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Next Utah Social Media Developers Garage: May 13th at Bungee Labs

Posted on May 7, 2008 by jessestay

Our Utah Social Media Developers Garages (UTSMDev) happen every second Tuesday of every other month, and that is coming up one week from today. Our next meeting will be on May 13th from 7pm to 10pm at the same place as last time, Bungee Labs. We’ll bring the Wii or Xbox in case there’s time to play afterwards.

At this event, Bungee is going to show us a simple “Hello World” for Facebook using their Bungee Connect Platform. For those unaware, Bungee had “Platform as a Service” down before Google App Engine came out, and have recently even partnered with Amazon EC2 in order to provide full server access beyond their current platform. I have some videos of their stuff I took while at Web 2.0 Expo that I’ll try to post later this week in my “Utah Startups” series.

I am still looking for businesses to sponsor snacks and drinks (or even a full dinner – Bungee supplied Fuddruckers for our last event!) for the event – if your business would like some exposure I’ll be sure you get the credit. It could be a great way to meet new developers, Social Media experts, and bloggers!

As usual, while this event is targeted towards developers, everyone is welcome at the event, as it could be a good way for your business to meet developers in this area, as well as just learn a little more about the Social Media space! For future announcements of UTSMDev events, be sure to subscribe to our Google Groups mailing list here!

Bungee Labs is located in the old WordPress building on the second floor – you can find directions here:

625 E Technology Ave B2300
Orem, UT 84097

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=625+E+Technology+Ave,+84097&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.724817,82.265625&ie=UTF8&ll=40.325575,-111.679738&spn=0.008163,0.020084&z=16&iwloc=cent

Please RSVP on our Facebook Event Page.

Improving the Twitter Web With SocialToo

Posted on April 29, 2008 by jessestay

I have a sincere favor to ask of you. Would you, if you have not already, go to http://socialtoo.com and sign up and help me out in my cause? Share it with others, blog about it, Twitter it – this was written for you. Today, I launched something special on SocialToo.com, something that I hope will make a better environment on Twitter. It only works if lots of people use it though.

Today I launched an intelligent blacklisting feature on SocialToo.com. After registering and logging into your SocialToo! Dashboard, you’ll see a text box where you can enter twitter screen names you would like to blacklist. For each “spammer” you see, or individual you simply do not want to follow, enter their Twitter screen-name, and when a certain percentage of users on SocialToo.com all blacklist that same user (we have a unique algorithm that determines that, based on crowd-sourcing the definition of “Spam” on Twitter), we add that name to a global blacklist on SocialToo.com. When anyone chooses to auto-follow those that follow them on Twitter using the SocialToo! auto-follow feature, now those users will never be followed. You can now ignore them forever, hindering their reasons for being on Twitter!

SocialToo.com is a project I term, “the Companion to the Social Web”. After registering you have options such as the ability to automatically follow those that follow you on Twitter, add an automated message that gets sent to users (via dm) after they follow you for the first time, and on Facebook, redirect to your Facebook profile via yourusername.socialtoo.com. More features are being worked on for multiple social networks, and the idea is to find all the needs that just are not provided by the traditional Social Networks, and make them available to the public. If you have a need let me know. All scripts that run behind the scenes at SocialToo.com I am releasing on a single-user level via Open Source (GPL v.2) so you can run it on your own server should you desire.

The final feature, released today, is this Global, Intelligent, blacklisting feature. This feature, to me makes much more sense than services like twitterblacklist.com, since rather than depending on ratio only, we’re depending on actual user definition, by the masses to determine who is a “spammer” on Twitter. I’ll look to also integrate with twitterblacklist.com’s API in the future, and maybe even contribute back to it as we grow, but this is the start of something big. This is truly a Groundswell opportunity (I’m reading Charlene Li’s book right now) that you can be a part of.

Live Blogging the Web 2.0 Expo: Yahoo Announces Y! OS #web20expo

Posted on April 24, 2008 by jessestay

Yahoo’s keynote proved very interesting. In it they announced a new technology they call, Y! OS. This technology is to be the beginning of a new Open, Social Strategy for Yahoo, and with the technology, as they term it, they are “Re-wiring Yahoo”.

Starting today, Yahoo is opening up the beta for their Search Monkey platform, which is to be a new way to organize and format search results. He showed some interesting formatting of search results with reviews, descriptions, etc.

According to them, Yahoo’s open strategy is about opening up all the properties of Yahoo. First of such will be an Application platform. They will be socializing all of their properites, unifying the user profiles, and integrating the ability to add “applications” across all Yahoo properties and apply Social properties to those applications.

According to Yahoo, they are “Not creating ‘yet another social network'”. Yahoo does not view “Social” as a destination. It should be an integrated environment. He showed some examples of integration within the Yahoo mail environment, showing a way to pop up messages most relevant to the individual through the Social Graph. Taking Yahoo portable will also be an integral part of this.

Yahoo says that later this year the first version of Y! OS will be delivered. This will include the beginning of Social Graph and Application Development platform, and an entirely new dimension of developing applications at Yahoo will become available.

This is huge news for Yahoo – it puts them up at par with Google and Facebook, and will change the way you use the internet as you know it. Expect to see more from Google along these lines in the future – I believe the iGoogle OpenSocial integration predicts this. With Yahoo as a part of the OpenSocial foundation, I expect them to integrate OpenSocial as part of this, and move to a fully social strategy. I’m very excited for this announcement and look forward to Y! OS to come into play at the end of this year.

Live Blogging the Web 2.0 Expo: Mark Andreeson #web20expo

Posted on April 24, 2008 by jessestay

Mark Andreesen, creator of Mosaic and founder of Ning.com, spoke to us in an interview today at the Web 2.0 Expo, and shared with us some of his thoughts on the growing up of the web, and what he thinks of the future. As I mentioned earlier, one interesting thing he mentioned was plans for Facebook Platform Integration, something I am very excited for. Here are the highlights.

What were your expectations when you released Mosaic?: “Hype at the time was interactive TV. Mosaic and internet technologies were kind of the renegade of the time – no one believed it could make money.”

At what point did you think this was going to change the game?: “It wasn’t until after Netscape was started that Mark started thinking it was going to be a phenomenon.”

Many of the TV and media companies mentioned are now extremely important players in this space. What do you make of those guys now?: “By and large most of the major media companies are still unprepared for the shift. Many of the newspaper companies are in an absolute free-fall. There is still a story that has yet to be written. These companies are uneasy about a commodotized future. That said, things are still developing and are still unknown.”

In 1995 Microsoft realized what you were doing was competitive and decided to launch Internet Explorer for Free – what is your thought of that?: “Well, in fact they used my code. If you go into the credits you’ll see the name of Mosaic from University of Illinois in there.”

Looking at the legacy of the browser, what is it you like and what do you wish evolved differently?: “It has turned out far better than anyone ever thought. The big surprise has been how many of the ideas that we had that we thought were experiments have lasted. One example being javascript – we created something that looked like Java because it was familiar to people at the time. Another example was cookies – we were writing an E-Commerce site for MCI, and needed a way to do it, so created the “cookie thing”. People are now seeing that as a threat to privacy, and I find that amusing. The other expiriment was the back and forward buttons – we were looking for a better way to navigate the internet, and it’s interesting to see that that method has stuck around.”

You said, “It’s nice to have this kind of money for the ‘coming of the nuclear winter'”. Can you tell me how to “build our bunkers”?: “There’s a huge irony for the industry where after the crash of the stock market in 2001 all the money got put into Real Estate, and now that’s crashing. On one hand all of this is happening in a remote area and doesn’t have a lot to do with us, but on the other hand, it all comes back around, and effects us in the end.”

What are the advertising models that might work?: “Your company has a strong advertising model to it – Ning is a social network play, but different – why is it not Facebook?: Ning is a company for people to create their own social networks. On average those networks are growing very quickly. Adding 1500 networks a day, and people are discovering that social networking is a central part of their lives.”

How do you feel about the idea of Data Portability?: “In general, pro. You can import data in and out of Ning as you want. There is not a lot of consumer demand for that type of thing however. The majority of supporters of Data Portability are early adopters.”

Google has laid out OpenSocial and you have ascribed to it. What does that matter to the users of Ning?: “It matters by default. Facebook did an amazing thing with rolling out the idea of a Social Networking Platform that users can take applications and apply them to their profiles, a powerful idea. The Facebook platform was specific to Facebook though, so a standard was needed which we joined.”

“Facebook is starting to get more open about the Platform – directionally that is the trend. I think a lot of people like us will be implementing both OpenSocial and Facebook.”

Ning Creator, Mark Andreesen, Announces Plans for Facebook Platform Integration

Posted on April 24, 2008 by jessestay

I’m sitting here at Web 2.0 Expo and watching the Mark Andreesen Keynote. One interesting thing he mentioned was that Ning (and others) has plans to launch onto both OpenSocial and Facebook platforms. This is the first I have been aware of plans outside of Bebo to utilize the Facebook Platform, and I believe a wise decision. The Facebook Platform is indeed one of the most popular and most used platforms out there, and therefore worth looking into as a Social Network looking for a standard to adopt. The question is, is Ning in talks with Facebook on this, and how far along are they in organizing this? Is this pure speculation? I am very much looking forward to Ning, and other Social Networks adopting the Facebook Platform as a standard. I’ll be posting the notes from the keynote next.

Charlene Li and Max Levchin from Slide

Posted on April 23, 2008 by jessestay

I came in late for the Tim O’Reilly keynote, but Tweeted the highlights. The next keynote talk was a discussion between Charlene Li, and Max Levchin from Slide. Here are my notes:

Facebook is not a fad.

How do you make money and get a valuation of 1/2 million dollars?: “Advertising”. 2 different methods – advertising and direct-to-consumer sales. The next couple years will focus on the consumer sales.

“Juno” sponsored an action within the Super Poke app called, “Pregnancy Test”. Juno was utilizing Super Poke to draw a close reaction to the fans of the movie. Every “super poke” sponsorship has been a smashing success for the advertisers.

How do you acquire customers?: Precise measurement of users engagement within software helps to determine.

Is Privacy an issue?: Aided by the social networks. Determine who wants to see the ads and who does not.

With more users than some of the social networks (70 million users), how do you deal with the conflict?: Competition is for advertising dollars, also who engages the user.

I am very much not a fan of Slide. Their business model is what encourages that “bubble” atmosphere on the Social Web. It is my hope that they adopt their model and move away from pure advertising and spammy-methods of propogation.

Live Blogging the Web 2.0 Expo: Social Strategy for Business #web20expo

Posted on April 23, 2008 by jessestay

Charlene Li, and Josh Bernoff are two of my favorite Social Media Experts. They published “Groundswell”, a book I strongly suggest and recommend to anyone looking to utilize social technology in their business strategy. Here are my notes:

Key roles and their Groundswell objectives:

Research

Marketing

Sales

Support

Development

Charlene talking about specific applications that accomplish these objectives:

Del Monte community, invitation only, has conversations with their customers. Del Monte asks their customers questions like, “What does your dog eat for breakfast” and gets responses back from the customers. Then, more specific questions are asked, and a conversation is started. This information is hard to measure in a focus group, but can be gathered via a Groundswell.

Now Charlene’s talking about tampons. What, don’t like the subject? Neither do most people. P&G had this same problem, and created the social network, “Being Girl”. No branding of “P&G” on the site. In articles, adds things like, “Brought to you by Always pads”.

Brides.com: Allows the bride-to-be to create a count-down calendar on their Myspace page. Widget shows the countdown, and offers a challenge to get the widget. When a user clicks to get the widget, they go to brides.com to get the widget. With widgets like this, your fans are doing the selling for you.

Starbucks: Suggestion boxes. All suggestions are public, and can be voted by the community. Management talks back to the community and responds to their feedback!

Keys to success for pragmatists:

Start with your customers

Choose an objective you can measure

Line up executive backing

Romance the naysayers

Start small, think big

Pragmatists bring companies and the groundswell together. Objectives are the key to successful social strategy. Use POST to frame your strategy. Think big, but start small.

Live Blogging the Web 2.0 Expo: Comparing Social Platforms #web20exp

Posted on April 23, 2008 by jessestay

Unfortunately I only have a Flip which gives me just 30 minutes of storage so you’ll be able to see the first 30 minutes below. I’m currently watching “Comparing Social Platforms”, with Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager for Facebook, Allen Hurff, SVP Engineering for Myspace, Jessica Alter, Dir. of Platform and Business Development for Bebo, Patrick Chanezon, Google OpenSocial Evangelist, and David Recordon, Open Platform Lead for Six Apart. It’s fascinating to see the leaders of all 4 areas, including a developer standpoint from Six Apart all talking about ways to improve the Social Graph.

I’ll continue from where the video left off:

Allen Hurff said a great point when it comes to focus on Platform Development: “I love developers, but I love users ten times more”. That’s a great point and something we need to remember, and not be too demanding on as developers. In the end it’s all about the users of our applications.

Dave Morin talked about the Causes application. If the user can’t get the message to the friends that they care about such a cause, that’s bad and needs to be taken care of. Facebook is trying to focus on this, while finding balance with Applications that perhaps aren’t as impacting to ensure they aren’t being spammy and user experience is protected.

Patrick Chanezon says Google prefers the term “organic growth” to “viral growth”. Dave Morin brought up that ultimately, creating the best product is the end goal. Those applications that just focus on Viral growth grow fast, but ultimately die out. In the end you want the best experience for the user.

Dave Morin: “A lot of the times we’ll see viral but no ‘social'”. Being able to see what your friends are doing with your application, how they interact together makes it social and not just viral.

Dave Morin: Social Commerce is the future of how people do business on the web. Working on a commerce engine for Facebook. He likes the applications that are doing virtual currencies (I agree).

David Recordon: Building applications has to be easy. Extensibility is important. It has to be easier than it is today – if more successful than today next year, technology still isn’t easy enough.

Questions:

Matt from SocialThing: will there ever be a premium model with guaranteed uptime, extended support, etc.?: Myspace says they haven’t thought of it. Facebook says they are committed to their platform – says it’s a good point and also haven’t thought of it.

How liberal are platforms going to be in sharing data?: Six Apart is one of the creators of the ATOM standard – bloggers should own their content. Facebook is committed to enabling people to take data where they want to. What exactly does “data portability” mean? Dave Morin posed that question to OpenSocial… “data portability” might not be the right word for it – “privacy portability” might be a better term for it. “It’s all about the user – it’s not about technology.”

What are the thoughts on creating an even playing field for viral channels?: Myspace will have a hard time

In conclusion it looks like the theme for this was putting focus on the users in the end vision, not the application. I’ll upload the video in a minute if it isn’t showing yet.

Me at Web 2.0 Expo

Posted on April 21, 2008 by jessestay

I’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo starting tomorrow, April 22 through Friday, April 25. This, in my opinion, is one of the conferences to be at this year, as I really feel we’re getting to a tipping point towards the evolution of Social Networks. Expect to hear a lot about Enterprise 2.0, Future of Mobile, and of course, the future of Social Networks. I’ll do my best to live-blog what I can on the Stay N’ Alive blog, OpensocialNow.com, and FacebookAdvice.com. I’ll be bringing along my wife’s Flip digital video camera so maybe I’ll even get some good video while I’m out there.

I’ll be bringing several signed copies (by both me and Jason) of “I’m on Facebook–Now What???” with me, which, if you’re a blogger and can convince me why I should give you a free copy (I love giveaways to your audience if you have a good audience) come see me. Or, if you already have a copy of the book I’m happy to sign copies while I’m there. I’ll be posting my whereabouts on Twitter so you should be able to find me. Also, look for me at the O’Reilly booth on Wednesday around 3pm. I’ll be also promoting my upcoming book, FBML Essentials and would love to meet you!

If you want to follow where I am, again, there’s Twitter, or feel free to check out my schedule here. Also, add me on Crowdvine!

Google Creating the Largest Social Network Ever

Posted on April 21, 2008 by jessestay

So many articles have come out today about the new iGoogle integration with OpenSocial and launch of the developer’s sandbox for iGoogle. I don’t think any of their headlines truly do it justice. Google has just launched something so big that, to me, should keep Facebook and MySpace up at night. This, I believe, is the item Google had up their sleeves which my source mentioned earlier.

Let’s just start with the fact that anyone can join the sandbox! Google has not given any information on if information stored on the sandbox will be deleted when they go live, but indications are that this data will remain when the sandbox goes live. This sandbox seems different than the Orkut sandbox, in that the sandbox, and the live site are one integrated environment. If you sign up for the sandbox, when you go to http://www.google.com/ig it automatically takes you to the sandbox environment every time, and not the live environment. Are you an early adopter and want access to see your friends feeds and share your profile with them? Just sign up for the Sandbox here, add the developer tools tab (Note, tabs are gone – not sure what to call it now. Also, the link in the developer docs is wrong – use the one I just posted.), and now, under “Developer Tools” you will begin seeing all your friends, you can invite new friends, and see their status updates.

Here’s what the new iGoogle Sandbox is:

Goodbye Tabs! — “Tabs” in iGoogle previously allowed you to segregate your Gadgets into different “views”, and Google even created pre-populated views such as “Finance” where they gave you all the Gadgets you needed for a particular subject. Google appears to have removed tabs in the sandbox, opting instead to put the “views” (or whatever Google will call them) into a sidebar on the left.

I mentioned on Twitter earlier that the new vision Facebook is giving us for user Profiles has a striking resemblance to iGoogle’s tabbed interface. That is all Google is doing here – they are providing a true, open, customizable environment that they have already put years into in order to create the ultimate user profile for an individual. Now Google just needs a way to allow you to determine which of the “Views” will be visible by your friends – trust me, Google has way more up their sleeve on this one. Facebook has a lot to catch up in this. Frankly, Facebook’s best strategy may remain in the walled-garden approach.

Friends from Google Reader and Gmail are now integrated in one, viral environment! — I have mentioned that Google Reader’s “Friends” integration was only the beginning for Google’s social efforts. I also argued that the API Google gives you to access Gmail Friend data is a big thing. Now, within a single environment, you can write applications that have access to these “Friends”, as well as all of your Gmail contact data. Ask it to suggest friend to you – you’ll notice it seems to be using that Gmail Contact API to retrieve your Gmail contacts and add them as friends.

Now go into your Gmail contacts – how many people are on your contacts list? I’m willing to bet that for most people it’s way more than you have in Facebook or Myspace or LinkedIn. Imagine what will happen when that entire friends list begins adding each other as friends. This is why I think Google is building the largest Social Network ever. The great thing is Google’s platform is so vast you may not even know you’re in a “Social Network”. This is what Charlene Li was mentioning when she said Social Networks of the future will be transparent.

Google Reader Profile is now easier to update and share with others — after you add the Developer Tools, you’ll notice your Google Reader Profile is now displayed and integrated for you. Where many people are using iGoogle as their Home Page of their browser, this now gives you a profile to edit, and share with others. Much of this data is available via the OpenSocial API and can be shared with others via Applications. Google is only beginning to give the user a sense of a “Profile” through this update – expect to see much more from them.

“Updates” Feed/Gadget — under Developer Tools you’ll also see a “Status Updates” Gadget. This is a slap right in the “face” of Facebook’s News Feed in that now any interactions you make in Google Reader get stored in this Gadget, and shared on your Friends’ iGoogle pages. I believe this information will also eventually be available and updateable via the OpenSocial API.

Status Updates — One cool thing I noticed is that when your “Updates” Gadget updates itself, it automatically updates a “Status” under your name in your profile. It doesn’t appear that it updates your Gmail status, but I expect that to happen in the future as well. I’d also love to see this updatable via the OpenSocial API and manually, as well.

Automatic Invitations interface for your Apps — in the upper-right of each Gadget, there is a link to “Share this Gadget”. Click on that, and you can invite your friends to add the gadget as well. This is a great viral way to start, along with the Updates Feed, but I imagine we’ll also see ways to further get into the invitations architecture via OpenSocial in the future. For now, I suggest the Google Contacts API. 🙂

Now, imagine Google Apps getting this same functionality in the future and your business being allowed to have the same access to iGoogle Gadgets – Enterprise 2.0 is knocking at our doors, my friends! Google has just given us almost all the same functionality as Facebook, in an open, not walled garden. Google has just “Checked” Facebook here I believe.