If managing your applications on three platforms wasn’t already enough for you, two more platforms will be going live next week: Orkut and hi5. While there are few details as to viral distribution on Orkut, hi5 has provided details about their viral distribution channels. Of particular significance is that “there are no limits to how many friends a user can invite.” This sounds similar to the Facebook platform when it launched.

These launches will be more significant than the Bebo launch considering that hi5 and Orkut are the 8th and 10th (respectively) most visited sites on the web according to Alexa.com. With no limits on invitations for friends we may see a similar gold rush to those applications that launched on the Facebook platform. Both platforms will launch using the OpenSocial standard bringing the total number of potential users via OpenSocial far greater than Facebook.

Add together MySpace’s platform and Facebook’s viral distribution channels and hi5 is setting up to be a significant launch. Next week will surely be a big week as the reach of social platforms is set to almost double. For one person, attempting to monitor all the action on all the platforms is extremely challenging but extremely exciting. For development teams building on each of the platforms, being ready for launch on all sites is not only challenging but close to impossible.

This first quarter of this year has been transformational for the social platform space.

Today is mobile friday (I wanted it to be mobile monday but what can I do?). According to their press release, Verizon Wireless customers can now access MySpace Mobile on all Mobile Web 2.0-enabled phones. I’m not quite sure what Mobile Web 2.0-enabled phones are but apparently it is a Verizon service. The new service enables customers to access:

• Message Management – Just as it is called, users can read their messages as well as send in reply with all their friends as well as respond to friend requests. This is greater then the services currently provided by Facebook’s Blackberry application.
• View Photo Albums – You can browse through your albums on your phone. There was no comment on whether or not you can view your friends pictures.
• Viewing Friends – Just like on the standard version of MySpace, users can browse through all of their friends’ profiles from their verizon handled device.
• Friend Search – Not only can you browse through your friends’ profiles but you can also search for others. So if you want to spend time looking at random peoples’ profiles on your phone, now you can!
• Comments & Blog Postings – Just as you can do on your PC, you can post comments and update blogs. Also, “any new information entered will be posted to a member’s mobile and online MySpace profile simultaneously.”

From my recollection, this service is a premium service and users need to pay a monthly fee to access MySpace. It is most likely combined with their “Mobile Web 2.0″ service which, has a pretty horrible name. This news highlights the rapid growth of the mobile space for social networking. 2008 is going to most definitely see continued growth in the mobile space. Are you a “Mobile Web 2.0″ subscriber?

I’m about to drive downtown to speak at the Boomer Business Summit on a panel about social networks and blogs for boomers. This is definitely foreign territory for me. The main boomers I know are my parents and their friends. So how are boomers using social networks? I know that both my parents are on Facebook and use the site regularly. I don’t think they are the average boomer though.

I’m curious to find out what type of social networks the boomers are involved in and what their thoughts on transparency are. As I posted about this morning, Gary Vaynerchuk suggests that the world is going to become increasingly transparent and we won’t be able to hide from ourselves. Ultimately the truth about everyone will be public information. I think that the boomers may be one of the last generations that aren’t totally transparent.

Then again I have friends that avoid putting all their information online. They are not going to become Twitter users anytime soon. They use the web for email, instant messaging, news and stalking their friends on Facebook. Are you a boomer? What types of social networks are you active on? Do you think boomers are more hesitant to become more transparent? What suggestions do you think I should make for the boomers while at the conference?

According to Andrew Einhorn, Indiana has now banned sex offenders from all social networks, chat rooms and instant message applications. While the ban will be put in place it doesn’t ensure that they won’t still use the services. As such parents should still be actively involved in monitoring their children’s online activity.

As children become socially engaged online at a younger age, the security of children is becoming increasingly important. As such various measures are being taken across the country but these actions take time as they work their way through our government’s bureaucratic systems. My guess is that we will soon see the active monitoring of computer use by registered sex offenders.

It’s a similar concept to house arrest. If you are a threat to society online, you probably should be monitored. We are going to see a huge wave of legal issues arise over the next decade all related to online issues. As citizens spend more time online, it is increasingly important to protect individuals’ privacy. Additionally as more time is spent online I have a feeling that we will begin to see the policing of digital activity. What do you think?

Social networking sites are increasingly becoming a center of activity on the web. MySpace and Facebook have become the modern day portals. Last week, Sarah Perez suggested that social networks will soon become the next iTunes in that they will become the center of media distribution. Back in November I suggested that social networks will become the new T.V.

Ultimately Sarah and I are both saying the same thing. The real question I have though is will these sites continue to exist 5 years from now? If these sites fail to exist 5 years from now, how can they be the new television? Ultimately there are only a few components that are used heavily on social networks: user profiles, friend lists and search. More recently there is the addition of newsfeeds as well.

When I began to write this article, my initial argument was that all of these features can be theoretically abstracted and don’t need to exist within a the traditional sense of a “social network site.” Charlene Li has been saying the same thing for the past few months and while listening to a podcast last night on the future of social networks, pre-recorded at last year’s AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, many of the panelists seemed to agree. Last week I stopped writing this post halfway through though because I began to wonder if this argument is accurate.

Could social networks really be totally abstracted? Would Facebook, which is this generation’s phonebook, really be abstracted to the point where other people create other directories based on their social graph? Twitter already provides complete open access and with the addition of friend grouping features you have a completely open social graph. Somebody is bound to do it, but then again the site that decides to open will need to already have a significant portion of the worldwide social graph.

While this could happen, it will require the average joe to understand the implications of entering all their personal data into this massive (and open) database. Otherwise, I don’t see a reason for the average Facebook user or MySpace user to go recreate their highly complex networks on another site. While I believe openness should and will win, I’m not quite sure how this will take place. Many will point to Friendster and say that users then were willing to easily leave the site.

My argument for those individuals is that the users had not completely entered their entire network. For highly connected individuals, it is extremely difficult to move all of that information to another site. Then again, I use Salesforce.com to manage all my contacts and they provide an export feature. With a little bit of effort my social graph could become portable.

Every time I think about it though, I come back to the same question: would the average Joe understand and do this? Do you think this is destined to happen? Will social networks become just like air and totally transparent? Perhaps there will be two classes of people, those with completely portable social graphs and those that stay locked-in to one site. What do you think?

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?

Saying that MySpace’s application approval process is far from being streamlined would be a serious understatement. I have been speaking with a number of developers over the past few days who have been listing off the multiple issues taking place with the recently launched MySpace platform. Applications have been mysteriously disappearing from the application directory, other apps have been turned off without warning.

The applications have been suspended and then the developers are taking their issues to the forums and on IRC. The largest complaint appears to be people who have their application mistakenly suspended. The most frequent cause is that the developers have improperly set the image and description for the application but for others the application randomly switches into suspended mode.

According to another developer I spoke with, there are still substantial security issues with the new MySpace platform. One issue was that the OAuth version being used by MySpace is not a standard version. As such, changes need to be made to the code to adjust for this. While I don’t know about the technical aspects of this, it definitely sounds like it would be a pain the ass.

There also appears to be other technical difficulties for an unfortunate few. After having their applications approved, they are not able to add it to their profile. For those that aren’t developers, many of these issues can be brushed off as technical difficulties but for those that are building the applications the issues can be seriously time consuming and in turn a poor use of internal resources.

One developer I spoke with today said that he wasn’t too concerned about the timely launch of his application because ultimately, a few thousand users “really isn’t that significant” when looking at the bigger picture. While I’m not sure if I agree with this argument, I do think that companies need to carefully assess whether or not investing significant resources in an unfinished platform that changes hourly is a good idea.

Want to track the rapid growth of MySpace applications? Now you don’t need to refresh the MySpace application directory. Thanks to the D.C. based HungryMachine team (who recently launched LivingSocial), you can now graph each of the applications. This is an initial revision and while the directory isn’t pretty, it gets the job done.

SocialMedia, the creator of the original Appsaholic which launched on Facebook early last year, probably won’t be too happy with this new application. The best part about the MyAppsaholic site is that it is already in leaderboard format, similar to Adonomics aside from the application valuations which many have criticized for being unrealistic. The HungryMachine team will be adding features as requested.

If you’d like to see more features go Twitter Eddie Frederick and he’ll add them. The next few weeks are going to be exciting as we watch one platform launch after the other. Many are betting that MySpace is the next top platform to launch on given their large user base. Conversely, I’ve heard many criticize statistics on MySpace’s user base claiming that the numbers are inaccurately represented due to the massive number of bots being used to spam users.

While Comscore and Nielsen may not be completely accurate, you can rest assured that MyAppsaholic is providing accurate statistics on MySpace application growth. Go check it out!

As I spend an increasing amount of time on social networks, I have begun wondering when social networking stopped being something that you do for fun and became a daily chore. In 2002 I received an invite to Friendster which at the time was an invite only social network. I was excited and immediately began to connect with all of my friends that I knew on the site. Then MySpace launched and all of my friends shifted to the new and cool social network and I suddenly re-connected with the same friends.

Soon after MySpace launched I tried creating my own social network only to have Facebook, the network that I now obsessively cover, beat me to the punch. This story is not about how I got beat out by a formidable competitor but instead about how soon enough social networking would become more of a task than an enjoyable past-time. LinkedIn was the beginning of using social networking professionally but at some point last year, Facebook also became the network of choice for many of my professional contacts.

Once that occurred, Facebook suddenly became a chore for me. Perhaps I am to blame as I set up a blog that was specifically about Facebook. Facebook became my job and as such it became party of my daily routine. I have a feeling that this isn’t only happening to me though and is now a problem that many of us face. Has social networking become a job for you? Is it something that you do in your free time or have you now forced yourself to use it for managing you business contacts?