Geek Gestalt

LimeWire 5.0 allows users to share files with friends on any Jabber-compatible system, as well as to have search results incorporate files from the LimeWire store.

(Credit: Lime Wire)

LAS VEGAS--Get ready for the collision of social networking and peer-to-peer file sharing.

With the beta release of LimeWire 5.0 (download for Windows| Mac), which was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show here, the popular P2P service is incorporating a social element that will enable people using Jabber-compatible services like Gmail to share files with friends on their buddy lists. Lime Wire calls this a "personal sharing network."

The idea, said Lime Wire CEO George Searle, is to add trusted context to user searches for content, given that people are more likely to want--and feel comfortable with--content from people they know.

Additionally, Searle explained that the new social features of LimeWire--which has 70 million monthly unique users and more than 5 billion queries a month--will enable people to choose whether to make files available to the public at large, or just to their friends and family.

In many ways, this is much like many other content-sharing systems. But to Searle, adding a social component to LimeWire means making what is already an extremely popular service more personal to many users.

Essentially, the way the new feature works is that users will be able to decide whether to make files--photographs, for example--available to anyone on LimeWire, or just to people on their buddy lists. Similarly, users will be able to search for files from their friends. And this will take advantage of a sharing system that tens of millions of people already use, something that Lime Wire hopes will encourage many on the service to adopt the social elements.

Searle said he hopes that the social feature will allow users to trust the sources of the content they share across the system in a way that's not really possible when sharing with strangers.

Playfish, a leading maker of games for social networks like Facebook, said Tuesday it has closed a $17 million B funding round.

The company has released five games and four of them are on Facebook's top-10 list, Playfish said in a release.

The company, which is London, also has offices in San Francisco, Beijing and Norway. It said has 10 million users of its games, which include Bowling Buddies, Geo Challenge, Pet Society, Who has the biggest Brain and Word Challenge.

Although many games publishers have said that the recent economic downturn will affect their industry less than others, Playfish's haul is notable for being so large.

SAN FRANCISCO--When you're one of the earliest adopters of a new technology, or one of the first companies into a new space, you tend to be very bullish on its future.

That energy was very much in evidence Thursday at InterPlay, the first-ever conference solely devoted to social gaming.

If you're not familiar with the concept of social gaming--small, casual game applications designed to be played on social networks like Facebook--you soon will be. That's because there is a lot of interest--and a growing amount of venture capital--being focused on the young space.

Examples of the early enthusiasm for the space include $15 million in funding for the Social Gaming Network from Greylock Partners, the Founders Fund, Columbia Partners, and Novak Biddle Venture Partners and $10 million of investment from venture capitalists including Union Square Ventures.

"There's significant recognition that social-gaming applications, at least on Facebook, are displaying high engagement and virality (rates)," said Dave McClure, the author of social media blog 500 Hats and one of the lead organizers of the Web 2.0 conferences.

McClure said the nascent space caught his attention after a student of his built a social game and quickly got significant financial interest in it from two different companies.

Still, McClure, who moderated a panel at InterPlay Thursday called "Funding the social game sphere," said he isn't entirely sure if there really is a lot of money to be made yet with such games.

"Can you translate user engagement and virality into monetization?" McClure said. "There's lots of potential, but lots of questions about monetization."

Such uncertainty, he said, is due in part to the fact that there is no universally respected system for collecting payments for the small financial transactions that could be a big part of the process. McClure also noted that it's going to be hard for anyone to take on the dominant player in the space, Facebook.

"Hopefully, some of those things will change over the next 6 to 12 months," McClure said.

At InterPlay, there was a healthy crowd of several hundred people, many of whom had paid $199 to be there. That's a low price for a conference, but it's unlikely people interested in this industry will be able to attend such confabs for such a small fee much longer.

In fact, the second such gathering, the Social Gaming Summit, will be taking place next month, also in San Francisco. The fee for that event is $399.

But back at InterPlay Thursday, attendees chose from a series of panels, including McClure's and others like "The future of online social gaming," "Gaming on the social platforms," "Advertising and marketing on social games" and "Micro-transactions and virtual goods." There were also some workshops on how to make money with social-gaming applications and a talk about metrics in the space.

And while panels at conferences like this are always a big draw, there's equal interest amongst attendees in getting the chance to network with each other and meet the industry's leaders.

One interesting question about social gaming is where the big video game publishers are.

"You see a lot of traditional game companies sitting on the sidelines," said Dean Takahashi, who writes for VentureBeat. "It could be costly for them to wait. If Electronic Arts waits too long (to create their own social games), it may be that they'll have to buy one of these companies for $100 million."

Yet, it's also possible that this is all much ado about nothing, Takahashi seemed to be saying.

"It is hard to understand why people are getting so excited about some simple games," he said, "that don't take armies of people to create."

The answer, he suggested, is that social networks like Facebook have demonstrated that it is possible to make mundane activities like messaging fun by applying game mechanics.

To some at the conference, being there is a function of necessity for those who want to make the social-gaming industry a powerful force.

"We're so early in a new industry," said Kristian Segerstrale, the CEO of Playfish, "to have some of the companies in a room to talk about shared issues."

Further, Segerstrale said, the point of an early conference like InterPlay is to help get the word out about some of the metrics that are important to a new industry, but which the rest of the world has yet to understand.

For example, he pointed out that in the social-gaming space, one of the most important metrics is total monthly minutes spent on a service by users.

That was also one of the two most important metrics mentioned by Jeremy Liew, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in the panel on funding social games.

"Two of the most useful metrics are page views and time spent in the game," said Liew. "I like to see numbers of 100 million minutes spent per month."

Those are big numbers, of course, but there do seem to be a number of social games that have been able to get that kind of user interest and engagement.

And that's why, in the end, the space seems primed for a lot more investment and lot more new companies getting involved.

"Everyone here is thinking there's an opportunity here that the game companies aren't exploiting," Takahashi said, "'Why don't we, the social media community, exploit it?'"

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.

Weblin is a service that allows people to have avatars that appear on the Web pages they visit and communicate with any other Weblin users who are visiting the same pages.

(Credit: Weblin)

If you're a social media addict but think that visiting regular Web sites is a lonely experience, you might want to take a look at Weblin.

Created by a German company, Weblin is designed to make the experience of surfing Web sites social--or make services like Facebook or MySpace.com more social. It does so by letting users create an avatar that they can then, effectively, take with them as they move around from site to site.

If they then find themselves on a site that is being visited at the same time by other Weblin users, then they can communicate with each other.

Weblin's main model is a small download, but it is also about to launch a light version that will require no downloads or plug-ins and will simply auto-assign users an avatar rather than them getting to choose their own.

(Credit: Weblin)

The main Weblin service is a small download that allows users to register and then create their own avatar. But next week, Weblin plans to launch a light version of the service that requires no download or plug-in and which assigns an avatar to everyone who uses it.

That means that users would have less control over the experience, but at the same time they'd be able to use Weblin without doing anything except use the Web. Additionally, the light version will not require registration. Rather, users will just have to enter a URL into a Weblin page.

Down the line, Weblin says, it hopes to make it possible to integrate Weblin with users' existing avatars from some virtual worlds.

For the time being, of course, Weblin's utility seems like it only comes from there being a critical mass of users and when users visit sites that are popular with others employing the service. But over time, if it grows large enough, it could provide a fun alternative to the traditional way of using Web sites.

On June 10, Geek Gestalt hits the highways for Road Trip 2008. I'll start in Orlando, Fla., and visit many of the South's most interesting destinations. Stay tuned, and be sure to keep up, both now and during the trip, with what I'm doing on Twitter.

If you're like many people deeply wired into a Web 2.0 lifestyle, your inbox is a never-ending flow of invites to new social-networking services.

Day in and day out, it seems, there's a new one. Today it's Notch Up, yesterday it's Naymz. Last week it was Dopplr.

And that's not even counting the steady flow of requests to be someone's friend on LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo or Facebook.

For me, it's a constant annoyance. I know I probably should jump on the LinkedIn bandwagon, for example, yet I never have, and frankly, don't expect I ever will. I suppose it's possible that one day, long ago, I created an account. All I know is that every few days, someone I know--often a distant acquaintance--will ask me to be their friend on LinkedIn.

And of course, what follows some set number of days later is a stern automated message warning me that my offer to be that person's friend is going to expire. Darn!

For some people, though, the issue with the constant stream of invites is becoming more than just annoying.

"I'm suffering from sheer invite toxicity," wrote Heather Kelley, the Kraus visiting professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, to an e-mail list I'm on. "Regardless of source, exclusivity or debatable utility of the service, my immediate response to seeing one in my inbox is 'NOT ANOTHER ONE,' combined with annoyance at the friend who sent it--'What? You expect me to join ANOTHER time-wasting thingy just because you did?'"

And lest you think that Kelley is complaining too much, and why can't she just ignore the invites and move on, remember that for many people, staying connected to their friends, and current or potential professional colleagues is a little like breathing.

Whether that's a good thing is a conversation for another day, but you know these people are hardly rare--you may even be one of them.

And for people like that, there is an intense social and professional pressure to join whatever new social network is on offer, especially if the invite comes from a friend.

"That is pretty much exactly how I feel about it," said Mark De Loura, a San Francisco-based video game technology consultant. "There's enough of a net gain out of joining that I always (feel I have to) do it."

One of the major problems behind the flood of invites is that many of the services seem to mine users' contacts lists for names to send invites, either for joining a new service or for, say, using a Facebook application. Similarly, some systems force users to opt-out of adding their contacts to new invite lists rather than opt-in.

To some, that is a real problem that the companies behind the social networks need to solve.

"That behavior," said Kim Pallister, a technology blogger who works for Intel, "the opt-out spam list is going to piss off the user base...You need to have that be opt-in, not opt-out."

That's particularly true because, practically speaking, since many users quickly click through such opt-outs without noticing what they mean, they may not even see what they're agreeing to.

"The interesting thing about those invites," said Judith Meskill, a longtime social networks observer and blogger, and currently COO of a startup called CrowdFusion, "is that they are being spawned often without the knowledge of the spammer. This practice really must stop."

Meskill suggested that the only way it might stop is if the companies behind some of the services band together to create a set of behavioral regulations.

"It's their industry," Meskill said. "They should be protecting its rep. It really makes the whole industry look bad."

Still, if such standards were to be implemented, it's certainly not going to happen any time soon. And in the interim, the problem of people being endlessly frustrated by more and more invites continues.

One rather well-known tech executive, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates recently decided to quit Facebook because he was getting more than 8,000 friend requests a day.

That, of course, is an extreme example, but to people like Kelley, the never-ending invites often feel like a plague, and one that simply won't go away.

"I first noticed it like one notices a new allergic reaction," Kelley, who said she is or has been a member of at least 14 social networks, told me by IM. "Over time, I started noticing a more and more negative reaction to each new one that surfaced. It was similar to the feeling of hearing about a new startup during the height of the (dot-com) bubble. It just defied all logic and kind of offended me as a thinking human."

Not everyone, of course, feels that the number of new social networks is a problem. For some, it creates ever-changing ways to connect to important people in their lives, and more focused ways to filter lists of friends and acquaintances.

"I receive invitations for new social networking sites almost every time a new one hits beta," said Souris Hong-Porretta, vice president of interactive media at Entertainment Media Ventures. "I'm not so tired of receiving invites. It's part of my culture and part of my job to know what's out there."

Hong-Porretta said that she's even moderating a panel at the upcoming South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, about such applications.

But even she wishes the services weren't such time-sucks.

"I do sometimes wish that there was a magic button I could push that would fill in all my relevant information for me though."

Hong-Porretta, though, can see why for people less interested in staying abreast of every new service, the invite stream is a problem.

"I'm not surprised people are experiencing social networking site invite fatigue," she said. "The sites are time capital intensive in the beginning...I think people are going to be much more particular about the sites they sign up for now. I think a defining factor will be, 'Is this site useful or helpful to me?'"

One thing some would like to see would be an actual consolidation of the many services, precisely so there isn't social networking site overload.

"What I'd ideally like would be to have a couple different networks, personal and professional (that I could) keep separate," said De Loura. There might be "somebody I might want to connect to for personal reasons, but not for business reasons. (And) there are people I want to protect. I don't want everybody to be linked to execs at Microsoft who have been gracious enough to link to me."

Meskill thinks that De Loura is on the right track. She said she foresees a new set of social network sites that are "strong vertical offerings," sites like Flickr that give users a specific and focused set of things to do.

"I think a new generation of strong, user-focused offerings would be very well received," Meskill said, "in verticals like photos, music, food, tech, etc. Those plays have not arrived yet, however."

The thing is, though, that even if social-networking services do evolve as Meskill suggests, users will still find themselves accosted with nearly daily invites. And that's not necessarily a good thing. Especially when the invites come from friends.

In fact, there's even a term for the invites that come from friends: "bacn."

"It's spam from people you know," said Pallister. "It's worse than spam because you're not sure you should ignore it. 'Did they mean to send this to me? Should I delete it?'"

Meskill said she's aware that bacn has become a big problem on Facebook.

"Friends are dropping friends as friends," Meskill said, "because they are being hammered by a ton of this stuff."

So what's the solution?

It's hard to say. But to people like Meskill, it's become clear that the social network services are going to have to take action soon, or else they're going to risk turning off their users. And these days, it's more important to those companies than ever that that doesn't happen.

"Since we have advanced beyond the first adopters," she said, "and the next wave and are now into the broader wave of medium-to-late adopters, this is more imperative than ever."

Digsby is a new service that aims to give people a way to link their contacts from leading IM clients with e-mail and social networks like Facebook and MySpace.com

(Credit: Jeff Hester, BigBlueBall.com)

If you're the type of person who communicates with friends, co-workers, relatives, and such via several different IM services, e-mail, and Facebook--and you know you are--software could soon offer you one of the cleanest ways ever to link them all together.

The software, called Digsby, went into private beta Tuesday, and its goal is to give people a way to organize their contacts from Yahoo Messenger, AOL IM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Windows Live Messenger, as well as e-mail, Facebook, and MySpace.com into a single client.

Digsby went into private beta on Tuesday. It is the brainchild of Steve Shapiro, an MBA student at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

(Credit: Jeff Hester, BigBlueBall.com)

According to Jeff Hester, who runs instant message community site BigBlueBall.com and who wrote about Digsby late Wednesday night, the service is the smoothest integration of all the various communications tools that it links together.

Digsby offers the ability to have a single buddy list for all your (major) IM clients and to carry on several IM conversations via tabbed windows. Furthermore, you can create new aliases for each contact for convenience.

It also allows you to work with Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and other major Web-based e-mail services and to "stay up to date with everything happening on your Facebook or MySpace accounts," including friend requests, messages, group invites, and other communications.

Currently, Digsby only works with Facebook and MySpace, but it hints at other social network support in the near future.

Hester said he thinks it works better with Facebook.

"The integration with Facebook is best," Hester wrote on BigBlueBall.com, "and (there) is even a Digsby widget for your Facebook profile. With Myspace, you get the status and updates, but to take an action, Digsby launches a browser and takes you to the full Myspace Web site. It might be nice if they used a mini-browser and the mobile version of the site, but only as an option."

Hester told me late Wednesday night by instant message that the integration with Facebook is cleaner because of the API.

For now, Digsby is closed to general public sign-ups, but a visit to BigBlueBall might net you an invite.

I have to admit, I'm not sure whether there are other services that can do all of this, but even if there are, this may be the best yet.

It's sure to be the next Facebook. It'll dwarf MySpace.com.

I bring you: The Ask a Ninja social network.

For anyone who's been using typewriters and watching over-the-air television the last couple of years, Ask a Ninja is the hit video blog in which a ninja answers questions about the lifestyle of sneaking undetected into locked buildings and opening victims up with katanas. And things like that.

The hit video blog is launching its own social-networking service.

(Credit: Ask a Ninja)

Well, the audience has gotten so big that the creators have decided to do something that almost no one else has thought of: launch a site on which the video blog's fans can network with each other, create friends lists, leave testimonials--surely about the best suggestions on how to slice up evildoers and the like--and so forth.

Ah, so I kid just a little bit.

The truth is, I'm just not sure how successful a deeply focused social network like this can be. The Ask a Ninja community may be passionate and strong, but is it big enough to support a whole social-networking service? Especially when it's possible to set up focused groups on other networks?

Well, of course, we won't know the answer for a while. But I'm skeptical.

Particularly, because I wonder how members will be able to tell their friends apart when every single one of them is wearing the exact same ninja outfit.