sociality

When to play platform games

Here at the Web 2.0 Summit, you can feel the envy that entrepreneurs have for Facebook and the huge lift the company got from opening up its service and making it into a platform that other developers can write for. Many startup CEOs I've talked to lately say they plan to release their product as a platform.

The instinct is good. Businesses based on platforms are more powerful than those based just on products. But there's more to platformizing a company than just publishing a few APIs. If you look at the Web services that became successful … Read more

MySpace, Skype to partner for voice function on IM client

MySpace and Skype are set to announce on Wednesday that the eBay-owned telephony client will be providing voice chat services for the News Corp.-owned social network's instant messaging client, MySpaceIM. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

Through this deal, MySpace users will be able to link their profiles to Skype accounts, and will be able to place voice chat calls through the MySpaceIM client or the Skype client to both Skype and MySpace members--but if your MySpace profile is set to "private," you will be exempt from calls from people who aren't on … Read more

Facebook, N.Y. attorney general reach accord

NEW YORK--Facebook appears to be making peace with New York's aggressive attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo.

At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon at Cuomo's office in downtown Manhattan, the attorney general along with Facebook vice president and chief privacy officer Chris Kelly unveiled a joint plan to address concerns about sexual predators on the fast-growing social-networking site.

"This did start out as an investigation," Kelly explained to the room full of reporters and photographers, "but it has turned into a great cooperative effort that we hope the whole industry will follow."

Cuomo had … Read more

Report: Vimeo's going hi-def next week

The New York Post reported on Tuesday morning that New York-based video-hosting community site Vimeo plans to announce this week that it will be distributing videos at a high-definition resolution of 1,280x720 pixels, making it apparently the first user-generated video-sharing site to do so.

The Post's Peter Lauria connects the new push for making high-definition technology available on user-generated video sites to the ongoing price drop in consumer-grade HD cameras--an inarguably hot item this holiday season.

But back to Vimeo--it's an interesting site. Originally a side project for CollegeHumor exec Jakob Lodwick, the site's close-knit community, … Read more

De.licio.us + Google Web History = Hooeey

Hooeey is a new bookmarking and tracking service for your browsing habits. You install a small toolbar in your browser, and it will quietly keep tabs on all your tabs, including which sites you're going to, how long you're staying at each one, and when you're doing it. At the same time, Hooeey adds a social networking layer, letting you share specific sites with others, both on the Hooeey network, and other, larger social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us and Reddit. The goal is to let you centralize your favorites, and make them easier to share … Read more

Current TV launches new site

Al Gore has proven that there can be life after politics. He's written several best-selling books, received an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, helped develop Current TV, a cable television station focused on getting young people interested in the world around them. and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last week. Seven years ago, he was running for president and since that time he's done all this.

Today Current launched a new website at Current.com that not only brings all the television content to the web, but also seeks to build a new social media platform. … Read more

CNET News.com feature: Social networks don their platform shoes

Five months after Facebook unveiled its platform initiative, the real arms race isn't among developers who want a piece of the action. Now, it's all about other Web companies looking to replicate Facebook's success.

In the past weeks, social networks Tagged, Hi5 and LinkedIn have made it clear they're working on application program interfaces (APIs) for developer platforms much like Facebook's. Rumors have been flying that Facebook's chief rival MySpace.com is working on something similar as well--though it doesn't appear it will be announced this week, as some had thought. (Representatives from … Read more

PicUrls does social news in pictures

While there's a giant crowd of people waiting for Digg to unveil its pictures section, there are already several services available for browsing popular news by pictures, including Google News and AOL's Mgnet (coverage). There's also a smaller, more independent group of sites that have been created by fans of some of these sites who have created their own visual solutions. One of them--Reddit Media--has increasingly become so popular it's led to Digpicz (Digg in pictures), and now PicUrls--which is a play on words, and similarity to the popular aggregator PopUrls.

The site … Read more

PR is part of the product design: Ford's social media news release

I know this blog is about product design and innovation but let's talk about PR for a minute. Why? Because the way you talk about your product should be part of your design process. The product design ought to incorporate the product story you want to tell. Sometimes, the story even becomes the product. Moreover, some may think PR is immune to innovation, but is in fact a field that is currently going through a series of pretty radical disruptions. The rise of social media has challenged the old way of promoting messages, and today's PR practitioners face … Read more

Readers' revenge

I'll hand it to all the wisenheimers out there. Guys, you made my day.

Within hours of posting today's Facebook Fetish column on News.com, my Facebook in-box was inundated by a flood of strangers asking me to "befriend" them. Sorry guys, but I'm still playing hard to get. And in case you were wondering, so is Melissa. (Coop postdate added October 15: No wonder she won't respond. I can't even spell her name right. Obviously, it's "Marissa." My bad.)

I also received a lot of good feedback from readers … Read more