"Friend-what?" you might be asking, but it's true: Red Herring is reporting that Friendster, the ill-fated social networking that (I think) started it all, has been granted a patent on social networks. Following a great tradition of painstakingly clear patent language, Friendster owns the patent for a "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks".
Whether Friendster will use the time-tested 'if you can't beat 'em, take em to court' strategy is yet to be seen, but to their credit: they apparently applied for the patent (issued June 27 of 2006) way back in the day, before they fell from their perch.
Jookster mashes up web archiving, social networking, and ranked searching to provide a new service that I think has some interesting things going with it. After signing up for a Jookster profile and installing the Firefox tool-bar, users have access to personalized searches and instant web archiving. Clicking on the Jook This button in the tool-bar instantly archives a copy of the page you are visiting and indexes it for search. You can go back at your convenience and search through all the pages you have jooked. The cool thing about Jookster however is not the fact that it can archive and index content, Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 has been doing this for ages. The cool aspect of Jookster is the social aspect. Adding buddies with similar interests expands your search results to include things jooked by them, and their buddies, and their buddies buddies, etc. You can specify how many degrees of separation you want to search. The search results are ranked by how many degrees the person who jooked a page is away from you. This feature brings in a concept that has been much talked about at the Supernova conference this week; the fact that outside of the web, we use trusted contacts so look for information, and judge the quality information based on the what you think of your friends. Jookster brings this idea to the web, and I think it could be the start of something big. Imaging searching for information on the ecosystem of the amazon rain forest and being able to see that a biologist you know had jooked a result; wouldn't that immediately reassure you that the information there would be good stuff?
I think Jookster is a great idea, and even if it turns out that it is one of the many startups that will go belly up in this boom, I'm confident that the underlying ideas it embraces will be something that we are using for years to come.
Being bought by the owner of the Fox empire hasn't scared MySpace away from partnering with Al Gore's high profile film about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth." Announced last week but receiving little play in the blogosphere to date, the partnership appears to be more low-key online than the previous X-Men promotion but set to leverage the online community for real-world public events. The movie's main site doesn't appear to make any reference to the partnership, as it is described on MediaPost, but MySpace friend to all Tom does have a Truth badge and link to the film's MySpace profile.
According to MediaPost, "the campaign will culminate in a 10-city MySpace theater buyout on June 16, with free tickets going to select members of the film's MySpace community. MediaPost also reports that MySpace is contributing a significant amount of ad space to raise climate change awareness. The MySpace music channel is reported to be planning an artist-on-artist interview between the former vice president and a to-be-announced rock star who is also happens to be part of the MySpace community. The MySpace movies channel will spotlight an interview with the film's director, Davis Guggenheim.
The partnership between the film and the high profile online social network appears to be remarkably low-profile. No press releases appear on PR Web, few bloggers outside of MySpace have written about it and a Google News search brings back surprisingly few results. The MySpace community itself appears to be responding well, however, as almost 45,000 users have added the films as a friend to their profile in just less than a week.
MySpace and youth social software expert danah boyd has released the full text of an email interview she and Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, recently did with the MIT News Office on MySpace and the proposed Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). Lots of good detail and analysis here, a great example of the usefulness of email interviews. Helpful in understanding the proposed legislation, MySpace and youth social software in general and the public work of two prominent voices on these issues. Both boyd and Jenkins are funded by the MacArthur Foundation to do academic work on these topics currently.
Here's how boyd explains her work:
"For my doctoral dissertation, I am investigating why and how youth are engaging in digital publics like MySpace, how this affects identity development and how youth socialization has changed over the last century. This work is being funded by the MacArthur Foundation to help understand the nature of informal learning. Understanding why moral panics emerge when youth socialize is central to my research."
Jenkins says about his work: "[My work] seeks to identify the core social skills and cultural competencies young people need in order to become full participants in the cultural, political, economic, and social life of the 21st century. In doing this research, we are reviewing the current state of educational research surrounding participatory culture and examining how teachers are currently deploying these technologies through schools. We want in the long term to develop new curricular materials which help parents and teachers build a more constructive relationship with new media."
Both provide some useful thinking and talking points in regards to the much maligned sector of youth-oriented social software.
MySpace has announced it will partner with the print magazine Nylon to prerelease an online version of the mag with links to the MySpace pages of bands and others profiled in Nylon stories. Sounds like a good idea. The publication in question appears predictably vapid, but the model here could foretell similar agreements in the future.
The move brings to mind the thesis of Nick Carr, who predicts in his forthcoming book and current Gilmor Gang appearances that on-demand media and contextual advertising will decouple high-revenue low-value content from the low-revenue high-value content it has effectively subsidized in traditional media institutions. (Think Britney Spears coverage selling the ads that then pay for the investigative journalism found in section A or F, whichever the case may be.) Perhaps the analogy here is that MySpace's partnerships like this one with Nylon will help raise funds to help pay for the hard-hitting critical thought of Fox News. Hmmm.... no it's probably an example of the kind of cultural destruction that Carr sees on the horizon. Fluff will pay for nothing but profits and more fluff while journalism that, for example, challenges those in power, will become an underfunded, far less visible niche market.
One way or the other, agreements like this, the WaPo's Technorati partnership and now Time.com's embrace of newbie Sphere all point to a real blurring of the line between traditional and new media. That doesn't even seem a relevant question any more. It's about being smart, not about whether new forms of media will beat old ones.
Nielson/NetRatings has issued a study showing that the top 10 social networking sites saw traffic grow 47% over the last year, with MySpace seeing the biggest growth (367% increase) and MSN Spaces (286%) seeing the biggest growth. Hosted blogging systems were included in the study. These numbers might even seem low in light of, for example, the recent study from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (and MySpace victims) finding that 61% of 13-to 17-year-olds have a personal profile on sites such as MySpace, Friendster, or Xanga. The study continues with findings that 14% have actually met face-to-face with a person they had known only through the Internet (didn't MeetUp prove this was a difficult business model?) 30% have considered meeting someone they've only communicated with online (consideration being a rational process, not to be encouraged in children) 71% reported receiving messages online from someone they don't know (spam?).
Anecdotally, I'd guess that MySpace fear mongering has risen more than 367% in the last year and if 61% of kids really have MySpace et al. profiles then the spectre of electronic communication has posed a serious threat for well more than the last year. Links: The Internet Stock Blog (original coverage) via Susan Mernit
According to a Republican sponsored proposal in congress, children in school should only be allowed to access static web pages uploaded via FTP and without comments enabled. "Social-networking sites" broadly defined as anything with user profiles and communication between users, the ability to create a web page, etc. would be filtered by public schools or they would lose their subsidized internet access. Andy Carvin, now at PBS, is the place to look for more information. Original coverage from CNet.
You know what kids? School is stupid. It always has been - and now you've got the internet. Face to face interaction with a wide variety of people and some quality internet use will lead to far more learning than some stupid public school quaking in its boots over MySpace and willing to take down Blogger and Flickr in its paranoia. Hard work, creativity and communication skills are going to take you way further than school - ok? Argh, I hate this kind of stuff. Update: Heated rhetoric ends and intelligent discussion of the issues begins in comments below! Thanks to those participating.
It seems that everyone wants to by MySpace these days, or at least harness the customer-love (read: clickthroughs and eyeballs?) of social networking software. Del.icio.us today announced another increasingly sophisticated iteration of its new social function. Now people who've added you to their contacts list will be visible from your account, etc. Is this how RSS is going to end up being adopted, through means like this? I am perfectly capable of subscribing to peoples' bookmark feeds amongst my many feed subscriptions - but to be honest I almost never look at anything but my archive and other peoples' by tag in del.icio.us. Do readers here foresee themselves using del.icio.us as a social networking app? Perhaps they are getting ready for the hordes of new users that will come in with full Yahoo promotion.
Big discussion around the web about this weekend's New
York Times story on MySpace's anemic revenues relative to its huge traffic. My favorite contribution to the mix
so far is Tim O'Reilly's
post about the part of the story reporting that 10,000 MySpace users have accepted a friendship with the bouncing
square of ground beef from the Wendy's commercials. [Correction - that was 100,000 users!] What were you saying about
MySpace users again? Meat market jokes could abound...
Regardless, O'Reilly posits a theory that
relationship marketing like this between brands and consumers could be the next big thing. It could be as big as
the creation of contextual advertising ala Overture and then Google, he says. Thoughts?
My only
thought initially is that if I want to maintain a relationship with a vendor (and I do, many) then I'll subscribe to
their RSS feed (so I can catch square burgers in my aggregator, I guess). Is that what this is, if not on a
technical level then on a semi-functional level? Maybe that's the level of sophistication that will be needed in
order to see mass adoption of syndication/subscription technologies - click here to make friends with a square
burger. It seems possible.
"Employing and/or providing software programs, browser scripts, or other
technologies that serve to block or substantially impair the display of advertisements on LiveJournal pages."
What's more obnoxious - pop-up ads or threatening to kick me out of the party if I look the other way? As
you can imagine, conversation both technical and impassioned ensues at Slashdot.
No mention of the
controversy yet on the LiveJournal news page, which
(incomprehensibly) doesn't offer an RSS feed either. (correction - I don't know why I said this, they have a
number of feeds that apprently just evaded me.)
Forbes ran an interesting story this week about cottage
industries popping up around MySpace. A quick profiling of everything from profile mod tools to friend-invite
and comment spamming software (oh joy!) to t-shirts that just say "Tom is not my friend." Funny stuff.
MySpace announced today that they have hired
a former Department of Justice and Microsoft...gentleman, to fight sexual exploitation of children on the site.
Hemanshu Nigam's arrival is widely discussed, but I have to ask - why on earth did the company wait until now to add
such a position? Imagine how much horrible PR could have been averted by hiring someone to do this six months
ago, or whenever the furor was really breaking loose in the mainstream media. I'll be curious to see what kind of
commentary emerges from MySpace watchers.
I think Danah did a good job. Made some important points. I was surprised how calm he was about the whole
thing - until I remembered his show and MySpace are owned by the same company. Hahahah.
For more info on
Danah and her work in this space see her blog.
That's right, the most popular sport in the world finally has its own social networking site, Joga.com. Built by Nike and Google, I can't imagine it having a better outlook.
Well, if there were sex, free beer or viable get rich quick angles then maybe. But other than that
soccer/football, Nike and Google all seem a mass market match made in heaven. Sports highlight vids in particular
seem to have a lot of potential for web distro. I've even been willing to watch some of them on YouTube, and I'm not willing to watch almost anyting on YouTube - it's so grainy and
slow. Found via BizWeek.
If you're going to be in Austin this weekend, a number of us will be as well. Barb Dybwad, now an occasional
contributer here (when we're lucky) and Associate Editor of the Weblogs Inc. network will be speaking on a panel
Saturday at 5:00 called Public Square or Private Club:
Does Exclusivity Strengthen or Dilute?
No speaking for me, but I'll be there and maybe we can say
hi.
"Friend-what?" you might be asking, but it's true: Red Herring is reporting that Friendster, the ill-fated social networking that (I think) started it all, has been granted a patent on social networks. Following a great tradition of painstakingly clear patent language, Friendster owns the patent for a "system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks". 
