The Cisco Applying Web 2.0 to Your Business Challenges video is a must watch for every company not fully immersed in the world of social networking and new media. Robert Scoble and Jeremiah Owyang. I can’t recommend this video about how using wiki’s, blogs, social media and interaction is changing (and has been changing) business for a long time. Basically, if your company doesn’t have someone immersed in social networking tools first hand - hire one. Get someone in your company to give you feedback on what’s going on in this space. You only need to see the first 30 minutes.

Hi5 (yet another social network) is launching their OpenSocial based platform today (well really tomorrow and over the next few weeks) and have done a really great job communicating with developers how stuff is going to work. For example, letting developers know what will and won’t be working in their release plan. Facebook and MySpace could learn a good lesson here in communication. Stop being vague with your plans and let your developers and advocates know what’s up. Facebook has made some great strides with their notifications around larger platform changes, but the small stuff is still an open question.

Today I noticed a new tab in the application editor making it infinitely easier for developers of OpenSocial applications to adopt the MySpace platform. I first said they should be doing this two weeks ago and I’m happy to announce that they are. They now allow for the simple monolithic XML file to define your application. This is a great step forward. Their platform is becoming more robust and stable each day. Kudos to them, but they still have a lot to do as Nick O’Neill pointed out yesterday.

I saw on Forbes this morning that Time Warner is buying the social network Bebo for $850 million. My experience with Bebo hasn’t been great so far, it’s a blend of the best parts of MySpace and Facebook, but without the reliability or audience size of either. Granted my experience has been narrow - focused primarily on application development after they launched their platform based on the Facebook’s FBML.

AOL, the Internet division of Time Warner, said on Thursday that it was buying the social networking site Bebo for $850 million in cash, placing it in position to go head to head with News Corp.’s MySpace as well as Facebook.

What AOL fails to realize is that it’s original online presence was in fact a social network that they channeled into a portal. Now they’re looking to buy the 3rd - albeit a distant 3rd - largest social network to regain their original community of users. Kind of sad actually. Stats on the top 3 networks from complete.com below. Notice bebo’s not much more than a blip on the radar of MySpace and Facebook. As they say, “good luck with that.” I hope they don’t spam all the Bebo users with free AOL CD’s.

Today MySpace announced that the shift to OpenSocial 0.7 is completed and now they’re actively debugging it. The problem is, that most of the critical components, such as the ability to make AJAX requests, for any company looking to more widely leverage their existing databases are unable to do any testing at all! After setting aside my fears that OAuth wouldn’t be implemented in time, MySpace delivered yesterday OAuth signed requests. I’m really thankful that we can now use OpenSocial 0.7 within their container, but I’d be much happier if it all was working more than 48 hours before the soft launch. Their relay proxy machines have been down for nearly 12 hours now, putting a great crimp in development time. Does Rupert Murdoch own a pizza delivery chain or a significant interest in Red Bull?

Just saw a tweet about this from SXSW conference folks. Drop.io is providing private online temporary storage to folks - and the cool part is you can add items using just about any method you can think of, email, phone, computer… you get the idea. I decided to give it a try to see what the service was like. The site is very responsive and the application is simple and easy to understand. The announcement from SXSW is that the company is working on a Facebook app to bring this very cool functionality directly into Facebook. (more…)

MySpace, often considered noisy, brash and childish, is moving their platform into the hands of their users on Thursday (3/13) and developers are scrambling to get their widgets together. This is critical because of a serious first mover advantage that exists. MySpace has a huge daily user base, larger than Facebook, and will make or break widget companies who aren’t ready.

Compete’s metrics are revealing, an audience size roughly 2x larger than Facebook’s is nothing to sneeze at. Watch out Thursday as the gloves come off. What remains to be seen, is the growth rate that is possible with MySpace. Facebook apps had huge viral success due largely in part to very few early limitations on application interactions. That has all changed and apps are finding it harder and harder to grow their userbase. Now apps are limited to organic channels and may find branching into different networks more challenging.

Presumably, MySpace has learned from some of Facebook’s early mistakes. However, existing companies already have access to large networks of users through the Facebook audience with which they can promote their new MySpace applications. Of course it remains to be seen how large the overlap of users is from one network to the next.

Making me recall a certain Onion story, MySpace today made me a loser with no friends. The odd think about this is that if I were to re-connect to the friends I had, I’m unable to because we’re already friends. However, when viewing their profiles, they’re set to private. Clearly some type of bug has affected my user account or a cache somewhere has been corrupted. The authorities have been notified. (more…)

Yesterday I posted about how bleak the social networking landscape was becoming on Facebook and by extension, other social networks as well. Today I want to explore what a traditional media and existing business can do to promote themselves on Facebook without assuming that a widget is the panacea to save their business. This is another excerpt from a proposal I developed and felt was worth sharing with the community at large.

Gone are the days of instant success large scale applications. Users have a plethora of options when selecting their applications. For example, Twitter has their own application - but there are more than 20 others that seek to compete against it, each leveraging the utility of Twitter in it’s own way. Success in this overly saturated market will come from the niche audiences and remixing successful sites that are not already on Facebook.

Businesses need to leverage the “page” feature more extensively on Facebook to build up their brand as well as a buzz. The “fans” of this page have indirectly offered you their email address through Facebook. While you can’t export them into your current email marketing campaign system, you can still target these folks directly using updates. You can promote products, actions and even feature partnerships. Very few companies are effectively leveraging this right now. (Red) and Presidential Candidate Barack Obama being two I’ve seen, although there are likely others.

Companies that have existing media outlets such as newsletters, brochures and websites can leverage their existing media to build the fan base within Facebook. Creating an online persona for their product or service is the first step. When users take action within the Facebook “page” they’re actions are recorded and eligible for promotion on their friends and larger network news feeds. This viral component is critical for success because their friends likely have similar interests. This indirect endorsement of your product reaches a like minded audience that is between 1 and 5,000 people each time one person becomes a fan, rates your application and so on. The implications are huge; it gets your brand in front of many many more people. MySpace is slowly copying this feature, under the name Friend Updates, from Facebook. This is a powerful tool that companies need to leverage effectively in their social networking strategy. How access to this feed of information is gated by MySpace will be interesting to watch as their platform goes live.

To show an example of this, I recently created a Blackberry Pearl “page”. With out advertisement, corporate sponsorship or endorsement by the parent company - without having any real content - it continues to attract “fans” whom I can now send messages to as I see fit! Not unlike traditional media, it’s important to respect your users, but you can see the power here. If RIM were to provide incentives on this page, they could grow this into a powerful advocating tool. Incidentally, if someone from RIM would like to take over this page, please just let me know. I’ve also noticed someone else followed suit and has created one for the Curve.

Depending on your core business, there may be an existing Facebook application that you can leverage to build your brand more completely. For example, if your business involves publishing of content, a RSS feed on your Facebook page is a no-brainer for driving traffic back to your website. In the event that building out your own widget is something you’ll likely follow through on, you’ll be able to leverage the fan base once you have an application. Spreading the word through direct communication with each and every fan of your application.

Last, but no least (truly most important) social networks are about making connections. If pursuing a widget is the correct strategy for your business, be warned that it must somehow allow self expression while allowing the user to feel they are connected and part of some larger community. You might be better served purchasing an existing widget that has some traction within the network, then building one from the ground up.

This week O’Reilly Media is sponsoring the Graphing Social Patterns West (GSP West) conference in sunny San Diego, CA. Many leading application developers and minds are present discussing the future of social media as we know it. What follows is an excerpt from a proposal I developed for a potential client recently. I fell it brings value to the social networking community. It serves as an introductory piece in a series of posts for traditional media who have not yet grasped social networking for lead generation.

Leveraging the users social graph has grown increasingly more difficult in the last few months as providers such as Facebook lock down their social graph. Days of early growth fueled by numerous friend invites, notifications, newsfeed and messaging components has been replaced with systems of quotas and restrictions on use. Additionally, users are now more sensitive to the behavior of applications and quickly discard the apps they deem annoying or spammy. Not yet launched platforms from MySpace and Orkut have yet to implement these types of restrictions, but they have already received a bit of blogger attention for a platform thatʼs still in development. Given a little more time, more and more folks will be complaining and something will be done.

What this means for a content provider, seeking new audience through social media, is that growth must be fueled by highly engaging content and/or functionality. That’s right, just like traditional media - you can’t provide lip service. Applications now destined for failure include vanilla RSS feeds of site content, newsletter signups, subscription ploys and 1 time survey style quizzes that put a warm fuzzy icon on your profile. The limited engagement of one to many fails. Instead, engagement of new audience must include something for the user that makes them feel good about themselves and allows them to express themselves digitally, with their friends, in a way that no other application is already doing.

Users of social networking applications have a very low attention span and applications are competing in a more and more hostile environment each day. Applications are having to diversify their offering beyond the core application to retain users and increase traffic. Applications like Free Gifts have begun virtual economies leveraging game play, ultimately designed to increase time spent within the application, and rewarding users with special virtual gift incentives.

Revenue models that seem to have some success include pay per click ads and sponsored partnerships. Realistically, very few apps are able to sustain the technology costs, let alone development costs, with Google ads alone. There’s still a huge untapped market here for those who are willing to brave it. A few specific advertising networks have grown up to fill this space and offer CPM rates roughly double Googleʼs, but they are fueled primarily by other applications and not external advertisers seeking new audience. Likely due to poor performance of advertisements on social networks at large. Applications for existing media should be considered marketing expenses and not thought of as revenue streams (at least not initially).

Competition between friends (or even beyond immediate contacts to the network in Facebook or entire user-base elsewhere) definitely does very well with the Facebook / MySpace audiences. Applications such as Likeness show this daily. Additionally, leveraging user established in a recommendation style format is also highly effective. If your considering this type of application, be aware that there is a lot of competition in this area and micro-niche audiences on Facebook or MySpace are still too small to be sustaining.

Rewards based behavior works - however - there is a very short life span for actions that force virility based on user actions - that’s called SPAM. Meeting new people based on shared interests within a network will really enhance a users adoption and ultimately interaction with the application rewarding this behavior will enhance a products utility. Rewarding the users for daily and weekly interaction with desirable rewards will push the application much further along.

So the ultimate question then, how to promote a business on Facebook and other social networks? I’ll follow up with a post on that in the near future.