Social Networking-The journey from toys to tools
“Follow me on Twitter!”
“I’ll add you on Facebook!”
“Hey, we are Orkut friends!”
“I’ll subscribe to your RSS feed right away!”
You will agree, these are some of the most touted phrases that we use when we “network”. However, this is not the way the journey had begun. The transformation from toys to tools was a revolution that brought out a whole new “Social Economy” in “Social Networks”.
Craigslist offers listings for everything from apartments to lawyers to dates. It is free for users to search and in most cases, free for posters to put up their ads.
Patricia Nakache, a general partner at the venture capital firm, Trinity, is backing start-ups that figure people would be willing to pay for higher-quality, screened listings.
Because Craigslist does not much care about making money, it can be hard for a profit-driven business to compete. Just ask newspapers, which have seen their classified ads virtually disappear. But Ms. Nakache argues that “people are willing to pay for a better experience.”
As the economy totters, it’s easy to make fun of the concept of “Web 2.0” — the rallying cry of a generation of chipper start-ups spawned over the last few years with an unusual aversion to vowels.
Certainly, most of the venture capitalists I’ve talked to at the Web 2.0 Summit have said they are shying away from companies that are based on the idea of growing an audience now and figuring out how to make money later. However, after listening to the presentations here over the past three days, it is clear that some of the key concepts of the Web 2.0 movement are, in fact, taking root in deep ways.
One of the most significant trends is how the big companies that make very complicated systems are reworking them using the principles of Web 2.0 companies, particularly the notion of programs that talk to other programs. They are breaking up their technologies into discrete modules that can work alongside data and applications from others.
Facebook can be credited with taking the first step to open up large parts of its service to third parties. Last year, it let their applications on its site. Now, through its upcoming Facebook Connect service, it will let other companies build applications that use its list of people and who their friends are to deliver new services.
If Senators John McCain and Barack Obama actually do debate Friday night, you will be able to watch what thousands of viewers think of their verbal sparring almost as they talk. Twitter, the service that lets techno-hipsters broadcast their thoughts in 140-character bursts, is setting up a special politics page to make it easy to tune into the chatter.
At midnight Thursday, the company is launching election.twitter.com, the first specialized section of its site. Like Twitter's main service, it is dominated by a big white box. But instead of typing an answer to What are you doing? the election site asks, What do you think?
The emergence of social media has been a game-changer for newspapers and magazines. On the one hand, they have seen their print numbers continue to drop as more and more people turn to the internet to get their news and information. On the other hand, they (the smart ones) have seen that by embracing social media and leveraging the different opportunities it offers, they can drive more traffic to their sites, engage in open dialogues and react quicker. So what does this mean for you? More opportunities than ever for you to build relationships and get publicity. Here are a few things to keep in mind when trying to leverage social media for PR purposes -- and that's PR as in public relations, not PageRank!
Start Small
Many times when people think about getting publicity for their business, their wishlist goes something like this:
LiveWorld is a publicly traded company that's been around since 1996 and is best known for its white labeled social networks. These are online communities that LiveWorld helps clients build up around their existing brands, and they often take a good deal more time and effort to set up than communities created on top of self-service platforms like Ning or KickApps. However, LiveWorld is making a significant foray into "out-of-the-box" communities with the release of LiveBar, a widget-like site addition that brings community features to any website using only one line of JavaScript.
The worst mistake in internet marketing? Making things too complicated. It pumps up costs, slows site launches and keeps you offline when you could be online, selling stuff.
Who makes that mistake? You do. When you insist that that one feature is so important you can't live without it, you're killing yourself. If you can get 90% of the function with 10% of the effort, shouldn't you?
So, here's a list of features I think your site can probably do without, at least for now:
When you're deciding on features for your site, analyze the costs and benefits carefully. Consider whether you want a feature because you think it's important, or because it'll really help your audience.
No, I am definitely not going to write about the lucky number! I’ll talk about the most anticipated operating system of the year, yet to be released from the stables of Microsoft. Welcome to the new Windows 7.
I already have 7 questions on my mind. What shall be the minimum hardware requirements for this OS? Will the support for drivers be better than the previous releases of Microsoft? Will the new OS beat Vista and rival operating systems on performance issues? What about security? Phew!