The thing about my “beat”, as they’d call it in the newspaper business, is that I’m not really all that interested in “the news”. I’m not trying to cover all the stories, nor am I trying to cover most of them. I’m not trying to “break” anything or peddle products. I want to understand how social software affects my life. And yours.

Text comments will be deleted in this thread as I want video comments. ;) Click on the Sessmic Video comments link below. If you don’t already have one, grab a free account over at Seesmic.com.

This is what I want to know. How has social software benefited you? This is open ended and I want you to define what I mean by this. Some example questions might be:

1. How you got a job using LinkedIn
2. How you found an old crush on Facebook
3. How blogging helped you gain support for a good cause
4. How you used Flickr to communicate to your family on the other side of the world
5. How you used Brightkite to track your migration habits
6. How Twitter made the World Series special for you
7. How you had a brilliant entrepreneurial idea from a discussion on FriendFeed
8. How you used VC portfolio companies to attract the attention of a VC and get funded
9. How you made a career by offering advice on a blog

These are easy examples. I want you to offer your own insight on how, sometime, somewhere, social tools have enhanced your life. Tell us your story on video. If you don’t, I’ll look like a complete idiot for this format – but I’m okay with that. :)

The description of this panel is:

How does traditional advertiging work on social networks? What products and techniques are required to develop a viral marketing campaign? Find out how to use social networks, social advertising, and social applications to reach hundreds of millions of today’s online users.

The description of the session is as follows:

This session will present an overview of Facebook advertising and marketing solutions, including the Facebook Social Ads system and the Facebook application platform.

Uh huh. Watch it live as I live blog this session beginning around 10:30 AM Eastern time using CoveritLive.

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Graphing Social Patterns – Day 2

(06/10/2008) Powered by: CoveritLive

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9:24	LinkedIn Keynote beginning

9:25	We are a purpose drive network. We believe in trust. We believe in Business Relevance

9:25	This is Adam Nash from LinkedIn on stage

9:26	Showing a slide tghat shows LinkedIn as #4 social network after MySpace, Facebook and Classmates Online (WTF?!)

9:27	Average age of LinkedIn users is 41. On par with Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Business Week

9:28	Execs from all 500 Fortune 500 companies on Linked in. 3M small biz professionals

9:29	Jumping into Why Advertise on LinkedIn?

9:30

[Poll]

Are you more interested in social netwrok application development or the business/advertising potential in social networking? Applications and Development ( 0% ) Business and Advertising ( 100% ) None of the Above ( 0% )

9:31	Advertising possibilities – Run of Professional, inCrowds or Custom Segments

9:32	Fundamentally, our advertising is based on profile-based targetting

9:33	Jumping into the Platform. LinkedIn uses OpenSocial http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

9:34	LinkedIn was one of the original charter members on board the Google Open Social movement

9:35	I think, considering the Technosailor.com niche, I think I need to explore some of the advertising/OpenSocial API opportunities

9:35	OpenSocial platform launch for LinkedIn is NOT launched yet. It will be launched later

9:36	Platform: Home, Profile Canvas views

9:37	Platform: Currently selecting parrtners (Criteria: Productivity apps, extension to professional profile, targeted verticals)

9:37	Platform: We will open up over time

9:37	Adam’s profile on LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/adamnash

9:38	Taking audience questions

9:38	Question: LinkedIn already has a set of monetization strategies?

9:39	Answer: We make money on 1) Advertising, 2) Classifieds, 3) Subscription/Premium products and 4) Enterprise class products sold directly into large organizations

9:40	Question: Does LinkedIn have plans to make a way to visualize connections between people, businesses, etc?

9:41	Answer: Platform will help with this. Currently we also provide a way to see this within a company, including most pageviews for profile, etc.

9:42	Question: What is the spread geographically across the world? Top three countries?

9:43	Answer: Half members are from US. Very successful in countries like the UK, India, Netherlands and other places in Europe. It’s a moving target and Adam is not entirely clear – not wearing his PR hat.

9:43	Question: LinkedIn apps for the iPhone 3G?

9:44	Answer: LinkedIn has a iphone web app that they’ve been impressed with. Whether therre will be a July 7th app launch, LinkedIn is a fan and will pursue aggressivley – but this is not an announcement. Just a hint

9:44	Session Over.

9:47

I’m at the Graphing Social Patterns East conference, put on my O’Reilly Media. Full disclaimer: I’m not a fan of Tim O’Reilly. However, this conference is shaping up to be an interesting one as developers and businesses tackle the social landscape. Specifically, the social landscape as it pertains to applications.

Today has been tutorial day, as developers have been introduced (or reintroduced) to developing Facebook and MySpace applications. Meh meh meh. More zombies. The highlight (for me with my twisted mind) being when the speaker referred to a friend building a Masterbeat.com which resulted in an awkward, yet funny, pause. It’s music, people! It’s not what you think!

Regardless, today has been nowhere near as internet-shattering as Steve Jobs’Keynote. Maybe tomorrow.

GSP is an interesting conference to be had here in Washington, but it goes to the nature of a very rich (and somewhat untapped) community of social app developers here in the area. Refresh DC is one of the largest of the Refresh Movement cities, but because of the disjointed nature of the different DC communities, a lot of us in the “social media” community don’t necessarily see those in the developer community.

But cool things are happening. Social Times is doing a good job covering a lot of it.

So, I’ll be at GSP bringing live coverage. It’s looking to be a massive event and though I’d rather be at WWDC, GSP is a great alternative. For those of you who plan to be there, look me up. I’m @technosailor on Twitter.

The discussion over Disqus and Intense Debate has been an interesting one. Particularly perceptive readers may have noticed me playing around with both of these services a few weeks ago in the wee hours of the morning. If you didn’t notice, never fear… it was only for a minute before switching back to my default WordPress comments.

So here’s the thing. I met Intense Debate, and perhaps Disqus, at Blog World Expo. At the same time, I met SezWho, a competitor. Each of these services offer a “social network” around commenting. But what set them apart was in who owned the data.

I use the word “own” loosely here. What I mean is, “Where is the comment data being hosted?”

There’s legitimate reasons for this. One example of why it is important for me to own the data is in the case of a legal issue or subpoena. Very relevant concern. At b5, there were several times where the Police called us asking for data about some random person on some random blog who was a person of interest in some random crime. In all cases, we could not give up data without a subpoena. When provided, we cooperated. When we were not served, we didn’t relinquish data.

This is pretty common and the bigger a property (or in b5′s case, group of properties) get, the bigger the target that is on your back.

In the case of Intense Debate and Disqus, none of this data is controlled by me. It’s controlled by them for a variety of reasons. SezWho did not host the comments which was a big selling point for them.

In the case of blogs, there are many things that can be done via mashup that doesn’t place any kind of liability on the site owner or blogger. However, in the context of comments, that is actually content.

In order for me to use Disqus or Intense Debate here – both of which I’m interested in using as it adds some nifty functionality to the blog – I need to host the content and control the styling. Without that, it’s a no-go.

FindWhere CEO Jaap Groot and my friend and DoC co-host Geoff Livingston have co-authored a white paper (they call it a manifesto) for mobile and location-based social networks outlining eight requirements for a successful mobile endeavor.

The true local, mobile and social breakthrough requires a completely converged product that will be so intuitive and robust that community members won’t have to wrestle with such a service. Instead, it will be so easy and fun, online community members will clamor to be a part of the craze. They will actively engage, and voluntarily spread the word about their experiences, in hopes that their friends will join them online. The winning service will be so compelling that it will be viral.

They go on to describe the eight factors:

1. Provide a base offering free of charge. Today’s social network user does not tolerate paid-for services.
2. Work on a wide selection of phones.
3. Offer an intelligent, simple user interface for accessing information.
4. Use GPS rather than force users to manually enter their location every time.
5. Integrate intelligently into existing social networks rather than further inundate people with a new one.
6. Allow users to share and use their location data in as many ways as possible.
7. Enable individuals to set various levels of privacy control for personal security.
8. Monetize in an intelligent, non-intrusive way

Some of these factors are implemented better than others and some are not technically possible with the mobile client and telcos the way they exist now. Things need to change within the four walls of the carriers.

As with all white papers, it is a call to action. A spotlight on gaps in the industry. One day, all of these items will be inherent in the social offerings but it could take 5-10 years to see that occur.

The great thing about Tweets like this is that it makes you feel like you know the person on the other hand. It’s a vast global playground where people are swinging on swings and sliding down slides and just having fun. They are having conversation.

We had this big global conversation a few years back when marketers were trying to figure out how to leverage this new blogging fad. It was so raw and real, and folks were transparent. It challenged traditional PR types to think differently. The problem is that these same PR folks may have learned about blogging but instantly regress to old habits in other forms of Web 2.0.

In the end, the conversation is still the important thing.

Lately, Twitter marketers have taken to using this global instant messaging service to promote their products, their political candidates, their new service without much thought to those of us who were on the ground floor of Twitter (defined here as pre-SXSW ’07) and using it for it’s purpose.

Robert Scoble said somewhere that he loved Twitter because it was where he could have a window into the minds of early adopters. And this is true. In the end though, traditional marketing types have failed to realize that it’s not the tool that matters. Use a blog, use Twitter, use MySpace. I don’t care! The tool matters not. What matters is the conversation.

Treating my time and my focus as a cheap trick is not winning me over to your thing. I don’t care if John Edwards is using Twitter. I will not come to your event if I have to see it promoted on Twitter. Period. End of story. I am not your whore. If you want my trime, at least buy me a drink and lets spend some quality time first.

You may use Web 2.0 tools, but Web 2.0 is not the answer to marketing. Conversations and relationships are. Use Twitter for what it was intended.

Yahoo partners with Zillow to provide estimates on real estate to Yahoo! Real Estate users. Single handedly, Yahoo dominates the fantasy sports market, a demographic that is fiercely loyal and extensive use type users.

To cap it off, Yahoo could have owned Facebook if it wasn’t for management dropping the ball. Given Facebook’s recent emergence, a $1B investment in Facebook would probably return to Yahoo 3-5 times over in the next 2 years in terms of Facebook valuation.

The problem with Yahoo, of course, is not Yahoo. Yahoo has certainly not helped itself. But as Elise Ackerman at the Merc points out, “…that Yahoo shouldn’t try to out-Google Google“.

Google is the king of search. It is the king of remnant advertising in terms of pure marketshare. It is the king of web-based productivity tools (Gmail, Documents & Spreadsheets, Calendar). Yahoo can’t compete on Google’s turf.

However, they can beef up their social networking and become the king of that niche. Web 2.0 is all about the mashup so Yahoo’s challenge is figuring out how to actually integrate all these social networks they own into a compelling product or group of products.

Incidentally, the buzz today is that Fox Interactive may be in talks with Yahoo to trade off MySpace for a 30% stake in Yahoo. There be dragons in those talks. Watch closely!

Scott Matthewman says: It still seems to be as busy as ever from where I’m sitting. But the whole customisation thing is reminiscent of late 90′s Geocities — all those animated backgrounds. My eyes!

Jon Phillips says: Its soul is old world and fb folks tell me that mass migration from myspace to fb is happening.

Rachel Clarke says: Not yet. There is a definite move towards facebook for some but MySpace will remain and have uses because of its more public nature.

Gary Grant says: It may still have some life left for the kids. It never came alive for me though, not addictive like FB.

Justin Heim says: The life line is slowing down, and it is proving to be a slow and painful death… But it is still kicking!

Brian Layman says: Yes. It is packed garbage. + too many people never joined it because it was always just a place for pre-teens. With WordPress making it so easy to create real sites, it doesn’t even have that going for them. Now Facebook offers a mature social network.

Mark Jaquith says: Not yet. But I suspect that the exodus will be as swift as the rise, if not more so.

Jessica Doyle says: I never used myspace at all so therefor it didn’t exist to me. If it was never alive then it can’t be dead.

Laurarose Dunn says: Nope. I use myspace more than facebook simply because I have more friends from over the years on it. ALthough I am finding that facebook is pretty cool too!

Rico Mossegeld says: Never tried it, so it was never alive for me.

Devon Rutherford says: I know lots of 20, 30 and 40-some-year-olds that still use myspace (not just teens). Yes, the interface sucks, but non-technical individuals typically aren’t that discriminating when it comes to selecting a social networking interface. Facebook FTW! :)

Scott Allen says: Nope – that’s still where my kids (age 12-25) are. They don’t even know about FB. MS ate Friendster only indirectly because of the interface – the musicians and artists were too restricted by Friendster, so they migrated, then everyone else followed.

Kimberly Williams says: i don’t think so but i prefer facebook over myspace any day because the things on her are better than myspace and i think you can do more.

James Joyner says: I’ve never really used it. Then again, I’m not their target demo.

Robert Barac says: I bloody well hope so… I think MySpace is the old black.

Sasha Manuel says: What is MySpace? :-P

Travis Seitler says: Not yet. Maybe in two years…

Chris Cree says: Never got into MySpace. Skipped right past it, I guess.

Minic Rivera says: Yes.

If I get a significant amount of input, I’ll publish the results as a video and you can say you were made into a movie star because of this blog (yeah, right!). Just to clarify, I need an actual file emailed to me. Feel free to publish to YouTube but if I don’t get a file, I can’t use it. :)

The blog is called Startup Spark and is similar to Venture Files but is a broader version on all types of entrepreneurship.

I invite you to check it out and subscribe. This blog will continue but in the coming months I will be focusing this blog more on innovation topics and will be unveiling a new design.

So keep reading Venture Files and add Startup Spark to your feed reader and your daily viewing.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneurship

However, the point was to get eyeballs at HP and we did. Digg was the means to the end and though it was hard, there was no better way of making sure HP saw the story.

Recapping the story, Thomas misinterpreted the ship date on his HP laptop and did not realize the computer would be shipped on February 28 (today). This set him back but he figured that he could have HP change the shipping method to overnight in order to get the computer before he headed out of town on Monday. In communicating this wish, HP did not in any way accommodate him and in fact, threw up walls to push him off to other departments and representatives.

I made a big deal about that kind of behavior on this blog. To me, customer service does not always say that the customer is always right, but does work with the customer to find a tack that will please, primarily the customer, but also the service provider. In this process, that did not happen.

Whether Diggers think I was inappropriate for bringing the topic up or daring to have a complaint doesn’t matter to me. I don’t make everyone happy in my job all the time, but if I don’t I need to ask myself why. And HP needs to ask themselves why?

Fortunately, there is good news from this story and I’m proud to have been a part. Thomas received his laptop today. It wasn’t supposed to even be built until tomorrow. Additionally, they expedited shipping by sending the box Priority Overnight from China – or whatever the equivalent is. It was shipped yesterday from China and arrived this morning. He has recieved an email from a high level HP official thanking him for his business and apologizing if his experience was anything less than stellar.

Props to HP for being stand-up on this matter.

And to everyone who had nothing good to say – let this be a lesson. The power is with the people. We can get things done. Corporate policies can be adjusted when the interests of the corporation are at play. And don’t let anyone tell you it can’t be done. Of course the real victory is with the blogosphere. So many people still don’t “get” us. They say we’re a bunch of hacks hiding out in front of a computer all day. Folks, this is where the real work can be done.

Digg has come under increasing fire as they continue to tread deafly through the internet world. Kevin Rose inspires the entire organization to arrogance that carries through to corporate policies and down to the Digg Mob that buries stories it doesn’t like simply because they don’t like them.

The problem with Digg is in the democratic system. Or rather the non-democratic system. Diggers on the surface have the ability to Digg an entry or bury an entry. This is great in an honor-system kind of way because every vote counts (how often have we heard that mantra?) and every voice matters. If the community doesn’t like something, a sufficient number of “Burys” will stifle the story. If the community finds a story worthwhile, in theory, the story will have legs.

Unfortunately, the Digg system is seen to be rigged. Sources that are often buried for a variety of reasons, are soon flagged as spam sites. When a sufficient number of people, particularly influential people as most of the stories promoted to the front page are a result of a handful of elite Diggers, band together with an agenda and are given unchecked power (Burys have no paper trail), then points of view found to be contrary to the agenda are suppressed. Little Green Footballs is experiencing that right now.

I also experienced that early in the month when I wrote an article pertaining to an SEO tactic. That article made the Digg front page and within 10 minutes was off the front page. Every other time a story has hit the front page, the story has stayed there for a significant amount of time. Fortunately, I’m not (yet) on the spam list, though I presume that after Digg Week this week, I will be. :-)

I generally view Jason Calacanis as a bastard, but I have tremendous respect for what he has accomplished notably at WIN and then at AOL with the Netscape project. Jason has also been at frequent odds with Digg. In fairness, this is for two reasons: he’s not afraid to call Kevin Rose on his crap and secondly, he reinvented Netscape and in my opinion made a far superior product to Digg. Jason really hammered the point home when he called Kevin Rose out on Monday regarding Digg’s non-accountable burying practice.

The problem is that Kevin Rose is deaf, as alluded to earlier, and somehow navigates through the internet world completely blind to what the world around him thinks of his product and completely deaf to how to improve it and completely non-verbal about how he feels about the complaints. To me, lack of these critical senses is simply termed ‘senseless’.

Steve Fisher inaugurated yesterdays blogging on Technosailor with, in my opinion, a great article about things Digg needs to do to stay alive. It’s a shame it hasn’t received more attention. In private conversation, Steve predicts Digg has one year to live. In his entry, he gives it two, simply based on the economics of finding an exit strategy in the possibly waning economy.

Things to think about as Digg continues to self destruct in the public eye. I personally could care less if I ever see the front page of Digg again and, in fact, am considering rerouting traffic coming from Digg to the bit bucket – just to keep the classless behavior off my blog. Instead, I’ll be looking to gain traction with other sites such as Netscape and del.icio.us. In fact, that’s tomorrow’s contribution to Digg Week.

Related Digg Week Entries

• CASE STUDY: HP Gives Consumer the Middle Finger
• The Digg Mob
• 5 Things Digg needs to do or it will die in 2008
• What George Orwell Can Teach Us About Digg
• Gaming Digg: Is it a game when the money isn’t Monopoly Money?

We talk alot about the techology scene and I made the comment that Digg would be dead or made irrelevant by next year. So he challenged me to write about it on his blog.

The original post is here.

I did a repost below to read the article as an alternative:

The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference this week and Kevin’s presentation “The Future of Crowd Generated Media” got me thinking about how long Digg might last or stay relevant.

Granted, Jason Calcanis wrote a month ago about how Digg would “die a death of 1000 cuts”. He is right that they own the “Young Tech Male” or YTM demographic and it is hard to go beyond that group. I subscribe to Netscape and the quality of articles are dramatically different. Netscape has far fewer votes but the news is real and relevant (their interface just needs work).

The death of Digg will not be 1000 cuts but because of its failure to extend and protect its brand. So much time has been spent on covering them and how cool they are that they have ignored the fact that there is no reasonable way it can meet its revenue goals.

Jason does a good analysis of the deal and I agree on the valuation. To quote directly:

“The real challenge for Kevin and Co. at digg now is that they probably raised their $8.5m round at 60-80M post-money. That means that the latest round of investors are going to look for 10-20x that amount as an exit. That’s a 600M -1.6B exit. That means they have to get to $30-50M in revenue. That means that Kevin is right when he says they have no interest in selling the company–they’ve got 4-5 years of work to get to those revenue numbers… start building the sales for now because to hit those numbers you need a 20-person sales team.”

Kevin Rose says that they have not interest in selling and that is smart. Unfortunately, in 4-5 years Digg will be irrelevant so he has about 1-2 years to make it work for an exit. You are seeing the beginnings of chinks in the armor. Friends list or no friends list, spammers, censorship, gaming the system and a lot more. Digg did not invent “social voting”, Slashdot did and Digg only got popular because the YTM saw this as a better venue to troll and trash each other. Their community is powerful (900K as of this writing) and the “Digg effect” is far reaching for what geeky things they find interesting.

In fact, every new site that adopts “social voting”, Netscape included, has been profiled as “taking the Digg approach”.

So is Digg going to become a verb like Xerox or Tivo and lose its brand equity?

In order to save this company and keep it going here are the five things I would do in the next 12 months to maintain Digg’s leadership:

#1 – Don’t fight the Digg Clones – Own them – There are Digg clones popping up all over the place. Why not screen them and make them niche sites within the digg community. Similar to a blog network (like B5 Media). This will create a niche army of targeted sites. Digg has created a brand for the Young Tech Male so it is going to be near impossible to break away from that perception. It needs this to stay on top.

#2 – Do a deal with MySpace – These are your future users and huddled masses looking for ways to make MySpace more relevant. The Digg model for artists, MySpace blog entries and news could add a whole new dimension to the ugliest site in the world. The revenue share could be gigantic.

#3 – Create a relevance metric for contributors – We should know that there is more weight on a submission from a 50 year old PhD with expertise in that topic than a pseudo-intellectual 16 year old.

#4 – Hire topic editors – Now, we don’t want to run the risk of paying Digg members to submit. This is quite the opposite. We want new people who can help monitor and own a topic to add value, prevent bias and . Social voting is great but there must be oversight or the “Wisdom of Crowds” will turn into the “Wisdom of Mobs”.

#5 – License the Digg software to major news outlets and Fortune 500 companies – Let’s face it, traditional media can’t keep up. Some are just now finding blogs and a limited few are experimenting with the Social Voting/Digg approach. Why not have Digg show them how to do it and take ad money and license revenue from the deal? Dell’s new site should have been running a Digg system feeding back to the mothership. In this case, it just borrowed the concept, baked it up and served it to customers. Digg not included….

Otherwise, if things like this are not done in the next 12 months, Digg will be outdone by a site that is cooler and sucks the core “Diggers” to the new site.

If you were the entrepreneur in charge of Digg, what would you do?

I look forward to everyone’s feedback.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneurship, social networks

Granted, Jason Calcanis wrote a month ago about how Digg would “die a death of 1000 cuts”. He is right that they own the “Young Tech Male” or YTM demographic and it is hard to go beyond that group. I subscribe to Netscape and the quality of articles are dramatically different. Netscape has far fewer votes but the news is real and relevant (their interface just needs work).

The death of Digg will not be 1000 cuts but because of its failure to extend and protect its brand. So much time has been spent on covering them and how cool they are that they have ignored the fact that there is no reasonable way it can meet its revenue goals.

Jason does a good analysis of the deal and I agree on the valuation. To quote directly:

“The real challenge for Kevin and Co. at digg now is that they probably raised their $8.5m round at 60-80M post-money. That means that the latest round of investors are going to look for 10-20x that amount as an exit. That’s a 600M -1.6B exit. That means they have to get to $30-50M in revenue. That means that Kevin is right when he says they have no interest in selling the company–they’ve got 4-5 years of work to get to those revenue numbers… start building the sales for now because to hit those numbers you need a 20-person sales team.”

Kevin Rose says that they have not interest in selling and that is smart. Unfortunately, in 4-5 years Digg will be irrelevant so he has about 1-2 years to make it work for an exit. You are seeing the beginnings of chinks in the armor. Friends list or no friends list, spammers, censorship, gaming the system and a lot more. Digg did not invent “social voting”, Slashdot did and Digg only got popular because the YTM saw this as a better venue to troll and trash each other. Their community is powerful (900K as of this writing) and the “Digg effect” is far reaching for what geeky things they find interesting.

In fact, every new site that adopts “social voting”, Netscape included, has been profiled as “taking the Digg approach”.

So is Digg going to become a verb like Xerox or Tivo and lose its brand equity?

In order to save this company and keep it going here are the five things I would do in the next 12 months to maintain Digg’s leadership:

#1 – Don’t fight the Digg Clones – Own them – There are Digg clones popping up all over the place. Why not screen them and make them niche sites within the digg community. Similar to a blog network (like B5 Media). This will create a niche army of targeted sites. Digg has created a brand for the Young Tech Male so it is going to be near impossible to break away from that perception. It needs this to stay on top.

#2 – Do a deal with MySpace – These are your future users and huddled masses looking for ways to make MySpace more relevant. The Digg model for artists, MySpace blog entries and news could add a whole new dimension to the ugliest site in the world. The revenue share could be gigantic.

#3 – Create a relevance metric for contributors – We should know that there is more weight on a submission from a 50 year old PhD with expertise in that topic than a pseudo-intellectual 16 year old.

#4 – Hire topic editors – Now, we don’t want to run the risk of paying Digg members to submit. This is quite the opposite. We want new people who can help monitor and own a topic to add value, prevent bias and . Social voting is great but there must be oversight or the “Wisdom of Crowds” will turn into the “Wisdom of Mobs”.

#5 – License the Digg software to major news outlets and Fortune 500 companies – Let’s face it, traditional media can’t keep up. Some are just now finding blogs and a limited few are experimenting with the Social Voting/Digg approach. Why not have Digg show them how to do it and take ad money and license revenue from the deal? Dell’s new site should have been running a Digg system feeding back to the mothership. In this case, it just borrowed the concept, baked it up and served it to customers. Digg not included….

Otherwise, if things like this are not done in the next 12 months, Digg will be outdone by a site that is cooler and sucks the core “Diggers” to the new site.

About Steve Fisher: Editor of the blog Venture Files and a veteran of the dotcom bubble and bust, Steve Fisher is a serial entrepreneur with one successful venture and one spectacular flame-out under his belt. He has the scars to show anyone who asks. Steve is currently CEO of The Slipstream Group, a a software firm focused on providing social networking and supply chain technology for the travel industry. He is also doing research for a new book on how people and teams innovate within an organization by finding the rebel within themselves. He can be reached at Steven_Fisher@Yahoo.com.

Related Digg Week Entries

• CASE STUDY: HP Gives Consumer the Middle Finger
• The Digg Mob
• The Digg Bury Effect
• What George Orwell Can Teach Us About Digg
• Gaming Digg: Is it a game when the money isn’t Monopoly Money?

I refer to these first three phrases from Dave Hornik’s seminal blog entry “Social Networks 3.0” written in December 2005. I accept his interpretation of the first three phrases as follows:

Social Networks 1.0 - Group communications (i.e., AIM, ICQ, eGroup)
Social Networks 2.0 - Basic and Broad Social Networks (i.e. Friendster, LinkedIn)
Social Networks 3.0 - Experience based and more niche focused

Unfortunately, this has left us with a multitude of social networks that just make the noise much louder and they will surely fail because the are selling to the echo chamber and not doing something innovative.

So where does that lead us?

With Om Malik’s post “Are Social Networks Just a Feature?” it got me thinking as to how things are starting to froth to the point where they either need to converge, consolidate, commit suicide or connect. Marc Canter is one person that has it right and has put the tools in place to enable your personal social network or define a niche one with a white label solution. Now this could contribute to the noise, but on the other hand it could allow people to be in one place and aggregate their social network memberships and relationships.

With the recent press coverage of social networks finding new growth with APIs there is the beginning of a ground shift that over the next 18 months will lead to Social Networking 4.0.

So what is Social Networking 4.0?
Social Networking 4.0 is what I call Meta Social Networks. Om is right that tools that build this as a feature will exist but I don’t think many have the desire or sufficient motivation to build a MySpace. I believe that this will lead to increasing the value of intranet systems and back a few years ago when “portals” was the big buzzword, we used to call this concept “Enterprise Expertise Portals”.

The extension of these API’s will allow not only wicked cool Mashups (that is for a later post) it will allow some smart enterpreneur (HINT: FREE BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY HERE) to create an identity portal that allows you to manage your profiles on each network and all the details, yet respecting the dotted lines – FOR EXAMPLE: keeping your Goth Emo profile on MySpace separate from your professional business resume on LinkedIn is a necessary thing. Unless you wanted to let your business colleague know about your penchant for black and finding everything so depressing. Then again, they might already have a clue….

So eventually your “Identity Portal” could use various plugins and mashup API’s to take the social networking sites to another level.

This actually leads us full circle to Om Malik’s post of social networks becoming a feature. But in my opinion they would be called foundation and not just a feature.

Still, there are some challenges to overcome:

• Multiple Identities – This could be overcome with an identity portal but standards like OpenID could help move this along.
• Social Network API standard – It is good some are opening up. But there should be some standardization of basic profile data so it is easier to work with when connecting to profiles.

I look forward to hearing the communities thoughts on this and if it might work, what other challenges and what “Identity Portal” you might build.

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, social+networks+leadership, social+networks+4.0

Just in case you’re not familiar with Web 2.0, the first round of web technologies, Web 1.0, was mostly read-only, while Web 2.0 is enabled for massive read-write capabilities. Two things make this possible: rich web technologies and social computing tools. Rich web technologies consist of things like Ajax, RSS, and Ruby on Rails, while social computing tools are primarily social networks, search, wikis, blogs, and tagging. The “Web 2.0 goal”: creating new paradigms in how software is used by consumers and companies. For the travel industry, Social Travel is that very thing.

Over the past decade, travel software has evolved as an extension of existing travel channels, by web-enabling the travel buying experience. At first this was hailed as a revolution because you didn’t have to rely on an airline customer service operator or travel agent to find you the best deal. You, the customer became in control, and didn’t have to submit to the mercy of the airline-owned Global Distribution System (GDS) products that were based on old mainframe technology.

With the advent of the web, travel sites popped up and pricing started to become more transparent, enabling the building of three types of business models. First, there were traditional sites (like Travelocity, Expedia, and Orbitz), which were extensions of their big brother GDS platforms. Then came reverse auctions (such as Priceline), which let you communicate how much you would be willing to pay. And finally, to squeeze out that last dollar, remnant sites (like HotWire and CheapTickets) that took all the extra inventory to market and delivered dollars that would otherwise never have been spent. The main thing wasn’t how good or bad these travel sites might have been in terms of inventory or design. The crucial thing they did was to empower the consumer with choice.

However, choice wasn’t enough. Incremental innovations including predictive pricing (like Farecast), multi-site search (Mobissimo, for example), and mobile communications (such as Kayak Mobile) helped sites evolve—but something was still truly missing. It was the community and communication between travelers.

Today, the online travel sector is undergoing a revolution. Or more accurately, a convergence between travel sites and social computing that is creating this new category of social travel. The overall goals of social travel sites are to enable community and communication between people who might travel together, share travel destination interests, and look for better information on destinations and service providers.

In the end, this is still about selling travel services—airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, and cruises—but social travel opens up all kinds of new selling opportunities, such as:

1: Group Travel. This lets you include all your friends and family in groups, to coordinate travel for events and vacations. For consumers, it means group buying power, and for travel service providers, it means more revenue as there is less hassle in the buying process.

2: Accurate Destination Marketing. This is not just knowing where people have gone in the past; it is about knowing where they like and want to go—making the marketing process more effective.

Right now, several sites in this space are taking various approaches in the social travel space. The primary ones out there are Groople, TravelPost, TripHub, TripConnect, and 43places.

Coming up next: VentureFiles will review some of the companies we mentioned in more depth, taking a look at what makes them compelling and what could break them out of their current “early-adopter only” phase.

Here is my two cents on the market for 2007:

Digg – They have set off a revolution but the hype is going to peak. Netscape actually has better news and is more relevant. Make money or sell soon.

Facebook – Arrogant Founder, turns down $1.5B offer because he thinks its worth $8B. People are just wanting this to implode. I have one word for you – Friendster.

Myspace – MySpace will offer paid content or new revenue share models. As many people say that Web 2.0 is an after market for Google, media sites and design shops will become an after market for MySpace. We will see a whole new set of companies specializing in “MySpace consulting”.

Office 2.0 – This area will make some incremental headway as the apps get more sophisticated but the trick is going to be offline use.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise2.0, predictions