I’ve been reading recently that a number of social networking sites are rushing to launch [or re-launch] a widgets platform given the success of the Facebook platform. There have been announcements about a MySpace platform which claim that it will essentially be a set of…

Mary Jo Foley has a delightful post entitled Are all ‘open’ Web platforms created equal? where she wonders why there is more hype around the Facebook platform, Google’s muched hyped attempt to counter it on November 5th and other efforts that Anil Dash has accurately…

I scored an invite to FriendFeed and after trying out the service, I have to say it is both disappointing and encouraging at the same time. It is disappointing because one would expect folks like Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit who helped launch Google Maps, Gmail and AdSense while at Google…

I read this post by Steve Rubel several times and I still don’t quite get the logic as to why portals will win in the social networking war. Google and Yahoo (in particular) have a lot of the components mentioned in these posts (IM, email, address books, etc) and it hasn’t translated…

Every time I make a prediction, there's a better than 90% chance I am going to be wrong. But this one, you can take to the bank. The portals - AOL, Yahoo, Google, Windows Live, all of them - will be big winners in the social networking wars. "What," you say? "How can that be? I…

One of the slams I saw yesterday after we started posting Google Reader’s feed numbers is that “nobody reads RSS.” Today, Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, gave us some more numbers so we can extrapolate out just how many people actually are using RSS. First, let’s start with…

This morning this comment was left in my last post: +++++ We’ve now posted on the Reader blog with more details about this: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/10/subscriber-stats-summed-up.html The post mentions that the counts were slightly off until this morning, so keep that in mind when…

So Google recently made it fairly easy to determine the number of Google Reader subscribers around a particular blog. Gabe Rivera at Techmeme did a little work on excel and came up with an unofficial list of the top blogs and the number of subscribers each blog has on Google Reader. He sent the list…

UPDATE: This list is no longer accurate. Google updated the numbers last night and they all changed pretty dramatically. I’ll update the list later this week when I have time. Darren Rowse on ProBlogger showed me how to look up how many subscribers I have on Google Reader. So, I went looking…

On Friday, Google Operating System noticed that Google Reader will tell you Google Reader subscriber numbers for a blog when you search to add a new feed. It didn’t take long for different folks to start collecting subscriber numbers for different blogs. I haven’t asked the Reader team…

On Friday, Google Operating System noticed that Google Reader will tell you Google Reader subscriber numbers for a blog when you search to add a new feed. It didn’t take long for different folks to start collecting subscriber numbers for different blogs. I haven’t asked the Reader team…

Google exposed the number of Google Reader / iGoogle subscribers to a feed in the crawler's user-agent and in the Webmaster Console, but that's only useful for your own feed. What if you want to see how many subscribers Google Operating System has? Now you can see the number of subscribers by…

MySpace is set to launch its 3rd party developer platform in just a few weeks, according to sources speaking to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. If what Arrington is reporting is true (and it almost always is) then things are really changing at the industry leading social network. By this time…

There are big changes underway over at MSN Video, some of which represent a real look forward for the industry. It's hard to believe, and it isn't pretty, but this is a site you've got to check out. The site's design, full screen player and advertising model are big. Time on Site The big news…

That del.icio.us dominates the social bookmarking space is clear, but by how much? Where do the other players stand? We'll attempt to sort it all out and predict what's coming next for social bookmarking in this post. A year ago in our Social Bookmarking Faceoff post, we looked at the state of the…

Blog software vendor Six Apart this afternoon posted a long rumination, with video, on the "social graph" and how vendors should relate to it. The social graph is the network of your networks, all your accounts and friends across multiple online social networks and other sites you…

Google hunters ferreted out a new feature late last night called Google Shared Stuff. The project is obviously far from ready to ship - but it's too late to squabble about that now! I've got high hopes for social bookmarking in general but this particular project may not be worth your time to…

Watch out Tumblr, here comes Soup. Soup is an easy to use tumble blogging application that includes two killer features: social networking (kinda) and outside activity streams. It's sort of a cross between Tumblr, Pownce, and a social activity aggregator. [Ed: I had to look up "tumble…

Yesterday a select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the “Facebook issue.” The meeting was so secret that all attendees had to sign…

Big trend coming out of TechCrunch40: data normalization services like Mint, Cake, TripIt, and Clickable. DMS is a new category (I think I just named it) in which companies pull in data from 3rd parties, normalize (clean) it, and then leverage it. In Cake's case they suck in people's trading…

There's been a lot of chatter about the entire concept of social graphing. I have no idea if there is validity here or not. And certainly people smarter than I am are talking about the potential viability of the entire concept. However, what I do know is that a lot of us are increasingly…

Google Blogscoped got their hands on an internal video created by the Google Reader team where they discuss future plans for their popular service.There’s a pile of interesting information; highlights include Google developing a new way for publishers to notify Google of updates, plans to…

This week I want to try something a little different and attempt a debate here at ProBlogger. The idea is simple - I’ve chosen two people who I think have experience around a debated blogging topic to argue the case for either side of it. These two opinions will act as the first speaker for…

There's been a lot of chatter about the entire concept of social graphing. I have no idea if there is validity here or not. And certainly people smarter than I am are talking about the potential viability of the entire concept. However, what I do know is that a lot of us are increasingly…

Google has just quietly launched a new social link sharing service called Google Shared Stuff.According to this help file, you can add links to your “shared stuff page” by adding a bookmarklet to your web browser’s “Links” or “Bookmarks” bar or by clicking…

Walking barefoot over a cobblestone path is possible, and no step in particular will injure your feet. But the overall experience isn’t nice. It’s the same when a website has minor usability problems piling up: none of the issues taken on its own is disastrous at all, but taken together,…

Social networking is twice as popular with young women as young men, but adult men are more likely to use social networks than adult women. Young women use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, share pictures and communicate. Adult men tend use it to network and communicate professionally. But…

On Friday evening I wrote a piece about integrating images, audio and perhaps other types with Twitter. There's been a bit of reaction, not too much, I think because most of the people who are adversarial about this kind of stuff either don't use Twitter, or because it's the weekend. Most of the…

Back in 2001, I wrote a document called Payloads for RSS that explained how you could attach something to a RSS item. I didn't explain how a RSS app would display or play one of these things, that would come later.Today, we may be at a similar place with Twitter. Sometimes I want to answer Twitter's…

TechMeme really likes Friday evening's Monkey piece, it's been #1 for almost 24 hours. Even if people still use the Social Graph term, it may have done some good by asking the question -- what's the difference between a network and a graph? In math there is no difference, a network is a graph and…