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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Hmmm, I used the words “social graph” in this interview with Randi Zuckerberg, director of business development at Facebook. Dave Winer, yesterday, said that anyone who uses that term sounds like a monkey. She gave her definition of Social Graph at about 14:39. Everyone who is…

I tried to ignore the term "social graph" when it first started popping up a few weeks ago. For one thing, it sounded like some sort of embarrassing disease; for another, the idea of having to figure out some arcane new Web 2.0 term was depressing. But the term - or is it a meme? - kept on…

A few weeks ago a well-respected developer wrote a blog post about something he called the "social graph." A graph, to most people, is a diagram like the one on the right, which plots the value of a stock over time. For 99.99 percent of the people this is what a graph is. For a very small…

Time might have nominated you as the Person of the Year, but Gawker Media, the publisher of such popular blogs as Gizmodo, Lifehacker, and Kotaku, is savvier: The company is making you into a contributor -- if you're a commenter, that is. Gawker owner Nick Denton stopped by the Wired News offices…

There's an old saying: "you can never have too much money or friends." But that's before social networking came along. And while the adage for money still rings true, a shift maybe under way in how we define friendship. You can thank the web and social nets for that. The American…

Google yesterday announced they’ll be rolling out a new look for their social network Orkut. It’s only being shown to a small portion of users right now. I can’t see it, for instance, but others now posted their screenshots, like the one below by Info-Mundo.net (Creative Commons…

And it's starting to happen right now, today in fact. I reported earlier on a new feed in Facebook, allowing notifications to be visible outside the wall.It's getting reallll interesting -- I've found some more RSS feeds in Facebook's UI. 1. Friends Status Updates. Look for the subscription link in…

Dél-Koreában az emberek évente több mint 100 millió dollárt költenek avatarra, vagyis olyan kis rajzolt figurákra, melyeket kitehetnek az MSN Messenger ablakába, vagy feltehetnek a közösségi portálokra. Dél-Korea a jövő online világának boszorkánykonyhája, bár az ottani…

There’s a war being fought over ownership of your identity. Today Netvibes launches the Facebook Widget, which lets you view your Facebook notifications and friends within Netvibes. Data displayed includes links to your profile, friends and networks, and the usual counters for the number of…

Congrats to the lead investors, Union Square Ventures and the angels, and the entrepreneurs. I've been reading various posts and comments, and see a thread that's still out there. People doubt that there's a way to make money with Twitter. To that I say, they haven't been reading this blog. Now…

We've got social networks with lots of users, like MySpace, Beebo, Facebook, etc, and we've got open social networks like Marc Canter's People Aggregator and Marc Andreessen's Ning. But we really don't yet have an open social network with a lot of users. Facebook took a step in that direction when…