Just two months after starting a flame war of sorts over whether it would acquire or go into competition with companies that were just “filling holes” in its service, Twitter is finally moving to fill one of the biggest holes the social network has had since it launched: the lack of a built-in link shortener. A post on the Twitter blog explains how the company has been shortening links in direct messages since March, in part to provide more security against phishing attempts — and will soon roll out the use of the t.co link shortener as a “wrapper” for all links.

The term “wrapper” means that every link that passes through Twitter will be shortened via the t.co system — and not just long links, but even links that have already been shortened by some other method, such as a competing service like Bit.ly or a white-label version such as the New York Times custom shortener. These links will still appear to users in the same way, but they will be shortened via t.co as they make their way through the Twitter system. When it comes to long links, Twitter hasn’t decided yet what they will look like exactly, as staffer Sean Garrett explains in the blog post:

A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title. Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you.

Garrett also explained that t.co links will be a maximum of 20 characters, so once the feature is rolled out to all users, links added to tweets will only use up 20 characters, regardless of their actual size.

The immediate response from many observers was to see the new feature as a Bit.ly killer, and it is clearly competition for that service, which was one of a number of link shorteners that sprang up to fill the void when Twitter first launched. But Bit.ly has moved on from its reliance on Twitter, as Betaworks founder John Borthwick described in a recent blog post. In any case, it’s clear that the real point of Twitter’s new feature isn’t to kill Bit.ly or any other service, but to accumulate data about the links that are shared on the network. As the Twitter blog post describes it:

Routing links through this service will eventually contribute to the metrics behind our Promoted Tweets platform and provide an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm—the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users. We are also looking to provide services that make use of this data, an example would be analytics within our eventual commercial accounts service.

As Bit.ly understood long before Twitter did (or before Twitter did anything about it), the data underlying the links that are shared by users is far more important than the simple act of shortening a link. The analytical data that could emerge from seeing everything that is shared in tens of millions of tweets every day could produce an incredibly valuable storehouse of information about what stories or websites or content is getting the most activity, in real time. It’s about time the service started paying attention to it.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Lessons From Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Max Klingensmith

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Yahoo’s New Features an Admission That Facebook Has Won the Social Race —

Yahoo is doubling down on its bets on social networking, but it is doing so by effectively outsourcing its social efforts to Facebook. The web portal this week is launching enhanced Facebook integration, along with a revamped personal profile feature called Yahoo Pulse, and also recently announced the addition of new Google Buzz-style social features in the company’s email service called Yahoo Updates. The new Facebook features are the result of an agreement that Yahoo signed with the social network in December to use what was then called Facebook Connect (now known as the Open Graph protocol).

The new features integrate Facebook status updates and activity streams into the customized user pages at Yahoo, including the home page and Yahoo Mail. Users can also share content on Facebook from any of the Yahoo content sites such as its sports hub, entertainment hub, etc. In addition, the site’s personal profile pages are now known as Yahoo Pulse, and the company says they will give users more control over how and where they share their content. Yahoo has been bending over backwards to talk about its new sharing features, including its Google Buzz-style social integration for email, hoping to avoid some of the privacy pain that Facebook and Google have encountered.

While the company no doubt hopes that its new features will encourage more people who visit the site to stay longer, they are also a tacit admission that Facebook has won the social race — one that Yahoo has not really been a factor in for some time. In a similar way, Yahoo has recently outsourced many of its existing services to others, including a deal with Match.com to handle the personals business and a partnership with Nokia for mobile email, not to mention the biggest outsourcing move of all: namely, outsourcing its entire search business to Microsoft.

In the final blow for Yahoo, a recent ranking of most-visited sites by Google showed Facebook the clear winner with 540 million monthly unique visitors, and Yahoo at number two with 490 million. Whether integrating Facebook sharing and activity streams will improve Yahoo’s position or simply accelerate the current downward trend for the site remains to be seen. The company appears to want to become a portal for the social web in the same sense that it used to be a portal for Web 1.0. — but half a billion users seem to have decided that they already have a portal for the social web, and it’s called Facebook.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Futurehttp://pro.gigaom.com/2010/03/why-newnet-companies-must-shoulder-more-responsibility

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Making Hotmail Hot Again Hot Again [The Mossberg Solution] —

Like it or not, your personal email address says something about you. Gmail tends to be considered the cool email to have today. Apple’s .Mac addresses (now .Me) identify users who own Macs and don’t mind paying $100 a year for email and related services. AOL emails are tied to adults who haven’t changed their address since the dial-up days. And Hotmail is seen as old school.

Since its debut in 1996, Hotmail has soared to 400 million users world-wide. But it also lost users along the way—particularly in 2008—due in part to a general perception that Hotmail wasn’t as modern as other email services.

Starting this week, Microsoft Corp. will try to change the way Hotmail is perceived by rolling out a revamped version. The company, which bought the program in 1998, has scrapped its attempts to get people to use its site for social networking, acknowledging that companies like Facebook and Twitter are already doing the job. And it has cleaned up its once confusing nomenclature: Hotmail is the sole name for Microsoft’s Web email program.

To spread the word, Microsoft recently launched a massive marketing campaign, involving online, radio and outdoor ads running through the end of the year, that will cost the company tens of millions of dollars, according to Microsoft general manager, Brian Hall. Mr. Hall says that “The New Busy” campaign is intended to demonstrate how Hotmail’s organizational features help busy people with full lives. Part of the campaign will focus on reintroducing current Hotmail users to new features.

But should you really consider reviving your old Hotmail account or opening a new one? I’ve been using this new version of Hotmail for the past few weeks and I’ve found it handled large files with ease, performed browser-like tasks within the inbox and integrated third-party social networks and email accounts. Though the Hotmail name still conjures up frustrating memories of too much spam and the belief that storage was restricted, Microsoft has revamped its old email service into one that’s smart, robust and reliable. It deserves a second look.

Hotmail is still big on sorting emails according to your existing “Contacts” versus everyone else. This works well if you’ve taken the time to add all of your friends to the Contacts list, a procedure that takes a couple seconds per person and is done as you send emails to people. This prompting can be a bit of a pain, but if you haven’t done it, you might miss emails from people you care about. A Microsoft representative said that by the end of this summer, users will be able to opt out of this sorting.

At first glance, the new Hotmail doesn’t look dramatically different. But a closer look reveals intelligent organizational tools. Shortcut tabs at the top of the inbox display only messages from social networks (think of all those email notifications from Facebook and Twitter), pre-made email groups or contacts. Many other email programs only do this if users manually set up folders.

Another organizational tool is called Quick Views. It automatically sorts four types of emails into folders: Flagged, Photos, Office Docs and Shipping Updates. These categories come preset and cannot be customized.

Quick Views saved me from digging through my inbox for specific emails and from dragging certain emails into folders for saving. When I ordered gifts online for a friend’s wedding, the shipping notification emails from the delivery service arrived in my inbox and were also viewable in the Shipping Updates folder. Emails with attached Office documents were neatly sorted into the Office Docs folder.

Behind the scenes of the revamped Hotmail, Microsoft is powering all inboxes with Windows Live SkyDrive—an ever-growing, server-based storage repository that guarantees you’ll never be asked to clean out your inbox. (As with many Web-based email programs, Hotmail stores your emails on servers rather than taking up space on your hard drive.)

SkyDrive also gives Hotmail users more freedom when sharing photos: Images can be quickly uploaded to SkyDrive and shared with friends via a Web link. One message can include up to 200 photos of 50 megabytes each, or 10 gigabytes total. Meanwhile, Gmail limits attachments to about 25 megabytes per message.

When Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents are attached to any message received, they are opened right in the Web browser, without having to open another program. This works thanks to a program called Office Web Apps, which functions regardless of whether or not Office 2010 is installed on the computer. Just as photos are shared from Hotmail using a SkyDrive link, so, too, are Office documents.

Hotmail’s inbox now has a Sweep feature, which lets you move or delete all emails from a particular sender. (A similar option in Microsoft Office 2010 wipes out all emails sent prior to the last message in a thread.) Another option for tidying up your inbox is Conversation View, which sorts all emails sent in the same conversation into one group. Users can opt in or out of this, unlike Gmail, which offers only threaded emails.

Tough spam filters caught every Viagra-related email sent to my Hotmail address. And if you identify a piece of mail in the Junk folder that isn’t actually spam, Hotmail remembers this and sorts differently in the future.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, now plays a role in Hotmail. It’s built into the search box as an option for scouring Web content directly from the inbox. It can be accessed while composing a message: A small “From Bing” drop-down menu in the email you’re writing lets you search for content to add to emails, like maps, videos, images and movie show times. This content appears in a right-side panel and can be embedded in email messages with one click.

To keep people from straying away to different Web pages while using Hotmail, Web functions can be performed from right within its inbox. These functions include watching videos from YouTube or Hulu, or viewing photos from Flickr or SmugMug. I clicked on YouTube links in emails and watched videos in a handsome overlay screen. And if an email includes codes for tracking packages using the U.S. Postal Service, the package’s real-time shipping status appears within the email. A Microsoft representative confirmed that FedEx and UPS are in the works.

I added my Gmail account to my Hotmail account, so I could check several personal email messages on the same Web page. In a similar manner, Hotmail can pull multiple contacts from several networks—like phone numbers and emails from LinkedIn or birthdays from Facebook—into a single Contact list.

Hotmail may have burned you in the past, but this beefed-up new version saves you time and is a pleasure to use.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg. Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Radio Towers Gone in Ten Years: Win, Lose or Draw for Social Media? —

Though not as widely covered as some of the other speakers at D8, Vivian Schiller, president of NPR, made a few heads spin with her statement that Internet radio will take the place of terrestrial radio within ten years. One would be hard pressed to find another major executive at an “over-the-air” broadcaster who would cede the airwaves, much less put a date on the towers going dark. Her comments were more likely discussed near radio station coffee pots than in new media blogs. But, heads up — this is more about new competition and opportunities than something “old” going away.

Radio has assets social networks need and that presently are just slides on business plan PowerPoint decks for many digital-only content providers. Listenership figures can be staggering when compared to Internet-only media. Local radio stations are expert at building loyalty/community among listeners and getting local advertising. While radio advertising is down overall, local ad spending on radio is rising. Google tried and failed to get in on radio ad revenue, but some smart, facile social media company could get it right through radio affiliations.

National radio operations are good at aggregating content for national distribution. Schiller acknowledged a number of local news operations and independent journalists empowered by social media that could gain national exposure through radio network marketing and distribution. Even Rush Limbaugh started out small.

For the most part, terrestrial broadcasters have not done a good job extending their brands into social media. But some or most will eventually get it right and they have strong brands to back up their efforts. Affiliation with the NPR brand is likely to be one reason so many musicians are allowing NPR Music to stream their live concerts and make them available on what appear to be permanent archives. The artists are promoting these collaborations with NPR music on their social media pages. Will artists have to choose between NPR Music and the rumored YouTube live streaming?

Lastly, even if all broadcast radio migrates to the Internet, it would be a pity for those towers to go dark. US radio is the most reliable, redundant point-to-multipoint data distribution network in the world, with an unmatched coverage footprint. That’s got to be of value to someone who needs to push a lot of data. Especially if there really is an FM tuner tucked inside of each iPhone.

Major Social Media & Search Engine Relationships —

Adding real-time search and social search to the mix in the search engine world has created a number of new opportunities for marketers that want to do a better job of reaching customers. With new data sharing announcements happening fairly regularly, it can paint an interesting picture when you lay out the relationships between major social networks and search engines. It’s not unlike the search engine relationship chart from Bruce Clay I remember from several years ago documenting the relationships between Inktomi, Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Direct Hit/Teoma, Northern Light and even Google. Not many of those are still around.

As the diagram above illustrates, the major data sharing for real-time search is between the social sites Twitter and Facebook and the major search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. To be more specific:

Yahoo announced yesterday that they would significantly enhance their relationship with Facebook. According to Yahoo’s Jim Stoneham, VP Communities, “People who use Yahoo! and Facebook can now link their accounts to view and share updates with friends across both networks”.  That kind of cross sharing relationship blurs the lines between social and search even more than the one–way integration of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook into Google and Bing search results.

Yahoo is expected to launch similar cross platform sharing functionality with Twitter and other social sites in the coming months according to MediaPost.

When search engines used to syndicate search results from different sources or even each other, it was important to know how to get web pages included in those sources so they would appear in search results where customers were looking.  As the major search engines update their data sources for real-time search and even socially influenced search, there’s an opportunity for marketers to understand how their participation on the social web can continue to provide signal and even content for the major search engines.

It doesn’t take much to see that some of the solutions for inclusion and earning top visibility are technical and related to publishing platforms, feeds and certain types of formats. Others are qualitative based on network size, type and topical focus. In the end, what matters is not just the changes search engines make to gain market share over each other, but the ways in which consumers respond in their information discovery, consumption and sharing behaviors.

While the effect of real-time search on current marketing programs isn’t anywhere as near as substantial as search marketing or even social media marketing, it’s an area that smart marketers would do well to monitor and experiment with.

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Facebook and Twitter Visitors Shop — and Spend — More Online —

Visitors to social media networks and services such as Facebook and Twitter shop more online than those who don’t go to such sites, according to comScore’s latest quarterly overview of the online retail economy, as reported by eMarketer. And in the case of Facebook, comScore’s figures show that the more frequently a user visits the social network, the more he or she spends online — $67 on average for heavy users of Facebook vs. $50 for a “light” user of the network and just $27 on average for a non-visitor (comScore defined a heavy user as anyone in the top 20 percent of visitors to the social network, as measured by time spent on the site).

The correlation between active visitors and spending habits online wasn’t as obvious for Twitter, however. While on one hand, comScore’s numbers showed that Twitter users tended to spend more than users of Facebook, heavy visitors to Twitter’s website — also defined as the top 20 percent in terms of time on the site — spent less on average than medium users or light users: $63 vs. $75 and $73, respectively (one factor that might affect these numbers is that a majority of interaction with Twitter comes through the company’s API, via third-party services and mobile apps).

Although $60-$70 may not seem like a huge amount for retailers to base their hopes on, the fact that visitors to social networking sites and services shop and spend more online than non-visitors is likely to increase their interest in the value of social media — and it could help explain why Facebook in particular has seen a rush of interest from advertisers: The network said recently it more than quadrupled the number of advertisers since the beginning of last year.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Future

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Olaf

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Over the past year or so, I’ve been part of the team working on building the next version of the social news feed on Windows Live. Yesterday, the next iteration of this feature was made broadly available on http://home.live.com and http://profile.live.com. As I look back at the work we’ve done there are a number of things I love about the philosophy behind what we’ve built and the actual features we’ve implemented.

The above screenshot shows the header for Messenger Social feed on the Windows Live home page and captures a number of it’s key concepts.

Highlights from your Favorite People

One of the key problems we want to address with this release is the conflicting feelings of information overload from getting a flood of minutiae on a daily basis from people you’d barely consider acquaintances and the feeling of not seeing enough stuff from the people you actually care about because they are being drowned out by other less important people. The way we’ve approached this problem is described on the Messenger Preview site and excerpted below

Because most people today use a variety of social networks and content sharing sites, with different sets of friends and acquaintances dispersed throughout these disparate networks, it can be challenging — and exhausting — to visit different websites and create different accounts just to keep abreast of your friends’ updates. But it isn’t just about bringing all that data together. What’s really valuable is helping you filter through the clutter and get to those updates you really care about — the ones from those people who you communicate with most frequently. There are a lot of intelligent algorithms and machine learning that can help in this, but we’ve found one of the best ways is to simply ask people. So, Windows Live Messenger will come right to the source — YOU — and ask you to specify your favorites:

The Highlights filter shows the most interesting recent content from your social network and strives to ensure you are kept up to date with updates from your favorites even if they aren’t posting a mile a minute like some of your more active social networking friends.

 

The screenshot above captures what this means in practice. Since Omar is one of my favorites, his updates show up ahead of updates from Mint.com even though his are several hours older than those from the Mint fan page. We learned from experience that although a number of people find the Highlights filter to be a valuable way to cut through the clutter and view the most interesting updates from their social network, there are also times when we have time to kill and don’t mind swimming in the full stream. For those times, we also have a Recent filter which provides the classic reverse chronological view of a stream of updates from your social network.

People-centric not Service-centric

The fundamental idea behind social software is that it enables people to connect with other people. When we first shipped the feed in Wave 3, it was a key part of our design philosophy that we would bring together updates from multiple services into a single experience that emphasized your friends not the services where the data was coming from. One consequence of this is that updates from multiple services are shown in a single stream as shown in the screenshot from the previous section. We don’t provide tabs for multiple services because at the end of the day, what’s important to me is seeing what my friends said today not what my Windows Live friends said versus what my Facebook friends said. Instead our filters enable users to decide how they want to see updates from all of their friends as opposed to making service-centric distinctions.

Another nice touch is that once I’ve connected a service such as Facebook to Windows Live (more on that below) when I see an update from a friend in my feed, not only do I have the options of communicating with him or viewing his data on Windows Live but also communicating with him via that service as well. 

and when I click “Send a message (Facebook)” above, it actually takes me to Facebook to send Omar a message via their messaging feature.

Bi-Directional Connections to Where your Friends are

In our previous release, we had a feature called Web Activities which enabled users to share the activities they performed on other sites such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and others with their friends on Windows Live. A consistent bit of feedback we got was that people wanted our integration with other sites to be much deeper. They wanted to be able see what their friends where doing regardless of what network they were on and interact with their content. They also wanted to be able to share content with their friends regardless of what network they were on as well. In short, our customers wanted interoperability, not just data portability. With our current release we have obliged in spades…

When you first interact with the Messenger Social experience we ask you to connect your favorite services to Windows Live so you can see what your friends are up to all over the Web and share what you’re doing on other sites with your friends on Windows Live. If you got the prompt above when visiting http://home.live.com and clicked through to Facebook, you’d see the following options to create bidirectional data flows between Facebook and Windows Live.

As I mentioned before, this isn’t about “portability” and asking your friends to leave Facebook for Windows Live. Instead it is about allowing both sites to interoperate in a way that enables Windows Live users to stay in touch with their friends without either set of users having to switch services. Of course, Facebook isn’t the only social networking service we interoperate with in this manner as you can tell from the following screen shot

 

With these connections made, I not only get to see what my friends are doing across MySpace and Facebook from within Windows Live but can also broadcast my thoughts to them from within Windows Live as well.

Shortly after our features were made available yesterday I created the following status update

which caused that update to be shared to both my Messenger friends and my Facebook friends (see the handy iconography in the bottom right). You can see the results from both sites below

On Facebook	On Windows Live

There’s more good stuff in the release as stuff rolls out across Windows Live and I’ll be writing more about what we’ve built in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading.

Now Playing: Usher - OMG (featuring Will.I.Am)

Google Tries to Get Some Buzz for Wave With ‘Wave This’ Feature —

Remember Google Wave? Before Buzz came along, Google Wave was the hot new social networking feature from the world’s largest search company. It launched with much fanfare at Google’s I/O conference last May, but has since failed to get much traction, in part because no one could figure out what to do with it exactly. Then along came Buzz in February and grabbed the spotlight from its Google cousin, in part because of the furore that arose over the service’s approach to privacy. Now Google Wave is rolling out a feature that it clearly hopes will catch the imagination of some web users and maybe jump-start Wave’s popularity.

The new feature allows users to add a bookmarklet to their browser that will create a new Wave from any web page, embedding a link inside the Wave so that other users can discuss it. If the page contains a video or image, that will be embedded as well — in a playable format, in the case of videos — so that users can check it out before discussing it. And Google has also provided web designers with an easy way to add “Wave This” buttons to their pages, and/or to produce clickable URLs that will generate a new Wave discussion.

Whether this new feature will bring in any new users for Google Wave is difficult to say. So far, the service’s biggest problem seems to be a lack of awareness that it even exists — since the initial attention around the launch died down, there has been little or no public discussion of the service (although it does have its fans), and Buzz has drawn much of the attention given to social networks at Google. Wave has been invite only until recently, however, and if the Wave This button starts showing up all around the web, it’s possible that it might get more popular interest. But then Buzz is fighting that battle too, and the king of the hill at the moment is Facebook and its global “like” button. There may not be much room left for Wave to capture a lot of social mind-share.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Google’s Social Scheme Hinges on Fears, Not Fortunes

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Yahoo Adds Facebook, Begins New Role as Social Network Aggregator —

Yahoo has announced a series of changes set to roll out this week that integrate Facebook's social networking service into various Yahoo properties, including Yahoo Mail and its homepage. Also included in the announcement is news of a refresh for Yahoo Profiles. Originally launched in 2008, the new profiles will be accessible at pulse.yahoo.com (whenever Yahoo gets around to making that URL live, that is.)

With all these changes, we wonder: Did Yahoo finally pick a new direction? And is it "social network aggregation?"

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Yahoo's New Direction?

According to the company press release, Yahoo's senior director of Social Platforms and Yahoo! Developer Network, Cody Simms, is quoted as saying Yahoo is "uniquely positioned to provide people with all of the mainstream methods of content discovery - social, search, communications, and editorial," which sounds like more of a mission statement than we've heard from the company in years.

One-time Web darlings from a bygone era of homepage portals, Yahoo has floundered over the years, lacking direction and a clear course. Even when directly asked by tech blogger Michael Arrington at the recent TechCrunch Disrupt conference, "what is Yahoo?", the stated answer from CEO Carol Bartz was rather wishy-washy: "Yahoo is a great company," she said. "Very strong in content for its users."

Right, so what is it again?

But with the new Facebook integration, it looks like Yahoo might now be starting to figure that out. It's an aggregator of not just news, but social networks too.

Yahoo: Mainstream Users' RSS Reader, Now a Social Network Aggregator too

The Yahoo homepage already functions as a somewhat decent RSS reader for those mainstream users who don't know what RSS is - you "add favorite websites" to customize the homepage's sidebar, from a list of choices that includes Yahoo properties, mainstream news publications like NPR and WSJ, top blogs like Huffington Post and Boing Boing and a couple social networks too.

Facebook now joins Yahoo's own "Buzz" network (a Digg clone for voting up news stories), Twitter and Flickr, the latter a Yahoo-owned property, in the list of social sites that can be added as "favorites" to the homepage.

With Facebook added, you can actually read your News Feed from Yahoo.com via the "Facebook Quickview" feature. Once you give the site permission (similar to how Facebook applications work), Facebook launches as a mini-window on Yahoo's homepage...just like all the other news and social sources already do today.

Facebook: It's Everywhere on Yahoo

But Yahoo's Facebook integration doesn't stop there - it's spread out across the network's sites, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, Flickr, and Yahoo's entertainment sites like omg!, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Movies. And the company promises there's more to come. From any of these sources, those creating and sharing content can link those activities to their Facebook profiles, allowing those actions to post to their Facebook Wall and News Feed.

Because the social aggregation is so extensive, Yahoo users are actually being given a centralized dashboard to manage their external social networks from: Yahoo! Pulse. Available (soon, we hope) at pulse.yahoo.com, the site will replace Yahoo! Profiles as a place to link, manage and update social accounts and their privacy settings.

Can Facebook Save Yahoo?

As far as picking a direction, going "all in" on Facebook isn't that bad of a choice for the flailing company, which was recently described by the New York Times as "a dog," referring to its poor stock market showing.

Creating a social and news dashboard application out of Yahoo.com is a decent choice for the company - after all, that's what Google is doing with Buzz and let's not forget that social aggregator FriendFeed did OK before being bought up by Facebook.

That said, one has to wonder: is a Facebook-heavy Yahoo enough to save the company?

Discuss

A new service called Yahoo Pulse will one-up Google Buzz by offering privacy tools and integration with Facebook news feeds on the Yahoo home page, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Pulse site will behave a bit like Threadsy or the desktop app TweetDeck, aggregating real-time updates from your Facebook news feed alongside other social networks.

Yahoo has been trying for months to make itself the ultimate starting page for Internet users; you can already view your Facebook and Twitter feeds using Yahoo’s “Quick View” feature, but Yahoo Pulse will provide an improved, tabbed interface and offer new kinds of integrations in Yahoo and Yahoo Mail.

Notably, Yahoo Pulse will have a privacy menu that will apply to multiple services. That feature will be an important draw for some users, given that Facebook has dealt with a big privacy backlash in recent weeks. Don’t expect it to add completely new privacy features to your Facebook account, though.

The privacy angle is also pertinent when you consider that Google — Yahoo’s chief rival — made some major privacy errors that greatly hindered the launch of Google Buzz, a very similar service. Those faux pas and the lack of Facebook integration prevented Buzz from becoming a killer application. Pulse is Yahoo’s answer to Buzz; maybe it learned from its rival’s mistakes.

The specifics of the new interface and integrations have not yet been revealed, but it’s all expected to launch within a few days. We’re curious to hear what kinds of integrations with Facebook Yahoo users would like to see, so let us know in the comments.

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Tags: facebook, flickr, google buzz, privacy, social media, social networking, Yahoo, yahoo pulse

Yahoo is clearly positioning itself to become a stronger player in the online content game, as evidenced by its recent acquisition of Associated Content. But we are hearing that the real prize they want is the Huffington Post. The two companies are currently in negotiations over a deep content partnership, according to sources close to the situation. There are also rumblings that Yahoo wants to buy the Huffington Post outright, but it may be too expensive. In any case, the Huffington Post seems to be more interested in doing a content deal than selling.

Yahoo needs high quality articles and videos, and the Huffington Post needs more traffic and pageviews. A content deal could conceivably include articles, videos, and advertising integrated across Yahoo News and other Yahoo properties. Who knows, maybe that deal could lead to something else. There are many ties between the two companies. Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau sits on Yahoo’s board, and president Greg Coleman used to be head of sales at Yahoo.

The Huffington Post is killing it right now. It is the biggest blog on the planet, with 26 million unique visitors worldwide in April, according to comScore. It is already bigger than NYTimes.com. The HuffPo has expanded well beyond politics to cover more than 20 different news categories, and it is embracing social networks as a way to drive pageviews through sharing. It is even experimenting with badges and other game mechanics to reward loyal readers and sharers.

If content is once again becoming king, online media companies need a lot of it and they need it to be good. An acquisition by Yahoo would accelerate the HuffPo’s growth, while at the same time give Yahoo a strong anchor for its content business. Sources with knowledge of the HuffPo’s thinking insist it is not for sale. But everything is for sale at the right price.

Buying the Huffington Post would not be cheap. When it last raised $25 million in December, 2008, that round gave the company a $125 million valuation. It would want multiples of that now. The company is on track to generate $60 million in revenues next year and $100 million in 2012. It still has cash in the bank, and could turn profitable by early next year. If you figure an acquisition multiple of 6X or 7X next year’s revenues, Yahoo would have to pay at least $360 million for HuffPo today, or much more a year from now. If Yahoo wants to focus on being a media company, there are worse things it could do than buy HuffPo. But is it really worth that much? A content deal lets Yahoo dip its toes in the water and find out.

Photo credit: Flickr/NeoGaboX

Microblogging, Instant Messaging and More Comes to Open Text's Social Enterprise Offerings —

Open Text, Canada's largest software company, released two new social enterprise products this week: Open Text Content Server Pulse and Open Text Social Communities. The company also released a new version of its Open Text Social Workplace software, adding microblogging and instant messaging features.

Pulse integrates social networking, status updates, and content collaboration into Open Text's flagship content management offering Open Text ECM Suite. It also adds social features into existing ECM Suite installs while maintaining existing access controls and other configurations.

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Social Communities enables companies to create a variety of internal or external social media applications, such as blogs, wikis, forums, and social networks. It's a part of Open Text CRM Suite, which was previously known as Vignette Community Applications and Services. Open Text acquired Vignette last year.

Social Workplace - which recently highlighted by Info-Tech Research Group as one of the best enterprise collaboration platforms currently available - added microblogging and instant messaging to its mix of features, and improved its integration with Open Text ECM Suite and Open Text eDOCs. Social Workplace, previously known as Open Text Social Media, is also available as a stand-alone platform.

Open Text faces competition from many players in both the ECM market and the social enterprise market.

Screenshot courtesy of OpenText

Discuss

Plunging into social media for the first time can be a bit daunting for individuals or businesses. There is a learning curve when it comes to becoming more social online, and it can take a while to learn what works and what doesn’t.  Here are a few of the best Do’s and Don’ts that can save you time and help grow your social media authority more quickly.

1. Start small

You’ll want to start small and try a couple services out at a time. Oftentimes newbies sign up for every social network under the sun and try to grow each of them. Guess how long they last? Building profiles for multiple social sites is hard work, so it’s best to start by only tackling a couple at first.

Once you find the right ones for you or your brand, then start to narrow your focus on those. Eventually you may want to scale your social media strategy to include more services, but you have to crawl before you can walk.

Start small, and then grow to other social networks as your confidence grows. Success breeds success.

2. Get a widget

Put a widget up on your site for your social networks. The best place to find followers is your own blog or site. Also, it’s much easier to get your readers and friends to vote or retweet your content than strangers. Adding a widget next to your content can help.

Facebook has a widget generator you can use, and the Tweetmeme badge is easy to add to your site as well.

3. Frequently test your buttons and widgets

Start testing which social media profiles have the most impact, then drop the rest. For example, if your site does really well with Facebook shares but hardly ever gets voted on Digg, then drop the Digg vote button.

Oftentimes you’ll see sites littered with tons of widgets and buttons. Having a gazillion widgets at the end of each article only creates noise and annoys the reader. Figure out which buttons are getting clicked, and drop the buttons that don’t convert. Ideally you’ll only have two or three widgets on each page.

You can tell which buttons are effective by using Google Analytics and goals to see who’s clicking what. You can also use A/B to see which types of buttons are getting more clicks.

4. Don’t annoy your followers

Sounds like common sense, right? Unfortunately, lots of companies that are just starting out with social media think the best way to “promote” their brand is to publish coupons, offers, news, and anything else related to their business.

Rule of thumb: if it’s something you personally wouldn’t like to receive, avoid it.

Your social media goal is to be helpful first. People follow and respect brands that are helpful, not self-promoting shills. Give first, then ask.

Try posting useful links to industry articles, answer questions, and engage. The followers, engagement, and ultimately sales will come if you’re helpful first.

5. Don’t fret about follower counts

Don’t believe all the spammy ebooks out there that sell you the notion that you can attract thousands of followers in a matter of days. Sure, you could do that and it’s not hard. But the types of followers who are going to be following you are mostly bots. Or they’re just following you in hopes that you’ll follow them back. Ultimately, they aren’t followers who would engage with you.

You want social media followers that are going to listen and interact with you, and 10 of those followers is worth more than a thousand bots.

It takes a while to organically build up a great social profile. Focus on building great content and being helpful, and the followers will come.

6. See what the pros are doing

Everyone has a different strategy when it comes to social media, and sometimes it’s best to take a look at people who are real social media experts. Lee Odden is a good example of someone using Twitter and Facebook to help people, which in turn grows his social media influence.

There are plenty of fantastic examples of people who truly understand how to interact and build powerful social media profiles the right way. Check out sites like WeFollow to find influential Twitter users within your niche.

7. Don’t overlook niche social media sites

When people think of social media, they typically think of Twitter or Facebook. But there are literally hundreds (maybe thousands?) of social media networks and sites that you can use to help promote your brand. Jut because a network isn’t huge doesn’t mean it’s not going to impact your social media strategy. Oftentimes targeted niche social sites can bring more targeted traffic to your site than larger sites.

If you’re smart, you can use smaller social networks to help promote your site on other bigger social networks. For example, I’ve written posts on web development that have made it to the front page of Dzone, a social media site for web development. Once the article made it to the front page of Dzone, the attention brought a lot of saves on Delicious, and subsequently made it to the Delicious front page. The delicious front page brought even more traffic, and those Delicious users voted the story up to the Digg front page. So, by simply submitting my site on a smaller niche news site with a great headline, I managed to make it to the coveted homepages of both Digg and Delicious.

Niche social news sites can be very powerful, and oftentimes much easier to become influential in than the larger sites. Here’s a list of social news sites organized by category.

8. Find people within your niche to follow on Twitter

The ideal follower on Twitter is one that has similar interests within your niche. You can find like-minded people to follow on Twitter through these  directories and odds are many will follow you back.

Once you’ve started following these people, start interacting with them. Participate in discussions, and retweet things they say that would be helpful to your community.

Not only will this method help build your follower counts, it also gives you more influence within your niche. You’ll find great friends that will help you promote your content and site too. Always remember to give first and ask later.

9. Stay Humble

Social media beginners often try to quickly establish themselves as “experts” within their field, but they have nothing to back it up. (For example, search for “social media experts” on Twitter. You’ll find many with only a handful of followers. Shouldn’t an “expert” have more?)

As with anything in life, nobody likes a know-it-all. Be humble. Ask questions. Teach, but don’t preach. Let others do the hyping for you. And they will if you’re helpful and humble.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | 9 Essential Social Media Tips for Beginners | http://www.toprankblog.com

Forget about the idea that early adopters are always first at everything. Sometimes it takes some of us a little bit longer to find utility in products or services that others get right away. Twitter was an obvious initial miss for me. I held out for a long time - by my standards - swearing first that I would never use it, and then finally giving in after getting some good feedback from peers who were finding value.

Now, nearly 30 months later, and 5,000 tweets later, the milestone I'll hit once this blog hits the service via FeedBurner, Twitter has become a powerful force. Even those people who are not on the service, or using it as often as many of us are, have at least heard of it, or know people on it. The assumption now is that everybody has a Twitter account, in the same way as we believe everybody has an e-mail address. News breaks on Twitter. People break on Twitter. And it has become the go-to source for real-time feedback from a massive audience. Maybe Twitter doesn't cure cancer, but it turns out, it can help - as we learned with #blamedrewscancer... and it sure doesn't cause cancer, no matter how frequently you update, or what client you prefer.


5,000 tweets sounds like a lot to me. That's almost 6 per day, or one every 4+ hours around the clock for 2 1/2 years, scattered almost exclusively between 8 a.m. in the morning and 2 at night, if TweetStats tells the truth. With 140 characters to play with, that's 700,000 characters of wiggle room. But as we once discussed with a Twitter Noise ratio I made up, one's pace can depend on their personal preferences, their choices to share links or engage in conversation, or what social networks make sense for them. I know, for example, that many Twitter-centric folks long since left 5,000 and 10,000 or even 20,000 and 50,000 tweets in the dust. @chrisbrogan sports nearly 70,000 while @parislemon is approaching 14,000 and the legendary @queenofspain is going to cross 85,000 before the month is out. So I must not be too noisy amid such elite company.


Twitter, for all its ups and downs with infrastructure strains and developer changes, through the company's maturation, has become an important player for many different things. Its limitations have been rebranded as simplicity, and what used to be a geek mecca is as much home to celebrities, teens and marketing as anything else. That's the problem with a nice neighborhood, everyone moves in and the ads go up. But the crowds have brought relevance. With worldwide growth and use in many different markets for many things, one can practically assume someone is twittering most events, in the same way one can safely assume that any scene of interest is being videotaped. The world is being recorded, and the world is being tweeted.


My comparatively slow approach to Twitter contrasted with some of my peers continues thanks to my own internal checks against noise. I still use Twitter primarily for distributing links from the blog and others I think may be relevant to followers. I set up a dedicated account at @lgstream for even more shares, without drowning my feed. I try to keep idle chat to a minimum, engaging on Google Buzz, FriendFeed and Facebook for some, and using Twitter DMs in other cases. I don't know if I'll ever make Twitter a place where I want to drop in and stay a while. I am absolutely glad it's there, and recognize its significant utility, but it still doesn't feel like a destination to me - instead, a powerful, increasingly critical utility.


By the time I hit 10,000 tweets, I expect Twitter will be dramatically different again from where it is now. As the company may have approached 200 employees, it could be at 1,000 or more by that time. It might be a public company, and the service could be dramatically different. Maybe popular clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic and Brizzly will be purchased by other brand names, or by Twitter themselves, like Tweetie was. But Twitter looks not only here to stay, but to play a big role in how this generation communicates. It may be through 140 characters at a time, including @Replies and short URLs, but it's what we've got.

Here's to filling your stream with another 5,000 useful tweets. You can find me at @louisgray.

Netvibes Launches iPad-Friendly Custom Feed Reader —

Since the device's release 2 months ago, many have praised the iPad for its media consumption capabilities while admitting that media creation is not its strong suit. It may not be the best device to compose a day's worth of emails, but watching video and reading books and news on the large touchscreen is certainly a compelling experience. Feeds are one of the most efficient ways to quickly consume large amounts of information from the Web, and feed reading service Netvibes is bringing their popular Web-based experience to the consumption-friendly iPad.

Sponsor

Netvibes allows users to aggregate, personalize and monitor their favorite blogs and trending topics into customizable dashboards that can also be viewed in a listed RSS reader form. With an iPad version launching today, fans of the service will be able to access their dashboards and feeds on their iPads using a mobile website optimized for the iPad's Safari browser. Since it is still web-based, content marked as read on the app will sync up with the desktop Web-based experience - sidestepping a common annoyance of native RSS readers.

Built-in social network integration also allows users to use the service a social dashboard along with the news and media browser. By connecting the app to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, users can monitor the activity of their friends and followers, as well as publish updates to their profiles from the app. The ability to share news items on these social networks is a feature missing from this release of the iPad version, but the company told ReadWriteWeb that more functionality such as this will come in future releases.

Users can also expect to see more visual magazine-style viewing options, premium dashboard branding and the ability to add, remove and change dashboard configurations in the near future. Personally I haven't found myself straying from good ole Google Reader for reading feeds online, and I feel that a web-based iPad-friendly version may not be enough to sway me away. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see Netvibes, or a similar service like Lazyfeed, develop a native application for the iPad that can fully leverage the device's features and APIs.

Discuss

Q&A: Is One-Way Communication an Oxymoron? —

Every now and then, I’m asked to answer questions for other blogs and media outlets – more so lately due in part to the recent release of Engage!

The conversations that always ensue trigger new insights, ideas, or perspectives and sometimes, I believe that the discussion is worth sharing with you, here. This is one such discussion hosted by my friend in Belgium, Jean-Paul De Clerck.

#Engage!

1) A thought: Social networks are merely a technological extension of our human nature to connect, be part of something and communicate, and ultimately people are the social networks. What is your reaction?

Social Networks are hubs for the contextual connection of people around ideas, interests, and passions. But at the same time, while social networks serve as the enabling technology to communicate, the relationships that people forge within these networks are more reminiscent of relations rather than relationships. These short-form engagements actually strengthen connections with each exchange. And it’s the act of causing or earning responses that seduces users toward a bottomless cycle of acting and inciting reactions.

Over time, what’s truly fascinating about social networking, is the creation of a human network, a grid of relationships that link social graphs from network to network. One day soon, we’ll have the ability to effectively engage and interact with our contacts from one dashboard across multiple networks.

2) The days of broadcasting are over in marketing communication. I never understood the one-way communication mentality in businesses since in the word communication is derived from the the Latin word “communis.” Why do you think it has taken businesses so long to understand that it’s about relationships?

One-way communication is often cited as an oxymoron in Social Media.

Social Media purists indeed believe that communication is a two-way street, and for many, it is. However, when you review the definition of communication, you might actually be surprised.

Communication is defined as a transmission or a statement, essentially implying one-way messaging. Depending on the dictionary we use, words such as relations, socializing, and conversation emerge. While we may crave communication through two-way interaction, what I believe we are truly vocalizing is the need to be heard by those attempting to communicate to or with us. Let’s not mistake the value in communication or one-way communication though. It is necessary to share activity, updates, direction, and intentions and in these cases, one-to-many dissemination is more than reasonable, in fact, it’s necessary and useful as well.

Some businesses believe that when they speak at audiences and markets that they are communicating through correspondence or conversation. Others believe that one-to-many transmissions offered some semblance of control and falsely assumed or underestimated that any potential dissent would rarely earn the public spotlight. Now with the socialization of media and the rise of new influencers, prominence is earned through not only listening, but established through attentiveness and the corresponding actions that inspire connection and adaptation.

3) What, according to you, is the role of content in social media marketing?

Content speaks to the mission and purpose of a business optimized for the framework of the medium and always with the unique and varying audiences in mind. Content is critical towards establishing a effective inbound marketing initiative as it represents the brand when the brand representative is not present. This is why brands must become media. Strategically placing content in the networks where stakeholders, customers, and prospects are actively seeking information amplifies the findability of our value proposition, differentiation, and intentions. This is why possessing a genuine understanding of the wants, needs, challenges, and options of our markets and also where, when, and how they seek direction proves effectual. And when combined with social media optimization (SMO), our content rises to the top of keyword searches within social networks, addressing the specific needs of consumers based on how and where they search.

Content is easy to commoditize. Meaningful content rooted in empathy and value is precious and as such, dramatically increases the promise of connecting to those they’re intended to affect.

Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook
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Please consider reading my brand new book, Engage!

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Get Putting the Public Back in Public Relations and The Conversation Prism:

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Image Credit: Shutterstock

In a society that wants to be more social and asking for ways to make the world a smaller place, we haven’t taken much time to ensure our privacy.

We are indulging in social networks such as Twitter, Stumbleupon, YouTube, Facebook and many other social sites that have been provided to us for free.

Free? Maybe that is where the answer lies and we have mistaken that free is never really the case, like the old saying goes, “Nothing in Life is free”. With every action there is a reaction in the waiting and we are slowly starting to scratch our heads with curiosity of why our time spent on the web is not so private.

Sharing Personal Information Publicly IS No Longer Personal

In the days when the Internet first began, there was fear of it; fear of talking to people and putting any type of personal information – was something we were not willing to do. It was the case of common sense, however, with the Internet’s growth creating easy access from the comforts of home such as; online shopping, gaming, and especially social media. We seemed to have left our common sense to the waste side and now are furious that our personal information that we publicly share is no longer personal. With that said, today we should not fear, but instead make sure we continuously stay educated.

As the most popular social network continues to break down boundaries that is unforeseen to us. Facebook has challenged us with not providing information up front or as easily accessible as we would hope for them to do. With insurmountable discussion’s questioning its methods and scaring many who use the social network to consider leaving the site. Is it really Facebook’s fault?

But it’s FREE

Facebook has nearly 500 million active users on a free site where we have the ability to chat with friends, family and play games. Join pages, create pages, and enjoy a variety of applications. We can share videos, pictures, and links and the list goes on. All of this and more are available to us without paying so much as our internet bill every month.

Facebook is foremost a business and in order to keep it free for us, they must find a way to monetize. They use third-party sites to create advertising on Facebook. Those third party sites pull information from your profile and pages to make the ads you see more relevant to your location and interests.

Facebook has made a statement that they want to make the Internet’s default to be social, isn’t that what we want? As Facebook continues to step outside of its box they will continue to utilize your information to monetize the site. They are looking for ways to make the advertisements and websites to be more social by using developer’s to create what we as a society have asked for.

Yes, Facebook could make it easier on us if every change they made that affected our privacy was announced to us and for some, given the ability to opt out if they chose to. However, how will it stay free, if we all opted out? It wouldn’t. The reality is, we need to use our own common sense when using any platform on the Internet and not share anything that you don’t want seen or used since it is not only a Facebook issue, it’s an Internet issue. If you want to leave Facebook, that is your choice, although, missing out on the one site that is most likely going to change the way we communicate on the Internet forever, may not be the best of decisions.

The responsibility is up to you to continue staying in the know of what is going on with whatever platform you use and to do your best to inform others. We cannot expect a free site to tell us what we can do to help demonetize them. This doesn’t mean that we have to agree with the workings of Facebook’s choices, nor do we have to like it. It is what it is, and we shouldn’t act so surprised or appalled that we cannot have our cake and eat it too, for the reality is, the more Social we get, the less private we’ll become.

With that said, here are some steps you can do to stay in the know about Facebook and your Privacy:

• Facebook Privacy Changes: Won’t Make You Less Social, Just More Savvy

• Your Facebook Privacy

Do you think Facebook has crossed the line or are we overreacting?

* * *

Read more News about Facebook on Soshable.

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Tinypay.me

Quick Pitch: Tinypay.me is the easiest way to sell virtually anything and is the world’s first socially integrated e-commerce website.

Genius Idea: If you are thinking of putting an old watch up for auction on eBay or listing your latest T-shirt design on Etsy, you may want to check out Tinypay.me first.

Tinypay.me is an e-commerce service that enables users to create quick listings for their products or services. Simply fill out the name, price and a quick description of the good or service you’d like to sell, type in a few personal details and upload a picture. You can also opt to donate the proceeds of the sale to charity, and identify your product or service’s location on a map.You can then share your listing directly with your social networks or set up your own online store on your blog or website. The whole process can take less than a minute.

The service only asks for your name and your PayPal e-mail address; you don’t even need to set up an account or share any of your bank information. You can also sync your listing with Facebook, Twitter and Google Product Search to share your listings instantaneously.

While the service is great for selling your products and services quickly and easily, it lacks many of the benefits of e-commerce sites like eBay, Etsy and Amazon Marketplace. They are destination sites for buyers and drive most of the traffic to the listings of individual sellers via marketing and excellent search and recommendation engines. And although Tinypay.me allows visitors to leave comments on a product, it has yet to implement seller and product ratings.

In other words, if you want to succeed with Tinypay.me, you’re going to have to depend entirely on your website and social networks to advertise and sell your goods.

What do you think of Tinypay.me? Have you ever sold anything online? If so, what e-commerce service did you use?

Find out more about the service in the video below.

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Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

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Reviews: Facebook, PHP, Twitter, eBay

Tags: bizspark, e-commerce, tinypay.me

Chris Saad: "Facebook's Claims About Data Portability Are False" —

Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook's recent privacy changes were not nefarious, but rather an unselfish pursuit of "a concept called data portability."

As the one of the people who popularized that concept in relation to social networks, and as a founding member of the organization representing that cause, I'd like to call bullshit on that.

Sponsor

Echo, the world's leading provider of comment/conversation technology to Tier 1 publishers. His role is to track trends in the marketplace, listen to and participate in the community and translate those needs into actionable product direction. His background includes co-authoring the Synaptic Web strawman , co-authoring the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) specification, and co-founding the DataPortability Project. The DataPortability project's mission is to advocate interoperable data portability for users, developers and vendors.

Until now I have stayed largely silent on the privacy hoopla because data portability and the open Web are not strictly related to privacy - at least in the sense that things don't need to be public for them to be portable or interoperable.

For example, just because the Web is based on open technologies (HTTP, HTML, SSL, JavaScript, etc.), it does not mean using your credit card on a properly configured website is public or unsafe. Sending email from one person to another does not mean third party websites can now suddenly "instantly personalize" their recommendations to you based on keywords found in your inbox.

Despite being based on interoperable technologies, these transactions remain private and secure.

Advocating Open Technologies Is Not Promoting the Death of Secrets

In the face of this, however, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook continue to (deliberately?) confuse the idea of open technologies with "sharing in public." The attempt to correlate the two things is at best misinformed and at worst dishonest.

With his latest statement, Zuckerberg and Facebook are now going so far as to declare their privacy missteps as "data portability." Actually, Facebook's changes have nothing to do with data portability. In fact, the root of the user backlash has nothing to do with what the company is doing but rather how its are doing it.

Its problem is that, as a service, Facebook started as a place for people to share with friends and family in a private setting. Users expected privacy. This expectation is referred to as a "social compact." It is an implied agreement that has less to do with the terms of service and more to do with user expectations and ethics. When I give you my business card, for example, I expect (through our implied social compact) that you won't give it to spammers.

It turns out, however, that this compact was good for users but not great for Facebook's business. There are two broad reasons why Facebook has felt forced to make the service more public.

Mark Zuckerberg Facebook SXSWi 2008. Photo by deneyterrio.

First, it's hard, if not impossible, to monetize private communication. People don't use those kinds of service with the intent to buy, but rather with the intent to communicate. Intention is critical when it comes to advertising and e-commerce.

Second, competition from services like Twitter have made it cool to be public, and it's finding interesting ways to monetize this public information (the least of which is selling its inventory of Tweets for $15 million a pop).

Most of Facebook's very mainstream users, however, still just want a private place to keep up with their friends and family. In short, the economic interests of the service are not in line with the interests of its users. Despite this, Facebook has been forced to smashed big cracks in its privacy blanket and started forcing its users, en mass, to adopt more transparent and public online personas.

This (now public) data can be used by advertisers, publishers and other third parties to help Facebook attract even more users, more data and ultimately more dollars through targeted ads and micro-transactions.

Next page: The Wrong Social Compact and What Are The Next Steps?

The Wrong Social Compact

The problem, then, is not Mark Zuckerberg's stated goal of making the world a more open (read, less private) place, but rather that Facebook did not initially establish the right social compact - promise - to its users to justify its role in this vision of public sharing.

As a result, users feel (rightly) violated. Facebook broke its promise for business purposes. And this is not the first - or last I suspect - time it will do it. (Remember Beacon?)

Finally - in regards to actual data portability, interoperability and the Web - the technology choices Facebook makes are anything but open. It uses proprietary technologies, protocols and formats to capture value from the Web and lock it up in its hub.

In short, nothing about its cultural or technological approach is open or interoperable; it has nothing to do with interoperable data portability - the only kind that matters.

Facebook has every right to do whatever it likes with its service. The market will decide if it continues to like the service or not. Any backlash from the media, or demands for more fairness, are largely irrelevant unless users vote with their feet and stop using the service. Facebook knows this is unlikely, though, given its deep (and growing) integration with the rest of the Web.

But claiming that users love the changes because more and more of them are stumbling into the service by way of widgets on publisher pages is dishonest. There is a real fear amongst the user base (and their partners) about these changes.

When it comes right down to it, the lack of honesty and clarity from the company and its representatives about these issues, and the continued trend of taking established language - such as "open technology" or "data portability" - and corrupting it for its own marketing purposes, is far more disconcerting than the boundaries it's pushing with its technology choices.

What Are the Next Steps?

We as responsible members of the technology community and the open web must be clear and honest about what we see - and any threat it might pose to our industry or the wider world. While jumping on the bandwagon might be fun and easy (and even profitable), it is a abjection of our own responsibilities.

So what can Facebook do in the face of this criticism and push-back?

• Declare clearly and unequivocally that its service has changed from a private place for sharing to a tool for public publishing.
• Go beyond what it has already done to correct the issue and provide a giant status indicator on the top right of a user's profile page indicating if they are in one of three modes: Public, Private, or Friends and Family only.
• Alternatively, (although highly unlikely) it can change its business model from one based on ads and publishers and to one that's based on charging users for pro services in order to align its economic interest with those of its users.

What can others do to protect their privacy or capitalize on Facebook's faults?

• Right now: Recognize that Facebook has violated user trust over and over for the sake of its business model, and will do it again. Stop sharing private information with the service.
• Short term: Create a properly private sharing network where people can feel safe to be with their friends and family.
• Medium term: Recognize (or decide to ensure) that Facebook is only one service, and in order to maintain and encourage competition and respect in the marketplace, other smaller (and not-so-small) players must be supported when making technology decisions (i.e. publishers must choose cross-platform tools and technologies).
• Long term: Continue to create an open alternative to Facebook whereby the Web is the platform and users can choose the applications that make sense for them, which includes privacy.
• Forever: Understand the difference between an "interoperable, open Web" and "Death of Privacy" - they are not the same thing.

Next week The DataPortability Project will be announcing a new initiative that will improve communications between Web services and users - stay tuned.

Discuss

Managing what’s being said about them online has become “a defining feature of online life” for many Internet users, according to a new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “especially the young.” The center surveyed 2,253 users over the age of 18 about their attitudes and behavior online, and found that younger users in particular are more likely to both search for information about themselves and modify what they share with others, and also tend to be less trusting of social networks and other sharing sites.

Compared with older users, young adults are not only the most attentive to customizing their privacy settings and limiting what they share via their profiles, but they are also generally less trusting of the sites that host their content. When asked how much of the time they think they can trust social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, 28 percent of users ages 18-29 say “never.”

The Center noted that young adults “are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions” and are the most likely to customize what they share and whom they share it with. Among other things, they:

• Take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online (44 percent of young adults say they do this, compared with just 25 percent of those between 50 and 64).
• Change privacy settings: a majority (71 percent) of social networking users between 18 and 29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online, compared with just 55 percent of older users.
• Delete unwanted comments: Almost half of those users between 18 and 29 have deleted comments others have made on their profile, compared with just 26 percent of older users.
• Remove their names from photos: Over 40 percent of those users between 18 and 29 say they have removed their name from photos that were tagged by others, compared with just 18 percent of older users.

The report also notes that managing your reputation online is increasingly important because it’s where employers are searching for information about potential hires (a claim that’s backed up by other research). In fact, 27 percent of employed Internet users were found to work for an employer that has policies about how they present themselves online, including what they can post on blogs and websites or what information they can share about themselves, while 31 percent of employed Internet users said they’ve searched online for information about co-workers, professional colleagues or business competitors.

The Center said its research showed several major trends, including:

• Reputation monitoring via search engines has increased, with more than half of Internet users searching for information about themselves online.
• More people are creating profiles on social networking sites, with over 46 percent of adults saying they have done this, up from just 20 percent in 2006.
• Many also search for information about their friends: Almost half of those surveyed said they searched online to find information about people from their past or existing friends.

There’s a full version of the report available here (PDF link).

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Stefan

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What Is Your Mood? — I love simple services, with simple ideas - This is why I like Moodler.in so much. It's not complicated or attempting to be the most sophisticated application, it is just a service where you can share your current mood with your friends. The application lets you show your mood right now by displaying a sweet icon to express that sentiment. After a quick sign-up (god, I love those easy forms), you are able to share notes with your friends. You can also download Moodler's AIR application and do the same from your desktop.

While I fell in-love with this sweet, simple application immediately, I just can't understand why they didn't connect this to Facebook and Twitter services yet. Even while it's so easy to sign-up and invite friends, I don't see why I need to bring my friends unto a new closed service instead of sending updates to where the places they already reside in. What I would suggest to the guys at Moodler is to add Facebook connect ASAP in order to allow people to connect with their already existing list of friends.

The service reminds me one of Facebook applications called Emoting, which was very famous back before the days when Facebook took all the fun applications and hid them under a tab deep down in our profiles. I say, bring the fun back, Moodler, and let us send cool messages to our friends, but don't make it harder on us, just connect with Facebook and Twitter so when we do send an update through Moodler, it will show up on these social networks as well. Plus, a notification system on the desktop app is needed.. Just saying.

Tweetdeck Adds Location Column, Integrates Foursquare — TweetDeck, the popular Adobe Air desktop app for social networks (though an HTML5 version is on the way), has now integrated Foursquare into its latest release. The move represents the latest from the startup to grab the "social dashboard" crown against the likes of Seesmic and others, although Tweetdeck seems to be heading towards a kind of "Pro User" space more than anything else. Now, adding your Foursquare account into Tweetdeck adds a location column. This has the handy benefit that Foursquare tweets can now be filtered out of your "All Friends" twitter column. A lot of people will probably welcome this as they tend to polute Twitter rather than adding anything to it. Now, the location column has a map button at the bottom. Clicking on this lets you view a live map of friends checking into Foursquare. Tweetdeck plans to extend this map shortly to be available in a separate view on a check-in item in the location column.