Recent News

I blame David Hasselhoff.

Everything was going fine for the web — the financial world had been unwinding its overleveraged excesses for nearly a year without nary a ripple into Silicon Valley — until the launch of HoffSpace, a social network revolving around the oogachaka-ing, burger-wagging actor.

Some bloggers called it a bizarre nightmare. Others decried it as the end of social networks. They were probably joking. But they were right.

Hoffspace showed once and for all what the web sector had fought so hard to admit: These social networks had finally expanded a niche too far. No longer was it possible to argue that one day social networking sites would be anywhere near as good at making money as they were at expanding, fractal-like, into a grey goo of trivial matter.

Social networks spent too much time trying to build audiences without building a solid business model. The thinking was, let thousands of startups innovate in thousands of ways and one of them will stumble onto something big. The way eBay did with online auctions, or Google did with a better search engine.

But even the site voted most likely to succeed is still punting when it comes to financial success. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a German paper this week that the site won’t have a business model for three years. “Growth is primary, revenue is secondary,” he said. On the face of it, that statement isn’t absurd. But coming last week, it sounded blindly out of touch. Facebook will surely survive, but smaller sites looking to it as a role model probably won’t.

This was the week when the Internet sector realized that not only are the good times over, but that much of the room we had for innovation is also gone. The time to experiment around with big, audacious ideas is passing. The invoice for that luxury is now due, and companies will have to either pay up or be so well-funded, like Facebook, that they can still afford tinker a bit. Money is what everyone is expecting from startups, simply because there is suddenly so much less of it around.

Of course, one thing that would help the sector would be if a major social networking company were to give enough of a peek into its books to show it has healthy cash flows, even a robust operating or net profit. But sites like Facebook and MySpace have been suspiciously shy about their financials so far, so that’s not likely to happen.

Many of these sites — focused on social networks or widgets or other mere embellishments to the web that emerged over the past few years — aren’t going to make it. Some with a smart focus, like LinkedIn, will muddle through. A few will be bought out cheap; others will live on as labors of love.

This is the destructive part of that celebrated and magical creative-destruction formula. A lot of areas in tech are probably going to find ways to keep growing, if more slowly: mobile advertising, perhaps, or cheaper, more efficient on-demand software.

Skeptics have been arguing for the past few years that social networking wasn’t a standalone business model, but a feature to enhance larger businesses with established business models. It seems that fate is finally happening. It just took a luminary like David Hasselhoff to make it real.

The booming resurgence of casual games—games that don’t a huge time commitment—was the focus of some speakers at the E For All Expo this past weekend.

Americans Throw Caution to the Wind When It Comes to Social Networking
MarketWatch - 7 minutes ago
... 2008 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- More than one in two (53 percent) Americans are concerned about security threats when using social networking sites ...

With the rise of social networking, we're also facing a host of new etiquette questions: Is it OK to embellish online profiles? How many friends are too many? Dan Tynan collects some expert advice.

The days of the stuffy job fair are fading as recruiters favor the Internet, where social networking sites are enabling organizations, including government agencies, to target the exact audiences they're looking for when it comes to recruits.

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Americans not only expect companies to have a presence on various social media sites, according to a new report by Cone, they also expect those companies to interact with customers, help troubleshoot problems, and even solicit feedback on products and services.

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The Age
The 10 Most Absurd Social Networks
PC Magazine - Sep 28, 2008
There are some ridiculous ones out there, including a social network for your dog and another for earning your way into Heaven. by Jennifer L. DeLeo Call me ...
Mobile network aka-aki lets members know when they're near one another CNN International
When private and public collide Sydney Morning Herald
all 9 news articles

Hitwise has released some interesting stats from August: Of the 56 leading social networking web sites, MySpace.com received 67.54 percent of U.S. visits. Facebook, by comparison, got a mere 20.56 percent of total visits.

Hitwise says that the market shares of U.S. visits to the social networking category overall decreased 2 percent in August from July to account for 6.4 percent of all U.S. visits. Year-over-year, visits to the category decreased 17 percent. The decline would make you believe that the social networking sector is losing steam. My guess is that, with school back in session, the services are going to see resumed growth.

Social-Networking Site Digg Expands
Wall Street Journal - Sep 24, 2008
By JIM CARLTON Digg Inc., a social networking site whose users vote on their favorite news stories, is launching a major expansion even as the general media ...

If you're a student, what you do online in your room may come back to bite you in the butt at school. A federal judge has ruled that a school had the right to suspend students over "lewd and vulgar" language used on a fake MySpace profile of the principal.

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theodp writes "Confirming paranoid high-schoolers' fears, a new Kaplan survey reveals that 10% of admissions officers from prestigious schools said they had peeked at sites like Facebook and MySpace to evaluate college-bound seniors. Of those using the profiles, 38% said it had a 'negative impact' on the applicant. 'Today's application is not just what you send ... but whatever they can Google about you,' said Kaplan's Jeff Olson. At Notre Dame, assistant provost for enrollment Dan Saracino said he and his staff sometimes come across candidates portraying themselves in a less-than-flattering light. 'It's typically inappropriate photos — like holding up a can of beer at a party,' Saracino said. On the other hand, using the Internet to vet someone's character seems overly intrusive to Northwestern's Christopher Watson. 'We consider Facebook and MySpace their personal space,' the dean of undergraduate admissions said. 'It would feel somewhat like an invasion of privacy.'" We recently discussed similar practices from prospective employers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Myspace Vs. Facebook ; Which Social Networking Site Do Teens Like ...
RedOrbit, TX - 9 hours ago
By Shea Conner It's a routine. When teenagers get home from school or hanging out with their friends, they get on the computer and check their comments on ...

College Applicants, Beware:
Wall Street Journal - 18 hours ago
A new survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% of admissions officers acknowledged looking at social-networking sites to evaluate applicants. ...
Anti-Social Networking: Pick 'Friends' Carefully Investor's Business Daily (subscription)
Admissions Officers Peek at Applicants' Facebook Profiles Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
all 8 news articles

Joost to Unveil Web-Based Beta
Adweek, NY - 5 hours ago
NEW YORK Joost, the mega-hyped, well-funded but infrequently viewed Internet TV startup, is taking a page from Facebook and other social networking ...
The New Facebook ... Blechhh! Forbes
all 6 news articles

An analysis of search trends shows that online porn is as popular as ever, but the proportion of searches for porn has gone down significantly over the years.

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Microsoft-backed social network goes belly-up
CNET News, CA - 17 hours ago
A would-be social network called Wallop has shut its doors, according to a message on the homepage. "Thank you for being part of the Wallop beta social ...
Microsoft social-networking licensee on the rocks? ZDNet Blogs
Wallop Takes A Leap Into the Deadpool Washington Post
all 4 news articles

Studies suggest that an increasing number of employers are actively searching social networking sites for information on job applicants. MySpace may not have been designed as an extended resume, but it's on the road to becoming one.

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We just released a number of improvements to our redesign at http://beta.friendfeed.com. Many thanks to everyone who has taken the time to preview our new design.

We plan to replace our current design with the new one very soon, so keep the feedback coming in our FriendFeed Beta feedback room.

Here are some of the changes we have made based on your comments:

Improved posting interface

We updated our interface for posting new items to FriendFeed. The new links make the posting function more obvious, accessible, and also distinguish it clearly from the search box. We also made the search box more prominent by moving it to the top of the page.

Navigation on the left

We moved the sidebar to the left-hand side to make navigation easier for those with wide screens. We kept the width of the sidebar narrow so those with smaller screens did not have too much space taken up by the sidebar.

Improved Rooms navigation

We updated the All Rooms page so that it is easier to see a comprehensive list of the rooms you participate in.

Friend Lists easier to use

We have heard a lot of positive feedback about the new Friend Lists feature. We added a number of features that make the feature more prominent. For example, you can now choose which friend lists a person goes in at the moment you subscribe to them.

Simpler and cleaner

We simplified the sidebar by removing and relocating some features to make it easier to use. We also tweaked the look and feel of feeds to make some of the links more easily discoverable.

Let us know what you think in the FriendFeed Beta feedback room.

Yahoo introduced a new iPhone application and rolled out new capabilities in its Blueprint developer environment.

One-in-Five Employers Use Social Networking Sites to Research Job ...
Earthtimes (press release), UK - 6 hours ago
Twenty-two percent of hiring managers said they use social networking sites to research job candidates, up from 11 percent in 2006, according to a ...