Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: Feb 6, 2008

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Web Strategy Summary
MySpace releases it’s developer platform, causing in influx of current Facebook developers to swarm over the new platform, expect more experimentation to occur as we see widgets explode on many social networks. I see a clear trend of information continuing to be distributed and amorphous, moving from one network to another.

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MySpace Developer Program cometh Feb 5th
The MySpace developer program is opening so third party widget and application creators can launch on MySpace, just as Facebook does.
Ben is working with the team and welcomes you in. I’ve done some analysis on what it means in this quicktake, why most should just wait and watch while the widget developers experiment. Dan Farber has additional analysis on what it means.

Security: Concerns about image uploader vulnerabilities
The industry has concerns over there being security flaws in image uploaders for MySpace and Facebook.

Features: Facebook Suggests Friends
Using it’s matching and contextual enginges, Facebook is spawning a feature that recommends friends, something similiar to dating sites.

Advertising: Google admits social networking ads not working
The use case of social networks vs search engines are radically different, people use social networks to connect with others, communicate and to self express, it’s often not a hunt for information. Google admits that advertising on social networks is not working.

Social Graph: Google releases an API to aggregate your many networks
I’m really glad to see that Google has taken a step forward to releasing an API that let’s you connect users from the many different networks. Brad Fitzpatrick has lead the charge here, watch his video. New to the concept, read this primer on how to explain the social graph to your executives.

Generation Gap: Kids not pleased with adults on Social Networks
As self-expression continues to be one of the top uses of social networks, kids find parents activities on social networks intrusive. If you’re a parent and have to deal with rejection from a child, follow this child relations template I created. (humor)

Marketshare: MySpace leads but Facebook closing gap
You can see the marketshare of the top 10 social networks in North America, MySpace dominates, although Facebook is following, Bebo has just a small marginal audience with little growth rate by market share.

Tie-In: WSJ adds social features with Facebook
WSJ will now have social features that let readers know which articles are popular, fueled by a users’ friends in Facebook. Beyond recommendation engines, this is a social powered recommendation engine, which should in turn, provide higher relevancy.

Version: Kickapps announce next iteration
Kickapps touts it’s newest version 3.0 which is aimed at making social networks easier to deploy. In our briefing with them, we were impressed with their strong widget development tools.

Fatigue: Are people getting tired of social networks?
There’s so much effort going into building the next generation social network, have we taken the time to think about users becoming tired and fatigued with social networks?

Campaign: Movie marketing on social networks
I really like this movie placement, they’re using many of the social tools that Facebook offers, acquires fans, and encourages discussion in this Cloverfield movie campaign.

Aggregation: Six apart lets you aggregate social media on blog
After a briefing with blogging software company Six Apart, they’ve now released a feature called Activity Streams that lets the blogger aggregate activity from other social sites (like twitter, digg, delcicious) in a news feed or news page type box on your blog.

Leave a comment if this Digest was helpful, or if you’ve anything to add. Email me if you’ve suggestions for next week’s digest.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2008 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Digest, Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.