MySpace

No, you’re not going to be able to download your MySpace contacts into your address book, but according to Reuters MySpace is going to allow its users to display profile information on other sites.

It’s step two, along with open social, in pressuring the “walled gardens” of the internet to really let people take command of the social connections they make.

It’s also another step in the “widgetization” of content on the internet, which I think might eventually turn in to a way to actually monetize content on the internet.

[ Update: looks like Facebook is joining the "widgetization of content" and data portability bandwagon and allowing third party sites to mesh with facebook features. It's called Facebook Connect. ]

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A lot of the recent buzz in the tech sector has been about unsuccessful efforts to monetize online social tools via advertising. Google is losing money on their advertising deal with MySpace. User sentiment suggests that demographic targeting doesn’t raise the relevance of advertising, and clickthrough rates are low across the board.

It’s not that social networks aren’t playing a role in business transactions. Blogger Charles Hudson wrote that he routinely makes transactions whose impetus has been a recommendation from friends through an online social network:

Judging by the activity I see within my own network, there are a lot of my friends using social networks as social Q&A systems to get input, advice, and recommendations in addition to just letting folks know what they’re up to at the moment.

But that activity doesn’t translate into revenue for the networks, and advertisers aren’t seeing the conversions like they do with Google’s AdWords service. So what’s a marketer to do?

A few suggestions:

1. If you’re doing targeted, self-serve advertising on Facebook, get as specific as you can. Avoid stereotyping your potential customers, all women are not interested in weight loss. Many men are not interested in having sex thrown at them all day long.
2. Think about ways of rounding out your campaign to encourage echo chamber behavior. Everyone is after conversions these days rather than brand awareness, so be sure to link your ad to a landing page that drives conversions and also enables social sharing of product recommendations. Even if the user who clicks through to your site doesn’t wind up becoming a customer, you want to enable him to encourage his friends to visit via social mechanisms such as embedding a video in his MySpace page or sharing your landing page on Facebook because it contains interesting content.
3. Consider building something useful — like an embeddable widget or a Facebook application that lets your customers connect with their friends in a way that involves your brand.

Longtime users of the Facebook platform have seen how applications from popular web services like Twitter can add tremendous value to the News Feed and Mini Feed features. In fact, one could argue that News Feed was the inspiration for lifestreaming tools like Tumblr and FriendFeed.

Now, it appears that the inspiration flows two ways. Facebook announced today that they would begin allowing users to import Mini Feed stories from Flickr, Picasa, Yelp and del.icio.us.

To use the new service, go to your profile and look at the Mini Feed section. Look for the new “import” link at the top, right corner of the Mini Feed profile box. Then, follow the instructions to import your activity into Facebook.  No word on how soon users will be able to import other activity, but other promised services include Digg.

I wonder how fast these updates will become a part of the site, and whether MySpace profile updates and other information will be included in the lifestream.

Also, why is Facebook announcing a feature associated with the Feed when the main feature is clearly broken at the moment? I wonder if this feature addition is the culprit for the massive News Feed slowdown.

It is an ongoing question, highlighted earlier this week by both Blogspotting and Adweek. Social technologies have always had trouble finding good advertising schemes.

One of the big issues with advertising in online social networks is, as both posts point out, a lack of reliable metrics. Adweek points out that MySpace is working hard to bring new variables to the table when talking with advertisers about value of their ad dollar:

Instead of only measuring ad exposures and clicks, MySpace is gathering data on visits to community pages, time spent there, whether visitors watched a video or embedded a piece of content in their page. What’s more, it is then tracking the pass-along rate for pieces of portable content, currently to one degree but soon beyond that. It is also tracking demographic and psychographic information for “friends” a brand has accrued.

MySpace is right to try to move beyond the limited CPM and CPC models that have dominated Web advertising for most of its existence. There are so many other factors in evaluating the effectiveness of an ad campaign.

Advertisers should probably be looking at comments, wall posts, or even posts in the blogosphere to see what is being said in response to their product and their campaign. To really evaluate impact in social networks and on the internet, you have to look at reactions not only from multiple people or through multiple feedback mechanisms, but in multiple places.

If you run an ad on Facebook and someone disagrees, they just might blog it instead responding in the network.

In the end, I don’t think there exists currently a metric that accurately represents the value an advertiser is buying in social networks. But I think it’s a very important question to be asking.

I’m listening to MySpace’s Amit Kapur talking about hypertargeting on MySpace. MySpace puts users into interest group packages and sells those packages to advertisers. I’m wondering how accuate their non-structured data analysis really is. How much does the non-structured data really factor into the hypertargeting mechanism?

Update: Amit says that their nonstructured data analysis factors in hugely and that it’s very accurate. I want more specifics.

It certainly seems to work, at least for the time being. They’re claiming a 300% increase in click-through rate at this point.

They should use Sentimine to enhance their results. I’ll bet we could do even better.

Brad Greenspan, one of the minds behind MySpace, has just thrown his hat into a new arena with a site called LiveVideo.com.

What’s the big idea?

From poking around the vnunet post about the launch as well as the actual site itself, it looks like the aim is to bring a more robust social network feel and a “live” interactive experience to the YouTube ethos.

I’m always interested in what kinds of ways people are interacting with computers and the internet. As bandwidth and processor power continues to boom, we’re seeing changes in the way we communicate online: first there was e-mail (which is now simultaneously hopeless and indispensable), then ICQ, then AIM, GTalk, then Skype, now video chat and social networks.

The signup process is pretty simple, and I think the options for “Account Type” are interesting (screencap’d above). I haven’t picked anything yet (so I’m a “standard user” at the moment), but I like the idea of self-identifying into a niche: I bet it makes content/friend discovery easier.

One of the side effects of the internet and new communications technology is that for years now people have been able to avoid actually talking to each other. We use emoticons and time-delays as buffers for real interpersonal contact, removing both some of the pressure and a good deal of the fun in being social.

I’m glad to see technology bringing us back to where we have real-time interactions.

The terms “online conversation,” “community,” and “social graph,” are popping up like errant moles nowadays. I often wonder how many of us really know what we’re talking about.

It’s still interesting to me that when you break down all social interaction on the internet, you basically just get “links.” Hyperlinks connect blog posts and blogs, they connect Twitter conversations, they connect profiles on social networks and topic threads on forums.

What’s powerful is how links have gone from being structure to infrastructure. Yes links connect Twitter conversations, but what’s more important is that Twitter’s system recognizes the @name nomenclature and treats it appropriately.

Links are invisible, which is awesome.

And I think conversations and communities are most strong where those links are the most invisible. I feel like I connect with people on Twitter and Facebook more readily and easily than I do from my blog posts. It’s more immediate, and somehow more personal. But I bet Seth Godin connects more with his blog.

Obviously, ‘the online conversation’ is happening everywhere. Bits and pieces are on Twitter, bits are on Pownce, Facebook statuses, Myspace photo comments, everywhere.

I think that’s pretty amazing.

If you’re looking to find and join cool conversations, you should probably check out Teresa’s webinar tomorrow or wednesday morning.

A little while ago a pointed you all to a post explaining how the $15bn Facebook valuation could have been a carefully designed trap laid out to close off all of Facebook’s exit strategies.

I pointed you to their post because I’m not smart enough to explain the details right.

Today, Fred Wilson, another guy with a lot more financial chops that I’ve got, explains why pulling a maneuver like that can occasionally come back to haunt you.

Another interesting read. And a clue as to why Rupert Murdoch owns most of the world already.

According to both Mashable and The Social Times today, MySpace has finally announced that they’re going to be launching their own developer platform on February 5th. From Mashable:

Earlier this evening, I spoke with Amit Kapur, who the company is also announcing has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer and will oversee the platform. While MySpace may be a little late to the platform party, it’s clear that they have been closely watching developments in the space and will be addressing many of the growing pains that chief rival Facebook has dealt with from the get-go; most notably privacy, monetization, and data ownership.

And additionally:

This means that unlike Facebook, where we have dozens of ad networks competing for inventory on applications, MySpace may play an active role, presumably utilizing its large ad sales force to help developers get premium revenue.

I think that MySpace is being really smart in their approach to the platform. It’s clear they’re not the first players in this game, but they’ve really paid a lot of attention to where Facebook is fumbling, and it seems like they’ve keyed in on the issues with monetization, assuming that they can attract developers with simpler (and they hope more effective) revenue models.

That’s true in a lot of cases, but I think that development on all of these social platforms going forward—Myspace, Facebook, and Open Social—will see a rise in applications designed less to be standalone, moneymaking ventures and designed more to replace the advertising and exposure that are already trending down in TV and other traditional media.

In other words, I’m not sure that application developers going forward will be looking first to monetize their apps. It may be something that they choose to do, but I think a forward-looking platform should design tools to help maximize brand exposure.

MySpace has announced a new division, Slingshot Labs, that will incubate commercial Web properties that will act symbiotically with the Web giant. TechCrunch and Mashable! both observe that this is likely intended to counter the venture fund that Facebook announced a few months back.

If you were MySpace, and you were incubating a consumer-Web product to shore up your dominance in the socnet space, what would you build?

If I were them, I’d start with some kind of a dating tool. Yes, the online dating market is majorly overcrowded. But MySpace already has the eyeballs. I’ll bet they could put Match.com’s abysmal technology and customer service to shame in a big fat hurry.

And it would be cool to have a dating widget that interacts with your MySpace profile in some cool way.

Strong words against Facebook come from Matt Frye over at O’Reilly OnLamp:

There’s a lot of speculation at any given time about what the future of the web is. I don’t know what it is, but I think I know what it’s not. Facebook.

Yeah, yeah, I can hearing the booing from here. Easy now, fan boys.

The truth is that the web rides waves of innovation and everyone on of those waves has a trough between it and the next wave. Facebook is currently experiencing the slide down the backside of the wave and is headed into the trough. Why?

Matt is right that things tend to work in cycles, and Facebook might be strolling down the backside of their upward surge, but I think Matt’s reasoning is a little off. The five point he lists to explain why FB is on its way out are something like: Facebook is getting tons of new users and traffic (but MySpace is the cap of possible users), Facebook costs money to run and isn’t selling, Facebook is pissing off users, Facebook is getting sued, and Facebook sucks.

Number five is completely subjective. And given the value that so many people are getting from it, I’d say it’s hard to argue that it’s useless.

Numbers, four, two, and one are the same thing: money. Matt seems to discount the possibility that Facebook will be making money on its own, and might not need new investment money to move forward.

And number three? It might be true that FB is pissing off some of its users with privacy issues. But they are responding, and they have done this before. They’re still (insert Matt’s point one). So far, so good. I think Facebook is still doing alright.

I was pointed to this post by Wade Rockett, one of the attendees at next week’s Web Community Forum: Community Building in the Age of Facebook. I know it’s from October (in blogging terms, this is like bringing up a conversation topic from the mesozoic era), but it outlines a really interesting aspect of Facebook for business use:

I was burning the midnight oil recently, starting to write an important piece that was due in a couple of days. It didn’t take long for me to realize that the job ahead of me would be much harder than I’d thought. Frankly, at that moment it seemed impossible that I could deliver quality work in such a short time. (Panic is often an essential part of the writing process.)

Feeling the need to vent in some small way, I updated my Facebook status to read, “Wade is deeply, DEEPLY unsettled.” Then I got to work.

The next morning I had an e-mail waiting for me from Geoff Bilbrough, my overboss in London. The subject line of his message read, “Is deeply unsettled.” In it was a simple question: Is there anything I should know or can do?

What happened here seems pretty straightforward: Geoff must have noticed Wade’s Facebook status, and was paying enough attention to want to offer help if it was needed. I think that this kind of apparent omniscience definitely qualifies as a “minor superpower.” Ten points to Facebook.

While a lot of people are probably going to feel unsettled knowing their boss could reading their Facebook statuses, I think that on the whole it is something that will end up giving companies (especially large ones where one boss may be in London and an employee in another country entirely) far more comfort and culture.

One of the reasons that I love working here at Parnassus Group is that we’ve got a relatively tight-night group. By virtue of the fact that we’re all connected through blogs, twitter, facebook, and on occasion, yes, real life too, our boss usually has a good handle on how we’re doing, and has even been known to bring Popsicles to sick employees.

My point is not to brag (yes it is). My point is that as managers and employees start interacting on social platforms like Facebook, especially when they live far away from each other, two things are going to happen:

1. Management will “mellow out” about personal expression - as “employees” turn into “people” AND as management gets younger, setting your Friday night Facebook status to “drunk dialing college buddies if I could find my phone” will probably not be grounds for a lecture.
2. Employees will have the opportunity to develop much better relationships with their bosses, especially if the communication is two way (think about your boss Twittering “At a wine and cheese party. Too much wine, not enough cheese.”)

I left a comment earlier today on AllFacebook, where Nick posted about MySpace’s plans to include a newsfeed and multiple profiles. At the end of the comment, I added that even with all the new features:

I’m still not going anywhere near MySpace until they remove the ugly stick.

After I wrote that I thought about it for a few minutes, because that’s really kind of an odd thing to say. I’m not going to use the site because it’s too ugly, even if it has great features? Admittedly, I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to web site looks, but hey, Facebook isn’t exactly the Mona Lisa either.

So why am I OK with Facebook? Why would I keep using it even if MySpace had a better feature set?

I think the answer is conventions. Allow me to draw on my inexcusably extensive knowledge of video games for an analogy: over the years, Real Time Strategy games like Warcraft, Command & Conquer, and Age of Empires have defined a certain basic interface and a certain basic set of commands that remains essentially intact in any RTS that you find on the shelves of GameStop today.

If I went out and picked up a copy of Supreme Commander (another RTS), I’d have reasonably little trouble figuring out how to do basic things like build units, group units, create buildings, select resources, or move the screen around the map. This is because there are established conventions for how these things are done.

It’s like speaking the same language in different states. You may not know what you’ll find in Idaho, but you’re pretty sure it’ll be speaking to you in English.

On MySpace I don’t feel like the navigational conventions are as clear. They’re there, of course, but every time I log in it feels like I’m wading through the early nineties. Every Facebook page has a consistent and obvious set of navigation, or navigational conventions. This is a language that is really easy to learn, which I think has been a strong factor in Facebook’s success with people over 14 years old.

After a certain age, new languages are harder to learn. Why make it harder?

Have you guys seen Myspace News?

http://news.myspace.com/

I’ve started to see these news pages show up in Google searches alongside Digg and Netscape pages. You can browse through the “hot” news articles in whichever category you pick and then vote on how cool it really is (there are gradients here beyond just “like it” or “not”).

It’s too bad that you can’t submit stories, though. Or at least I can’t figure out how, which amounts to more or less the same thing.

On the other hand, though, do we need another social news aggregator? Netscape works because there’s a meta-level that really sets it apart from Digg (and they have a slightly different audience). But what extra value do you really get from tying it in to a social network? Would it matter if a Facebook app provided this functionality? Would you switch from Digg?

Metrics of influence are always a tricky thing. Steve and I have always described Alexa as a thumbnail sketch of a site’s overall influence and traffic, since the Alexa toolbar is a truly self-selective tool.

Still, the news that Facebook beat MySpace in the Alexa rankings is very interesting indeed.

Leo Blanco writes, “It only proves that even the king of social networking can bleed.”I think we already knew that.

[Thanks to Nathan Ketsdever for the heads up.]