WAYN to be sold to AOL?

January 17, 2008

Interesting exclusive from Techcrunch UK this morning. They are carrying the story that WAYN may be sold to AOL for the sum of $200m. WAYN themselves haven’t acknowledged the deal but Techcrunch’s reporter claims three independent sources have verified it.

It’s a possibility. Maybe the founders and investors feel it’s time to cash out before the larger social networks take over the travel network mantle. Facebook is well on the way to providing the same functionality as part of it’s package. Once WAYN’s core users realise this they could see a large dip in traffic as users stop feeling the need to visit.

With the above in mind $200m does seem like a lot for something which could tank anytime soon! It would though be a good complement to AOL’s portal and if anyone is going to make a success of a niche network like this a portal which still has a semi-walled garden approach (such as AOL) could do it.

Personally I think it would be a better fit for Yahoo…

Posted by Steve E
Filed in acquisition, aol, online travel, social network, wayn
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Facebook devouring UK web traffic

January 15, 2008

Facebook accounted for 1 in 50 of all internet visits in December 2007 (according to Hitwise). It’s share of internet traffic has grown 10-fold over the last year (again in the UK).
It also positioned itself as the 7th largest upstream website, that means it sends the 7th largest amount of traffic referrals to other website categories within the Hitwise system.

Figures like this make it hard for marketers and PR people to ignore. Any potential traffic source of that magnitude has to be tapped into and quickly before your competitors figure out all the cool ways to make use of a social network and you end up looking like someone who’s following their lead. It’s still imperative to add value though, just diving in with a load of offers isn’t good enough, you need to engage and add value to your prospects experience of Facebook (while at the same time acquiring new prospects and customers).

Posted by Steve E
Filed in facebook, social network, traffic
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Mark Zuckerberg on 60 Minutes

January 14, 2008

Mark Zuckerberg the head of Facebook has been interviewed on U.S. tv program 60 Minutes. You can watch the video and read the associated article here.

Posted by Steve E
Filed in facebook, social network
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Official: Universities checking out students on Facebook

January 11, 2008

The Guardian has a story about this topic that I’ve blogged about before here.

An admissions tutor from Cambridge Uni in the UK has admitted that he checks up on potential students Facebook profiles. Of course the uni’s insist that a students success or failure to be admitted is purely down to their performance in interviews, academic record etc, not because of what their social network profile contains.

Many people feel this is really intrusive, but I believe it’s a natural course for anyone to take when there is information out there. This again reinforces my belief that you should never post anything up on a social network that you wouldn’t want your boss/tutor/Mum/priest to see!

Posted by Steve E
Filed in facebook, privacy, self pr, social network
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Facebook the slowest social site on the web

January 10, 2008

According to Watchmouse, a useful looking site offering a suite of web performance, load testing and monitoring tools that I’ve been evaluating.

Watchmouse performed some tests on most of the major social websites of the moment. The Watchmouse Site Performance Index quantifies the users perception of website speed and availability using the load time of the homepage with added penalties for components that fail to load. A very useful metric.

Out of 104 sites monitored 51 showed a Site Performance Index of over 1000 which indicates a slow load time which could result in a poor user experience.

Facebook came off worst of the lot. I’ve been finding Facebook increasingly frustrating with it’s slow response times. I think it’s time they put some of that funding to good use and increase the size of their data centres (or maybe look at their architecture).

The full results of the testing can be seen here.

Posted by Steve E
Filed in facebook, monitoring, performance, social media, social network, website
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Google; will it be the first social operating system?

December 16, 2007

So Google is becoming more of an operating system than just a set of services. It already has applications, search, advertising, blogging and loads of tools to help you organise and consume data. It’s announced OpenSocial as a set of API’s aimed at developers who might like to create cross social network applications and services. One would assume that all Googles services will sit on a set of OpenSocial integrated API’s. So it’s a connected, collection of services for your life.

Missing (up to now) was an identity piece of the puzzle, but now Google have a Profiles angle coming into play. Google Profiles will connect you to all the services you use giving a human face to the users of their many tools. This has to be a step towards a social awareness tool that could act like a social network across all Google services. Google Operating System reckons it could be the perfect platform for activity streams to be broadcast, I think they’re probably right and we could see a Google news feed erupt out of this. Perhaps this single Google profiles could broadcast your activity across all social networks using OpenSocial?

Google seem to be playing the game very shrewdly at the moment. They’re releasing the building blocks of social networking and activity streaming without ever showing their cards. They could be planning a massive push into social networking as a social operating system, or bloggers like me could be way off the mark and they may just be adding value to our lives.

Posted by Steve E
Filed in Google, identity, opensocial, social network
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Bebo snubbing Open Social? Or just being shrewd?

December 13, 2007

So Bebo have announced an application development platform with support for Facebook apps. Their using Facebooks platform standards so this should allow for interoperability.

Now Bebo were listed as one of the first OpenSocial partners, everyone else is reporting that this latest news is a snub to OpenSocial but I actually think it’s a very shrewd move from Bebo.

Not only will their apps be compatible with Facebook making it much easier for developers but if they are still going to work with OpenSocial as well they will cover all the bases very easily. It is possible they go the Facebook route alone but I doubt it as that will restrict their coverage.

The killer thing for me is if these apps can share data between networks. It’s all great making standards so development is easy but allowing a Bebo app to talk to a Facebook app, share data and the social graph will open up a world of possibilities and allow for true portability of data (and functionality).

Posted by Steve E
Filed in bebo, facebook, opensocial, social network
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Woohoo! An even better Netvibes coming soon!

December 8, 2007

I love Netvibes. It’s my starting point, feed reader and information consumption tool of choice. They’ve just announced a new version called Ginger which is coming very soon.

New features include…

Easier access to content:

New social and sharing features (including being able to import friends lists from social networks):

Activity notification (so you know what your friends like and do, a kind of news feed for Netvibes):
There’s also going to be an easier way to create Universes and load up social presence widgets, content for your friends etc. It’s really heading towards giving you similar functionality to your Facebook homepage but without being tied in and being more open in that you can add any email, messaging or other tool you like.

Sounds great! Looking forward to trying it soon!

Posted by Steve E
Filed in content, facebook, ginger, netvibes, social network
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Facebook tracking everyone!

December 4, 2007

Even if you’re not a member…

Beacon is raising privacy concerns left right and centre! It’s becoming a bit of a thorn in the side of Facebook and could help increase the backlash that they will face through their continued advertisation (is that a word? Maybe it should be!). There are already reports of some advertisers pulling out of using the system, worries about how Beacon tracks users without them opting in and now it seems they may be receiving data on anyone whether a member of Facebook or not.

PC World is carrying a story about the results of investigations into the Beacon system by some security researchers. They’ve found that even if you don’t have a Facebook account or your account is deactivated you will still be tracked on any Beacon third-party sites and your data sent back to Facebook. Quite what happens to that data we don’t know, but one would imagine that it sits on their servers hoping you will sign up so they can identify your cookie and serve ads to you.

It’s all getting a bit big brother. Facebook appear to have monetisation as their mantra now, where as they started off being useful they are gradually becoming surplus to requirements!

Posted by Steve E
Filed in advertising, banner, facebook, privacy, social media, social network
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Social networking study released

December 3, 2007

Thanks to Read/WriteWeb for posting this interesting study in a nice easy to view Slideshare way.

There’s some interesting thoughts about structure, how identity is managed, the types of networks available to users, followed by case studies of some of the major players.

Posted by Steve E
Filed in facebook, MySpace, social media, social network
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