News Corp, lately, has tried a lot of things with MySpace in wake of its competetion with Facebook. They haven’t had much success and recent reports suggest that the Core MySpace team might be on its way out. We think its a great and a gutsy decision. Though we are no one to comment on the likes of Chris and Tom, we believe they are hugely overrated.

MySpace as a product is an average product and it got popular because it was amongst the first. Right from the beginning everyone knew that MySpace was not very well thought of and it just needed a “Facebook” to overtake it in no time because you could clearly see a great vision behind the product and an even better execution.

Myspace will not miss anything by the departure of these executives and on the contrary will save around $50 million a year or even more which is considerable, if not huge.

What mySpace needs is fresh set of ideas, people with innovation on how to monetize and even more importantly bring the loyalty to millions of its users. Sadly Chris and Tom seem to have run out of ideas themselves. We will certainly eat our words if I see Chris or Tom starting a new company and making it super successful again.

Good Luck MySpace. Good Luck Chris, Good Luck Tom.

Just as I thought after doing my last blog on Microsoft deal with Facebook, I was so sure that Google won’t let it go so easy. Soon after the Facebook and the Microsoft deal, Google hits back by providing an open source platform community to Internet social networking leader MySpace and Bebo, a move that may undermine the rapid growth of their common rival, Facebook. Google announced the coup two days after revealing its plans to create a distribution network for open source web applications, known as widgets or web apps. Widgets make it easier to share music, pictures, video and other personal interests on social networking sites
We all knew Google will surely brew some kind of response to the Facebook and Microsoft deal just took place few weeks back. So here’s the thing.

Google lined up Bebo for the UK, MySpace for the UK and Friendster for Asia. That’s the social network API audience sewn up. Developers all over the world can now build widgets from the annoying (vampire battles and food fights) to the very functional (video players and photo galleries) that will work across all these sites with only minor tweakage.

Why did Myspace join Google’s OpenSocial?

With so much competition and so many new platforms opening everyday, limited resources is the major problem faced by most of the app developers these days. There are ample amount of opportunities but not enough people to pursue them all.

But i think MySpace is in itself big enough to require any platform, so why did they join?

It all comes down to competition for app developer’s time and resources. In the last few months since Facebook opened its own platform, a lot of competitors including MySpace have seen its lead fading. Facebook started winning more users day after day, and share more user time, because app developers were adding new features to the Facebook experience much faster than Myspace could do on its own.

Read more…

Immediate results, instant gratification, instant riches. Today thousands of online marketing products promise the same things and try and make money. And every minute, someone out there purchases a new product right before the price goes up. The new product, which inevitably is going to change the way we do Internet marketing. If you don’t purchase instantly you are going to get left in the dust while early adopters make all of the money.

Internet marketing is like a treasure hunt because the treasure may or may not actually be at the end, depending on whether you believe in it all.

The process needs to be revealed. The process needs to be flexible enough for personal modifications. And the process needs to guide a person through to profits.

The Marketing power of Internet sites

With the rise of individual voices and the eroding effectiveness of mass marketing techniques, it’s no wonder that so many marketing and communications disciplines are enamored with cracking the code on influence, specifically influence among people.

For example to market a book, an old-school form of media, we turn to a couple of the newest: video file sharing and online social networking, create a video spot for YouTube and our own Web site on MySpace.com. YouTube and MySpace, gives us an access to 30 million people, so you can well imagine how many potential customers we can line up with Internet. The reason why this technique is translating into sales is that videos are a lot visible to a large number of people.

Read more…

I have discussed a lot on social networking sites, their advantages, disadvantages, business approach, growth etc. By now, we all know that by joining a social networking service, users create personal profile and allow friends to contact them. This self-managed administrative service at times provides limited control or unlimited control over their profile visibility.

There has been an explosion in the size and number of social networking sites, resulting in some privacy issues. Today users manage more than one social networking sites, juggle between different passwords for each of them, leading to the inability to conveniently share profile across networks.

Various social networks are currently attempting to address these convenience issues, but this raises new privacy concerns and makes users even more insecure over their information.

I would like to address these privacy, security, and user convenience issues in online social networking and look out for some solutions on the same. Let me start with highlighting the social network privacy issue by explaining you the same.

Social Networking Privacy?

Cyberspace privacy is a lot different from the constitutional freedom and privacy that goes hand in hand. Whenever a huge number of people join any social network, serious privacy concerns are certain to emerge.

On the other hand, privacy in cyberspace is a whole different animal. Whenever a critical mass of people join a network community, serious privacy concerns inevitably emerge.
This platform is a channel of personal information online that positions a lot of site members at risk by displaying their private information publicly. It isn’t too late for us to look out for solutions and effectively try and apply it.

As social networking sites like as MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster have emerged as the most established forums for keeping in touch with old friends and meeting new ones. This change of information among friends have also lead to a major disadvantage of breaching information as users are releasing that their private information is being circulated far more than they would like.

In September 2006, Facebook’s recently introduced News Feed feature spurred additional privacy concerns from users. Over 700,000 users signed an online petition demanding the company discontinue the feature, stating that this compromised their privacy.

Who access your information on the social networks?

The easy way to share information online, a big advantage of social networks, but are we aware of who is accessing it?
There are a number of users who intend to share information with friends and family, find its way into the hands of the authorities, strangers, the press, and the public at large.
For example, job recruiters are looking to these sites as well as performing more traditional background checks on potential employees. Performing a search using these sites may provide a lot of unedited information about a person.

The search tools provided by each site easily effects our information. Like MySpace allows the general public to search its database of members, using search terms such as a name, e-mail address, or school. This search if further filtered down to a particular country of even postal code.

This search can be filtered down to a particular country or even to a postal code. At times if users don’t change their privacy settings, searchers can view their full profile such as occupation, hometown, marital status etc.

If users included in the search results have not changed their privacy settings from the default level, searchers can view their full profiles. These profiles may include personal information such as occupation, hometown, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and religion, as well as photos of users, and their friends or family.

One the other hand Facebook carries a more limited search feature. Users must be registered with the site to conduct a search, and can only view the profiles of those in their network, or of those already on their list of contacts. Some profiles viewed in this way include cell phone numbers and postal addresses. E-mail addresses always appear on Facebook profiles.

Friendster also restricts searches to members. However, members can view other users’ full profiles, whether they are on the member’s contact list or not. Notably, if the person searched for does not turn up in the Friendster database, the Friendster search engine provides a direct link to a data broker, which offers to search for the person.

Hence, there is a possibility that any one of a user’s several hundred “friends” can download this information and use it wherever and however they wish. In fact, access can extend beyond friends and members. Users need to realize that prospective employers, job recruitment agencies, law enforcement, and members of academic staff, can gain access to photographs, comments and information posted on profile pages, whether or not this information comports with the image you would like to portray to the world outside the network.

How can users prevent this problem?

Social networking’s been growing like crazy over the past year or so and companies everywhere have been scrambling to jump on the bandwagon either as advertisers or as creators of social networking sites themselves.

To the users, the good news is, social networking sites are working on progressive privacy policies. Several answers which cover many of the above-mentioned concerns should be addressed.

As good business dictates a significant online presence, we as consumers should demand more severe privacy regulations.

A lot of users are disheartened to know their information that they place online for their friends and family is viewed by people away from their interest.

Once we publish our information online, we have very little control over it. In this case right privacy settings can prevent your information to be showed to all. If the default settings are set at a higher level, users can immediately have more control.

For example if you being a user don’t want every detail of your profile available to those outside your network of friends, or did not want to allow photographs on your profile page to be downloaded can regulate their privacy settings accordingly.

Privacy and Security: How far is too far?

Concerns about security and privacy on the Internet will continue to influence social networking trends.

The September, 2006 release of Facebook’s News Feed and Mini-Feed features and the ensuing reaction among Facebook users prove an excellent point about the future of social networking: users do not like it when websites sacrifice user privacy for “improved” features. Facebook users were outraged by the features, which allowed other people in the network access to continuously-updated feeds of information about them. Development in social networking technologies will likely be tempered with an undercurrent of caution. In a world where identity theft is facilitated by easy access to personal information and employers judge potential employees by analyzing their social network profiles, users will be uncomfortable with features that readily offer up too much of their personal information. Video networking could face similar roadblocks if users decide that they do not want to share their physical appearances on the Internet.

Conclusion

The future of social networking is very much up in the air. Unforeseeable technological developments and the unpredictable nature of the course of trends in popular culture make predicting the next big thing in social networking very hard. Movements toward consolidation, niche markets, video networking, and increased mobility all seem viable, but only time will tell whether these or other features come to popular fruition.

So it is nobody but the users who will have to take care of the information they decide to display online.

To many people today Web 2.0 may just seem the latest in the never-ending succession of Internet trend, but just like the Internet I can see Web 2.0 staying for long. It mat be or may not be a bubble of sorts, but after reading on so many social networks and search engines I can say that sites like MySpace and Digg place a perfect lesson to teach corporate establishments.

As per me Web 2.0 is a package of both threats and opportunities, the time to take your head out of the sand is now and realize if we can make use of it or let it fade away.
I would like to discuss Web 2.0 in detail, to start with let me define it for you

What is Web 2.0?

Let’s start by examining what exactly we mean by Web 2.0. In its most basic sense, Web 2.0 refers to any tool or application that’s delivered over the Internet and allows people to interact—by contributing, editing and sharing content. Read more…

As newspapers, blogs and media are all anxiously propelling out news on the new applications for iPhone, I couldn’t resist writing about it as well.

With the new Internet technology taking over in a big way, iPhone apps have been the most interesting innovations. CRM provider Etelos - which has already gripped some popular platforms like Google Apps, Netvibes, Pageflakes and Windows Live - announced on its blog about an Etelos CRM suite of modularized CRM tools, for use on the iPhone.

Another new application in the iPhone splash is the Clippz.com. This service allows you to download “optimized video clips” from the Internet to a mobile device (a process it calls ’sideloading’). Clippz.com has announced that they are offering more than 500 MySpace, Metacafe and YouTube collections encoded in Apple iPhone’s H.264 file format. What else can one ask for!

Well, its will be too early for me to comment in terms of development. Infact I came across an article on the new development platform for web-based iPhone apps, the first of its kind. And to add to action Adobe AIR and Google Web ToolKit (GWT) are likely to participate in iPhones apps too.

The excitement around iPhone web applications is soaring day by day, and why not? We all are waiting to see some more action by iPhone developers.

So let me know what iPhone apps have you seen that have tickled your interest and you can’t wait to use?

There was a rush of high school students pouring in after Facebook opened to everyone last year September. This resulted in a huge number of high school teens registering for Facebook. Despite the rise of high school teens enrolling on Facebook was still framed as being about college.

I believe that this is indeed a change taking place, but it’s not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now indistinct. Some teens are flocking to MySpace while the others are flocking to Facebook. What they choose is kind of sticky because it seems it primarily has to do with opting for something different to break the monotony.

The other reason for this is the ideal substitute provided by Facebook after MySpace dangerously estranged “good” kids. Parents weren’t nearly as terrified of Facebook because it seemed “safe” thanks to the network-driven structure.

I suspect that this will be received with criticism, but my hope is that the readers who encounter this essay might be able to help me think through this. In other words, I want feedback on this piece.