Webware

MogoTXT, a company that wants to become the place for celebrities and sports superstars to connect with each other, announced Tuesday that it has launched a new microblogging tool. According to the company, five players have already signed up for the service including Shane Battier, LaMarcus Aldridge, Jordan Farmar, Eric Gordon, and Spencer Hawes. The real attraction for celebrities, the company's CEO says, is that MogoTXT allows the stars to share in the revenues of their following. In other words, the more users they can attract to the service to follow their micro-blog updates, the more money they can make off MogoTXT. The company plans to expand its service to Major League Baseball, soccer, NASCAR, college football, and NFL players later this year.

Mashable announced recently that it has acquired microreviews service Blippr for an undisclosed sum. According to the blog's founder, Pete Cashmore, users will be able to submit a microreview of any service the site's writers mention in a post. Those reviews can then be syndicated to Twitter, Friendfeed, and other social services. Cashmore said the Blippr acquisition is just one part of his company's plan to bring more social elements to the site.

Popular social network Hi5 has inked a deal with mobile payment service, Paymo, that allows users to buy virtual goods in the Hi5 Gift Store through their mobile phone. Once users clicks on the Paymo link from their phone, they will be asked to provide their phone number, country, and carrier, and every time they buy gifts through their device, the charges will be tacked on to the next month's phone bill. The Paymo feature is available now to all Hi5 users.

Twofish, a self-proclaimed "virtual economy," announced Tuesday that it has been able to add several new customers to the ranks of those using its Twofish Elements platform, which allows users to create virtual goods and microtransactions in online games. According to the company, developers Pocketville, Star Fever, Pangaea, and Ignite Skill Gaming are using the platform. Going forward, it hopes to add more customers and increase the instances of virtual goods and microtransactions in games.

Alloy Media, a company that provides youth-focused online content, announced Wednesday that it has acquired Takkle.com, an online resource and college recruitment site for high school sports. According to the company, Takkle will join the Teen.com Network, which includes a number of youth-focused sites. Takkle provides tools for high school athletes to create player and team profiles, as well as share videos and photos from games. It claims to draw a monthly audience of "1 million athletes, both male and female." The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

iWidgets, a company that allows users to take their content from Hi5, Facebook, and other social networks and syndicate those across the Web, raised $4.1 million in a Series A round of funding led by Opus Capital, the company announced Wednesday. In connection with the funding, the company has also added Geoff Katz, a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Board of Governors, as vice president of business development and marketing.

NetworkedBlogs, a Facebook app that allows users to add blogs they love to the popular social network, currently has almost 450,000 active users and over 700,000 installs, ReadWriteWeb is reporting. According to the report, its nearest competitor has yet to reach 100,000 installs. Most importantly, the app's users are adding 500 new blogs per day, bringing the total number of blogs on the site to 125,000. The app is free for all Facebook users.

Kiva, a nonprofit microlending company, has unveiled an open-source API platform for those who want to create applications for the finance community. The company is encouraging developers to create applications for the iPhone or a map that displays real-time global fund transfers. But its executives did say they want developers to use the API to develop apps that go beyond its few suggestions.

Slide and Katalyst Media, companies that provide social apps and original content, respectively, announced a partnership that brings KatalystHQ exclusively to Slide's Facebook app, FunSpace. KatalystHQ is an original series that looks at the "inner workings of a Hollywood-based entertainment company." Katalyst Media and KatalystHQ were co-founded by famed model and actor, Ashton Kutcher. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

I'm a social-networking addict. I'm never away from my Twitter stream, I always check Facebook for friend updates, and Friendfeed is probably my favorite Web tool this year. I check out Hi5 to catch a glimpse into the future, head back to Friendster from time to time, and can't help but check in with LiveJournal every few months when I feel nostalgic.

But for all that work with social networks, I've also become a somewhat critical and cynical user. And anyone who suffers from my same addiction probably has as well. That's why I've compiled this list of some of the most annoying social-networking quirks that affect us all.

Constant Updates

Sometimes, updates get to be a bit too much. It's not that I don't like them--I enjoy seeing what my friends are up to--but when I'm constantly inundated with new relationship status updates, virtual good purchases, and status updates, it gets overwhelming.

Thankfully, many social networks allow their users to control what kind of updates they receive, but even then, it's tough to decide what you should and shouldn't see. Maybe you don't want relationship status updates for everyone, but there are a select few that you do want updates about. Worse, status updates need to be kept on, but for some, you wish it was turned off. It's an awkward balance, but changing content settings usually helps. I spend most of my time in those settings prior to using any service before I get going.

Fail Whales

I realize the term "Fail Whale" really only pertains to one service--Twitter--but it does get annoying when any social network is down. Granted, many of these issues happen when a social network is in its infancy, and over time the sites become more reliable. But again, as a social-networking addict, I find myself using new social networks each day and downtime is a constant occurrence.

(Credit: Twitter.com)

During the first four months of 2008, Twitter experienced uptime of just 98.72 percent, for a grand total of 37 hours and 16 minutes down. Bebo was down for 14 hours during the same period and Hi5 trailed slightly behind with 13 hours of downtime. More popular sites like Facebook and MySpace kept downtime to under three hours.

Am I the only person who's annoyed by that? I realize maintaining a popular service isn't easy and scaling is a major issue, but more uptime means more user satisfaction, which is a key component in the success (or failure) of any social network.

Inordinately long beta periods

Beta periods are important to the growth and development of any social network. I'm a firm believer that, when used properly, they help the company find lingering issues to fix before the network goes live to an even larger community. Even better, they do a fine job of creating a viral-marketing campaign through beta testers who are impressed with the service and share that sentiment with friends who cannot yet access the site.

But sometimes, beta periods get a little out of hand. To me, a beta period that lasts too long tells me that the company knows there are problems and is simply unwilling, or unable to rectify them. So in order to cut down on negative feedback, it keeps the site in beta when it shouldn't be.

Maybe management forgot to take the beta sign down or its waiting for a special moment. Regardless of the reason, the longer a service is in beta, the sooner I lose confidence in it.

The fight with size

I hate to say it, but sometimes, social networks are too big. Try finding your friend with a unique name on Facebook or MySpace and you probably won't have too much trouble--there aren't that many people named Apple out there. But if you try to find your old friend Tom Smith, you'll probably have more trouble finding him than you should. Sure, there are advanced search options that try to help you narrow it down by location, but what if you don't know? After college, he went his way and you went yours. The chances of you finding him are slim. And as Facebook and MySpace add more users, it's even getting difficult to find less popular names. You wouldn't believe how many people on Facebook share my last name.

But it's not just trying to find old friends that can get frustrating. When you want to add an app to Facebook, it's almost impossible to find exactly what you're looking for without searching multiple times. Due to the incredibly high number of apps on the service, simply inputting, "card game" isn't going to cut it. I'm all for having more apps and widgets on social networks, but don't you think it could be arranged better to reduce search time? I'm guessing that would make the entire community much happier.

I hang out on Facebook a lot. Too much, maybe. Enough, certainly, to recognize a few types of unpleasant characters. I've come across five distinctive kinds of Facebook trolls, and I'm sure you've dealt with them too. Here's some advice to stop their onslaught and make your Facebook experience just a little better.

Troll type: Old-time Nobody
Confirm or ignore? Confirm

Social networks provide a slew of opportunities to connect with old friends, but that doesn't mean you need to befriend your third-grade buddy Bill, whom you haven't had a discussion with in 20 years. Usually they mention a time in your life the two of you shared when you were kids. Maybe it's not the end of the world, but it does get a bit awkward when they remember that time and you don't.

So how should you handle the Old Time Nobody? Be friends with them and don't think twice about it. Usually, they're harmless, and either really liked you when you were younger or just want to add another person to their friends list to show off. Either way, what does it hurt? You'll hardly communicate with them through Facebook and that will probably suffice you both. Don't worry about it and add them to your own list.

Troll type: New service addict
Confirm or ignore? Ignore

They became a friend of yours on MySpace, or maybe even followed you on LiveJournal, and ever since then, they've wanted to be your friend on every social network known to man. Sometimes you catch a really serious one who signs up for all the newest services before anyone, and they immediately send out invites like they're passing out candy to kids on Halloween.

Once you get their friend request on Facebook, ignore it. I hate to say it, but it's your only option. Unless you nip it in the bud now, you'll be getting requests to be your friend on even the smallest, most ridiculous social networks, and you'll never be able to stop it. They may send you a few requests before they get the message, which is fine, but unless you want to be annoyed over the next year with more friend requests and ridiculous notifications on Facebook, it's best if you turn the other cheek.

Troll type: Bar friend
Confirm or ignore? Confirm

How many times have you met someone who is a friend of a friend at a bar or party, only to come home and see a Facebook friend request sitting in your in-box? You probably don't remember their name, and the conversation you had with them was superficial at best. It's obvious they just want to add you to their growing list of friends and you honestly believe you'll never see them again.

Sadly, they've put you in a tough position. On one hand, the term "Friend" on Facebook indicates you actually like and care about that person, i.e. they're your actual friend. On the other hand, nobody thinks of it like that, and many want to have as many "friends" as possible. On balance, it's probably best to add them as a friend and not worry about it. You're sort of friends if you want to stretch the logic, and what does it hurt? You both get to add one more friend to your running total and it won't be awkward next time you see them at the bar.

Troll type: The stranger
Confirm or ignore? Think first

It happens to all of us: someone we don't know tries to be our friend on Facebook. Their profile claims they graduated from the same college and they live in your general area. You know you've never met the person and even if you did, it was for a fleeting second and you don't remember them at all.

Dealing with these people should be easy; just ignore them. But doing that without thinking could be a fatal mistake. What if you really do know the person and you forgot? That makes for an awkward reunion if you two ever see each other again. Simply deciding to ignore them probably isn't the best move, but then again, if you really don't know them, you probably shouldn't follow them to satisfy their desire to have the highest number of friends in their group. Decide carefully.

Troll type: The ghost
Confirm or ignore? Remove

Once you've become friends with people on Facebook, I think you enter into an agreement of sorts: you both decide to interact with each other and, most importantly, you both decide to use the service. But when your friends don't hold up their end of the bargain, it gets annoying, doesn't it? They sign up for the service, add friends during the first week, and never go back. They don't have a profile picture and the only information that's filled out in their profile is their name and birth date. They're a member, but not really.

When it comes to handling those people, it's best to remove them from your friends list. Sure, you'll lose a friend too, but don't you think they need to pay the price for agreeing to use the service and not following through? Call me old fashioned, but if someone decides to sign up for a social network, I'm a firm believer that they should use it for a reasonable amount of time and do their best to enhance the overall experience for everyone. If they're not holding up their end, they shouldn't be encouraged. A social network is all about interaction. If a friend doesn't want to interact, they shouldn't be on Facebook.

Social network Hi5 has launched a virtual-gift store and currency called "Hi5 Coins."

Hi5 is big on multiculturalism--the San Francisco-based company enjoys its most loyal following in a number of Latin American countries--so many of the gifts have regional cultural significance. The payment system is handled through the third-party service ClickandBuy, and a total of 36 gifts are available at launch.

Expect virtual-gift services to get even hotter in the social-network world over the next few months, as companies scramble for another form of revenue besides advertising. Facebook has modified its in-house Gifts application to allow for variable pricing, for example.

Gifts and virtual goods are also some of the biggest moneymakers on social-application platforms like Facebook's, not to mention in virtual worlds where members pay to accessorize their avatars.

Social network Hi5 has launched a site translation project, a week after the announcement that the company had created a "crowdsourced translation" app for use on the OpenSocial developer platform and several months after it initially announced plans for translation.

The site is now available not only in American English and the two dozen languages that Hi5 had previously translated it into (not through community efforts), but now also in Catalan, Danish, British English, Finnish, Hindi, Macedonian, Slovakian, Mexican Spanish, Colombian Spanish, and Swedish. These translations were generated by community participation and verified by translation service Lionbridge. Later in October, Hi5 plans to launch translated versions of the site in Albanian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Croatian, French, Maltese, Norwegian, Serbian, and several other Spanish dialects.

"The power of this program to deliver localized versions of our product has exceeded our own high expectations," founder and CEO Ramu Yalamanchi said in a release. "It is amazing to see the energy and enthusiasm of our global user community in action, taking our site into new languages and geographies that we otherwise wouldn't have the resources to address."

Hi5 is headquartered in San Francisco, but a plurality of its 56 million users come from Latin American countries.

This post was updated at 1:19 p.m. PT to note the number of languages into which Hi5 is already translated.

Social network Hi5 plans to announce on Thursday that it has built a developer application with the Google-created OpenSocial standard that "crowdsources" language translation.

This makes it possible for OpenSocial-compatible social networks or applications to let their users work to translate a site or application's text and interface into more languages, in turn making it easier for the service to have broader geographic reach. The translation app will be implemented on Hi5, a social network that was founded in San Francisco but is most popular in Spanish-speaking countries, as well as its own developer platform, and is open for more developers to use as well through OpenSocial.

Hi5's own site is already available in two dozen languages.

One big player in the social-app space that plans to use Hi5's translation code is iLike, a music service that has become popular largely through applications for platforms from Facebook to Apple's iTunes, and hopes to see its user base distributed around the world as well as across the Web. Another is RockYou, the "app factory" behind some of the most popular applications created with the Facebook and OpenSocial standards.

"As the leading music provider on hi5, we're excited to know that hi5's crowdsourcing service would expand iLike's reach internationally, helping music spread among fans from different languages, geographies and cultures," iLike CEO Ali Partovi said in a release.

The concept of crowdsourcing language translations caught fire when Facebook started enlisting volunteer members to help with the effort through an application on its own platform called Translation. The Hi5 application will, in effect, do the same thing for the OpenSocial platform.

Google built OpenSocial as a universal standard for social-network applications, and has since gained the following of almost every social site except for Facebook, which continues to use its own platform. Earlier this year, OpenSocial was spun off into a nonprofit organization separate from Google.

The biggest social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, have operated mobile sites long before anyone ever held an iPhone. Midsize social networks are still warming up to the concept: Hi5, a San Francisco-based company that counts its biggest following in Latin America, formally launched Hi5 Mobile on Tuesday.

The social site has launched its mobile edition in 26 different languages, a testament to its multicultural image, and has optimized it for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and select handsets from manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung. Those translations, Hi5 says, are done on the part of locals rather than the company to make the site more "culturally relevant."

But more importantly, Hi5's mobile site is a marketing effort to reach its most loyal customers. MySpace and Facebook's current mobile sites are intended as supplements to the browser-based editions, but Hi5 openly targets the "millions of international users who primarily use mobile devices, instead of a personal computer, to stay connected with friends, family and colleagues." After all, access to PCs is less common in many Latin American countries than in Hi5's home country.

Recent statistics from ComScore indicate that Hi5 has doubled its visitor count over the past year and that much of its foothold is in Latin America; the social-networking industry in that region of the world has grown by a third since mid-2007, according to the same statistics.

While other social networks like MySpace are working hard to make headway in the Latin American market (and MySpace says its market share there is growing), launching a mobile site is a savvy move on Hi5's part.

On November 1, 2007, Google launched OpenSocial, a set of APIs that leverage JavaScript and HTML for creating applications that access friends and update feeds from any compliant social network. Nearly 10 months later, Google is touting the maturation of the OpenSocial specification and growing developer and user adoption.

At this juncture OpenSocial version 0.7 has an addressable market of more than 300 million social network users, including the social networks that have delivered OpenSocial applications or are actively developing them, according to Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management. Friendster, which claims 75 million users including 55 million in Asia, recently unleashed OpenSocial for its developer community. Hi5 has more than 1,800 OpenSocial-compliant applications and 66 million installations, according to platform architect Paul Lindner. Hi5 has nearly 60 million users, with 80 percent outside the U.S., according to ComScore.

Overall, Kraus said that there are more than 4,500 OpenSocial applications and 150 million installs. In comparison, Facebook, which has so far eschewed OpenSocial, has more than 30,000 applications and 700 million installs.

"We expect to reach 500 million OpenSocial users by the end of the quarter. It's also very international, as social networking is a global phenomenon," Kraus said.

(Credit: Google)

The latest version of OpenSocial, 0.8, adds a number of new features that extend beyond its original JavaScript roots. "When we launched OpenSocial JavaScript was the center, but the community wants more choice. We agreed upon a RESTful API that gives access to the social bits and is already implemented in Apache Shindig and deployed by hi5 in beta," Kraus said. The OpenSocial RESTful API specification defines how servers, mobile devices, and desktop computers interact with OpenSocial containers without the need for JavaScript or direct user interaction.

"Hi5 launched with OpenSocial very early--January 1, 2008--and we ended up building the system, which had a lot of undefined pieces," Lindner said. "We had a lot of custom work with the REST endpoint so that applications could contact our server directly. As time went by all participants came up with one-offs, but now we are bringing it all together in the community with common types of solutions for these problems. Standardizing on a single specification will allow application developers to write code once and it will work on all different containers. We are already seeing others build on REST specification. Plaxo, for example, has enabled privacy-enabled exchange of contact info."

In addition, the OpenSocial community is working on compliance tools, such as an application that determines the level of compliance for a container.

(Credit: Google)

The 0.9 version of OpenSocial will add templates and markup, making it easier to develop the user experience dimension for an application. "Templates and markup are now in discussion on public mailing lists, but we believe we are pretty close," Kraus said. Regarding when OpenSocial is deserving of a version 1.0 designation, Kraus said that the "community will make the call."

The community Kraus speaks of is the group of about 350 developers participating in the main discussion around the evolution of the open-source OpenSocial specification and reference implementation. Google obviously has major clout in the evolution of OpenSocial, but Kraus noted that just 10 percent of the major participants are from Google.

To further untether OpenSocial from its origins, Google has also proposed an OpenSocial Foundation, which would be a steward for ensuring the OpenSocial specification stays open and intellectual property and patent non-assertions are handled so that developers feel safe about using the code, Kraus said. An announcement about the OpenSocial Foundation is expected "really soon," Kraus added.

Google clearly has a vested interest in seeing OpenSocial succeed. As Google's Vic Gundotra explained at the November 2007 launch, OpenSocial makes good economic sense. "The more applications, the more usage. More users means more searches. And, more searches means more revenue for Google. The goal is to grow the overall market, not just to increase market share." Having the an open source community behind it will make Google's economic mission much easier.