded social applications. Yesterday Brian Morrissey of AdWeek wrote that branded applications “are as popular as desolate Second Life islands.” In many cases Brian would be right. An advertiser launches an application, traffic surges after an initial ad campaign, and typically traffic falls off. Regularly, a small percentage of people stick around.
Take for example the “Ballers Network” which Nike launched and which Morrissey refers to in his article. He states “Despite its global ambitions and support in three languages, the application has a mere 3,400 users per month.” Now compare that to traditional advertising. How many monthly users does a T.V. or radio commercial have after the commercial has run? None.
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(2 votes, average: 3.5 out of 5) Loading ...Sometrics Experiences Continued Growth on Social Platforms
Posted by Kristen Nicole on December 9th, 2008 1:41 PM
As the first investment for recently formed capital group The Mailroom Fund, Sometrics launched last year in hopes of leveraging the increasing cross-network presence of user applications on the web. Over a year later, Sometrics is reporting 1,800 publishers of social applications and communities now using its social advertising and measurement solutions, with 1 billion ads served across its participating sites and networks.
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(6 votes, average: 3 out of 5) Loading ...MySpace Renames Data Availability to MySpace ID
Posted by Nick O'Neill on December 9th, 2008 11:22 AM
Last night MySpace announced that they would be renaming their Data Availability service to MySpace ID in addition to supporting Google’s Friend Connect. The announcement comes as both Google and Facebook roll out their single sign in services which attempt to help sites by giving them an easy way to integrate communities and with Facebook have access to user feeds.
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(1 votes, average: 2 out of 5) Loading ...Friendster Patents “Social Matching”
Posted by Kristen Nicole on December 9th, 2008 3:00 AM
After three patents relating to social networking, Friendster is at it again. The fourth patent for Friendster, called “Compatibility Scoring of Users in a Social Network,” seemingly pertains to matching users within the Friendster network for various purposes.
So far, Friendster is being pretty tight-lipped about its intended use of its new patent, and there’s only so much we can conjecture based on the patent’s name and the brief description of “scoring the compatibility between two members of a social network based on their interests and scoring the correlation between two interests for a given member of a social network.”
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(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5) Loading ...Google: Good With Widgets, Not With Feeds
Posted by Nick O'Neill on December 8th, 2008 4:54 PM
When Google launched their Friend Connect service publicly last week, they one-upped Facebook by providing publishers with an easy to install widget on their site for instantly creating a community. While the features weren’t robust, it made it so that anybody could instantly implement the service on their site. In contrast, Facebook rolled out their service with the a few partners, many of which have still yet to go live.
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(1 votes, average: 2 out of 5) Loading ...Obama’s Policy Changes Now Open for Discussion
Posted by Kristen Nicole on December 8th, 2008 4:16 PM
New policies announced by the incoming Obama administration highlight how social technology will be used to shape policy making. While Obama’s administration is clearly playing it safe when it comes to appointee online participation, for fear of embarrassing the new President-elect, it doesn’t mean that Obama doesn’t support leveraging the online medium for connecting with the people.
According to CNet, Obama’s transition team will be posting policy documents from official meetings with outside organizations publicly on the team’s site Change.gov. The site itself is intended to be a transitional website, aimed at forming a conduit for ongoing discussions between the administration and the people. So in a way, Change.gov becomes a socially-driven forum for conversing about policies and related questions and concerns having to do with the organizations meeting with the Obama administration.
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