metarand

Social Media: Are Families More Connected, Sharing More?

As an initial touchpoint for this post I want to point to a comment made recently by Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Talking about Facebook’s redesign at the Future of Web Apps event in London, he noted that sharing amongst people is growing at an exponential rate:

“One of the things that we have thought about at Facebook – we don’t have any conclusions on it yet – but an interesting historical analogy is Moore’s Law.” (The Law stated that the speed of processors would double every two years.) “And I wouldn’t be surprised, although there’s no definitive link yet, if something like that exists with the rate of sharing.“

This is a key insight and one that is being backed up by a Pew Internet & American Life Project on Networked Families. The report explores how parents and spouses are arriving at a “new connectedness” through the use of key social media enablers.

Read Write Web has a useful summary of the report. Yes, there is always the need for cognizant balance between work and play, face time and screen time, but on the whole we are able to connect more with family and friends, colleagues and compadres. I want to explore this more in a piece I am writing, but it seems to me that we are on the cusp of attaining a whole new level of sharing and connectedness.

Pongr: Are Facebook Apps On The Nose? fbFund Finalists Announced

The Facebook blog has a post today titled, “Drumroll, please”, and goes on to announce the top 25 finalists in their fbFund Developer Competition. Running an eye through the list I’d suggest a clang of cymbals is more appropriate.

Many of the apps are merely derivations of apps that have long since fallen out of favor. And then there are the names – take Pongr as an example. Surely the guys behind this one could’ve thought of a more appropriate name for a mobile price checking app.

One of them does catch my eye though – GroupCard. Initially put into play at Stanford University, this app empowers users to rally their friends to sign the same printable online card to celebrate any occassion. Each friend can add a message, upload photos or audio, and even make a gift contribution.

That sounds like a really neat app.

iPhone App Development Grows Up: Goldminers and Litigators Arrive

Last year the flavor was Facebook’s F8 Platform. This year it’s been all about iPhone apps. Fast followers, like Google, with Android, and RIM are emulating Apple’s app store, but the defining moment(s) that point to the platform having reached a stage of nascent maturity are twofold:

* firstly, the Sydney Morning Herald has cottoned on to the fact that there is good money to be made from developing apps – I’ll let you read the piece written by Asher Moses for yourselves, but I suspect/hope the developers will now descend on this new vein of “easy” moola;

* secondly, an iPhone developer has taken on Coors in a litigation over a beer drinking app emulation that users the iPhone’s tilt motion. Brave move, I wish Hottrix luck and hope their law firm is taking this on purely on contingency.

It will be great to see more developers tapping into these mobile app stores, but the key will be in keeping up the quality in the apps.

Photobucket Expands Features With Customized Themes And Advanced Organizer

Recognizing that photos and videos are how we keep and share the most important moments in our lives, Fox Interactive Media-owned photo and video sharing site Photobucket has taken another step towards making the sharing of memories even more personal and entertaining.

The site’s 46 million unique users worldwide will be able to make use of new album design themes and a new photo and video organizer.

With the themes feature, users can choose from pre-made themes in a range of categories (art, entertainment, holidays, nature, sports etc). Artists will be able to provide pre-made themes for their fans – currently Tokio Hotel has a custom theme on the site. In addition, users can create custom themes of their own.

Themes can be added to both individual and group albums and will be viewable by visitors to an entire album, individual photo or video and when photos or albums are shared. Group albums provide access for multiple people to share and view photos in a single album.

The new organizer allows users to add titles, descriptions and tags to photos and videos in bulk, customize the sort order of media in albums, organize content via drag and drop and search through albums based on descriptions, tag contents or titles.

Does Facebook Really Have Three Years To Figure Things Out?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tells us, via an interview with a Frankfurt newspaper, that they are currently experimenting with a number of models and expect to have worked out their optimal way to monetize within three years.

I agree with his premise that the model for social networks is different to the Google ad-based revenue model – people visit socnets to hang out, not to click through. I also agree that experimentation is good, but will it seriously take them three years?

Perhaps something got lost in the translation from Zuckerspeak to German to English.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

Jason Calacanis: Twitter’s Man In Tehran

Andrew Keen has penned a wonderful post about the follow versus followed aspects of social media, how this proves out the 80/20 or Pareto Rule and the Law of the Vital Few.

Well worth the read.

[via Dennis Howlett, picture courtesy of Lucie Debelkova]

Is Facebook Desperately Seeking Monetization?

Do we need a new business model for monetizing on the Internet?

Barry Diller, while being interviewed by the WSJ on the break up of IAC, pointed out that social-networking advertising is currently a big headache and methods are yet to be found to make it effective -

“will that get figured out? I absolutely believe it will. What form will it take? Absolutely unknown.“

It seems Facebook is still grappling with the right algorithm as well. The company’s COO and ex-Googler, Sheryl Sandberg stated at the American Magazine Conference in San Francisco yesterday -

“The monetization question on the web is a very big and open one.”

The holy grail, according to her, is “demand generation” and she’s calling for a new model and metrics.

John Furrier believes Sheryl needs to focus more on being a product leader and landing key business development deals – both things that MySpace has excelled at – rather than worrying now about monetizing.

I’m not quite with John yet. I believe that Facebook, and others in the industry, should be starting to think very seriously about what business model they follow.

We are definitely entering a phase when advertising growth slows. I’ve had this view corroborated by a number of very smart people on Sand Hill Road, including folks like Jeremy Liew at Lightspeed Venture Partners, and companies who totally rely on advertising for revenue are going to do it tougher for a while.

Flickr Panda’s To The Feed Generation

Mashable alerted us to Flickr’s new front page feature: a giant panda spewing a feed of popularly rated pictures.

There seems to be general uncertainty as to why the panda is vomiting pictures, but one thing’s for certain – this new “explore” feature is getting attention.

Social Network Leaders Crossover Into Mobile

The two leaders in the online social networking space, MySpace and Facebook, are emerging as the clear leaders in the mobile social space as well.

According to research carried out in Q2’08 by ABI Research, as high as 46% of the people who visited online social networks also visited mobile socnets. Of this nearly 70% visited MySpace and 67% Facebook. No other online social networks came near these figures.

What this shows is that firstly, there is a big gap between the market leaders in this space and anyone else, and secondly the hurdle for consumers to jump to specialist mobile socnets versus crossing over their online networks onto the mobile platform is very high.

I wonder how the adoption curve is trending for mobile socnets at the moment? Silicon Valley VCs have made bets on players like Bluepulse and Mig33, both of whom I’ve covered extensively. Combined with the excellent web browsing capabilities on handsets like the iPhone, is there a place for mobile only social networks?

Streaming The Real-Time Web

The MIT/Stanford Venture Lab hosted a fun session this week on Lifestreaming: The Real-Time Web. MC’d by Kara Swisher, who acknowledged to a somewhat flustered Jeff Clavier that she specializes in cheap shots, the session included Bret Taylor, a Friendfeed co-founder, and Loic Le Meur, Seesmic’s CEO.

The key question for me around the shift to the real-time web is how sites cater to different user tastes — some folks like drinking from the fire hydrant, getting a constant flow of information and responding to the trends, while others like to have the information archived (think of the way posts are represented on a blog) and they access it at their convenience.

I expect we will see a lot of innovation at this coal face to allow for the spectrum of usage.

Kara covers the event and includes some video – here.