Longstanding social network LiveJournal published a report Friday that asked its users what makes the site unique. Written by a Ph.D. candidate in the Media, Culture, and Communication department at New York University, the report contends that a defining characteristic of LiveJournal users is their "passion" for connecting with others. "LiveJournal's feature set encourages real, engaged, committed, long-term interaction with the site and friends met through the site, creating passionate users who care deeply about LiveJournal," the report said. Unfortunately, many of those "passionate" users seem to be moving to Facebook at a rapid rate.
News discovery service Socialmedian announced Friday that it has been acquired by XING, a business social network that has proved extremely successful in Europe. According to the company, Socialmedian's founder, Jason Goldberg, will relocate to XING's headquarters in Germany and take on the role of vice president of application platform. Socialmedian will stay a standalone service and remain under the creative control of Goldberg and his team.
Yahoo made an interesting announcement Friday, saying it has acquired a 30 percent stake in Network Management Company, an India-based telephone information service. The company did not give any reasons why it has decided to take a stake in the 411 service or if it has plans to expand it internationally to compete with Google's own 411 offering, but Network Management's CEO, T.S. Narayanaswamy, claims Yahoo's funding will create a "world class" team at the firm.
Starting Friday, GreatAmericans.com, a site that tries to inspire Americans through role models in the Armed Forces, is providing users with an opportunity to send recorded celebrity messages of thanks to loved ones serving the country in uniform. The site features messages from a number of "celebrities", including John Ondrasik, the founder of the band Five for Fighting; and Kim Cameron, lead singer of the Side FX Band. Visitors to the site can view celebrity messages, enter the name and information of their loved one, and send the thanks directly to them. The site also allows users to upload video of service men and women.
Socialmedian is a new Web 2.0 conversation service that does a decent job of repackaging concepts that users of Digg and Twitter will find familiar. I fear it's a bit too similar to other existing services to break into the mainstream, but there are some concepts and experiments on the site that make it work, at least for its devoted early beta users.
The site has been in closed alpha testing until now, but it is scheduled to open up to all tonight.
Like Digg, sort of, but with better focus.
On Socialmedian, you either join or create topics you're interested in, such as "Web 2.0," "Obama," or what have you. You can also follow particular people's updates if that's you cup of tea. It has the potential to work since the mechanics of contributing and following are good. There's a bookmarklet for grabbing URLs to share. This is something that Broong didn't get right, for example.
The challenge for this service is that, like any other social product, it's worthless without users. And given the slight bias the site has toward celebrity users (they're the ones people will probably want to follow), there's an even bigger challenge of getting people who are already Internet-famous to lock in to the system and use it regularly.
I do like Socialmedian's comment system.
One smart move: An easy way to send any item (either the page the item is about or the discussion around it on Socialmedian) to Twitter. During my testing of the service, I also found that it did a good job of auto-categorizing items into relevant topics. Users can also manually tag items they create.
As a business, Socialmedian could work. One of the project's backers is Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, an arm of the Washington Post Company that could nudge the development of the service into something that media properties might want to adopt--and pay for. Likewise, CEO Jason Goldberg says, he's getting queries from businesses who are interested in setting up private Socialmedian installations for hosting internal conversations.
I have no intention of trying to build a community of followers on Socialmedian, although if Ping.FM would let me cross-post items to the service, I would happily feed items to it. Also, I find that Friendfeed is doing a good job of keeping me updated in my field, even if the community does feel a bit more self-referential than I'd like. It looks like Socialmedian will do a better job of pulling in opinions from people they may not already be connected with.
- prev
- 1
- next
