SocialMedia Blog

Great video on F8 posted by Venturebeat.

SocialMedia is holding our first OpenSocial developer event called “OpenThread” on August 15th, 5pm - 8pm at SocialMedia’s SF office. The event will feature an hour and a half of discussion on developing on OpenSocial (short tutorial, developer panel, hosting discussion) followed by an “OpenBar”.

We’re limiting this to 150 developers due to space constraints, so we require all developers to sign up ahead of time. It’s a great event to network and learn more about if you’re missing out on OpenSocial.

Itinerary:

5:00 - 5:30 Sign In
5:30 - 5:45 Introduction and Brief History of MySpace / OpenSocial
5:45 - 6:00 Tutorial on building your first app (Hello World!) - MySpace demo
6:00 - 6:45 Panel with MySpace and other OpenSocial developers (How did you start?, What are the pros and cons?) - Linus Liang (CLZ Concepts), David King (Lil Green Patch), Kenneth Walton (Klicknation)
6:45 - 7:00 Application Hosting
7:00 - 8:00 Open Bar

Please RSVP by filling out the form below. Check this page for any updates about the program. Also, join the FB MySpace App developer group, specifically intended for cross platform devs.

For many of you, and even me, it seems like when we talk about social applications, we’re talking about the Facebook platform. Facebook has been around the longest and done a great job rolling out new features. However, MySpace is growing into a great complementary platform, with the added advantage that it’s an OpenSocial container. MySpace can currently monetize at the same rates as majority of Facebook inventory, as those with apps on both platforms already know.

Since cross development time is expensive for small groups of developers, we’ll be putting together some more resources on how to develop as well as user’s experiences over the next couple of months.

Moreover, as the web continues to “digest” social networking, there will be many more platforms where developers can create a living from applications. We’ll keep you posted.

SocialMedia Network’s CEO, Seth Goldstein, made a rather audacious statement at the IAB Social Media conference today: “Social Media is killing internet advertising”.

While it seems an odd conclusion coming from the eponymic advertising company, it’s true. Since the birth of online advertising, traditional modes of advertising have lost their effectiveness online as users have become less interested in branded content and more interested in each other.

On display was a graph showing just how profound this decline can be:

In response to this problem, Seth proposed that advertising needs to shift from a “shouting” model (one big ad on a content site), to a quieter form of advertising that speaks to users, alluding to a new advertising product to be launched by Social Media Networks in the Fall.

You can see more press on the keynote below:
Seth Goldstein: Beacon Set Industry Back
Exec: Ad industry must think small to tap social sites
Social Network CPMs: A Penny Arcade

Last night I was able to stop by the latest Google Campfire around Friend Connect. Despite everyone knowing the news, there was a great showing of bloggers and companies (Joyent, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Hi5) there to see a demo of Friend Connect.

Friend Connect is a collection of standards meant to make low traffic sites more social by harnessing existing social networking user bases. Google’s set of widgets let web developers quickly drop in code for widgets like sign-ups, comments, or really any other application on Open Social. Mussie Shore, a Google Product Manager, showed off what Google cooked up:

The system borrows bits and pieces I’ve seen already. The user login features were distinctly MyBlogLog, although now they supported all OpenID providers. The commenting widgets reminded me of JS-Kit, but now had identities attached to them. They both make a lot more sense together. All in all, if this was a stand alone startup, I’d be enthusiastic. However, it’s Google.

The series of data portability announcements from MySpace, Facebook, and Google are no accident. While Facebook, with its large, robust, base of user accounts has a head start in bringing its network to some of the largest sites on the internet. Google, on the other hand, took a strategy of going after the “long tail” of websites out there. Their “cut-n-paste” social networking solution is designed for even the most inexperienced webmasters, like that of Ingird Michaelson’s fan page.

Given this strategy, the uptake is likely to be slow. Facebook is mainly concerned with integrating into around 100 websites, whereas Google has to reach orders of magnitude more webmasters in order to have the same user base. Google will likely push the value added not only by Friend Connect, but also the value added by its growing library of applications. iLike has a compelling music widget, and Google Friend Connect is the only way you can get it.

Justin Smith has more notes on the speech.