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unlike other professional networking sites (like linkedin), yahoo has prepared a concept of a business networking site that will be truly social.

the business networking space has plenty of options for you to choose from but where yahoo’s network will be different is that it doesn’t necessarily help you directly get in touch with the upper management at potential employers or people in your industry that you would want to collaborate with. instead, yahoo! kickstart is focused towards a much younger market and helps connect college students with alumni at companies that interest them.

the concept already exists at many colleges and universities but is done manually, on paper and by phone, rather than through an online social network. for example, when i was going through recruiting and was thinking about applying to jp morgan, my career advising and planning services office flew in two recent graduates from our college who were working at the company, to come and talk to all potential applicants about the application and selection process, their work environment, how they manage their social lives with work, and lifestyle in the city. yahoo! kickstart takes this entire process online.

from what i’ve seen of the network so far, it seems that yahoo has created a great cross between linkedin and facebook. the site takes the individual and resume-based profiling feature from linkedin while looking more like facebook in terms of networking, group creation, company profiling and so on. just like facebook took the traditional paper-based college facebook online, yahoo! kickstart could be a stepping-stone from facebook to monster or career builder and finally linkedin.

Technorati Tags: business networking, social networking, facebook, yahoo, kickstart, linkedin, moster, career builder

after facing a complete, hour-long outage last week, bbc news is reporting that google’s blogger platform and the over 34.5 million sites hosted on it are now under attack,.

the attackers are posting malicious entries on the blogs containing links that take the unwitting reader to a booby-trapped download that affects your pc and allows the attacker to hijack it and mine it for data or use it for more attacks.

Security researcher Alex Eckelberry from Sunbelt Software first noticed the booby-trapped links turning up on Blogger on 27 August.

Now many hundreds of blogs on the site have been updated with a short entry containing the link.

Technorati Tags: google, blogger, bbc news, social media

online networking is moving beyond just socializing and into the professional arena. from doctors to educators, here’s a look at some of the best professional networking sites and the professions that are utilizing them.

networks for the medical profession

though there are countless networking sites for physicians, doctors, and medical students, sermo is by far the most popular. sermo let’s physicians connect and share observations from their daily practices and ‘challenge or corroborate each others opinions’. this helps people in the medical profession apply the idea of collective intelligence towards better patient care.

related networks: doctors’ hangout, student doctor, doctor networking, social md, clinical village

music-based networks

of all the music-based social networking sites i’ve used, last.fm provides the cleanest, least intrusive and easy-to-use experience. the site tracks your music and based on what you listen to most – locates other artists, albums, and songs according to your preferences. The service let’s you connect with people who share your musical tastes and allows artists and lables to upload their own music to the site and share it with other users.

related networks: ilike, jam now, sell a band, buzz net, sound pedia

networks for educators

there are some older and more established networks for teachers, but yahoo is about to take teacher-focused social networks by storm. yahoo! teachers is ‘designed by teachers for teachers’ to help them connect, create, share, and modify lesson plans for their students. the site is currently not open to public but the private beta preview looks very promising.

related networks: yacapaca, nextgen teachers

photography-based networks

with photobucket, smugmug, zooomr, and many more, the photography-hosting/sharing/networking space is far from under-served. that said, flickr stands out from the crowd and continues to grow faster than the other top 4 combined.

related networks: fotki, fotolog, photobucket, smugmug, zooomr

networks for business verticals

linkedin is the most popular professional networking site and it is also the number one business networking site ( excluding employment search sites like monster, careerbuilder, etc.). the site is maintained in a minimalist yet comprehensive - functional fashion and offers countless opportunities for networking with contemporaries or working in ancillary fields, without compromising your privacy.

related networks: ryze, doostang

this is by no means a comprehensive list of professional networking sites or the professions that have made the leap to online networking. in fact, many professionals continue to use all-purpose networks such as facebook, myspace, and linkedin, rather than focusing on their niche.

Technorati Tags: social networking, professional networking, business networking, social media, facebook, myspace, linkedin, flickr, last.fm, sermo

we first learned about the nbc universal and news corp. partnership with aol, msn, myspace, and yahoo! to try and check the google-youtube threat back in march, but it wasn’t until today that they picked out a name for the venture. you would assume that since it took them 5 months to do so, they would come up with something totally mind-blowing but that is sadly not the case.

the name they have chosen is ‘hulu’, which can mean thunder, hair, butt, old, cease, desist, and a couple of other things that are just as unrelated to the venture itself.

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building.

that said, the service does promise to have some excellent programming.

At launch, full episodes and clips from current hit shows, including Heroes, 24, House, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, Friday Night Lights, The Riches, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, Prison Break, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader and Top Chef, plus hits from the studios’ vast television libraries, will be available free, on an ad-supported basis, within a rich consumer experience featuring personalized video playlists, mashups, online communities and video search.

Technorati Tags: nbc universal, news corp., aol, msn, myspace, yahoo

when i was reading today’s release from facebook, i was instantly reminded of a similar announcement that compete made and that i reported on four months ago. compete had announced that they were moving to a new metric (called attention) for calculating popularity on the web.

attention is a time-based measure, so logically the more time we spend on a site, the more attention we give it. we think of attention as a pie-chart - its finite - so the sites that are increasing in attention over time are performing well along this metric.

facebook has provided more details on an earlier announcement about their new way of measuring the popularity of applications that are ranked in their directory.

currently, the focus is on total number of users, but going forward it will be based on user engagement.

we define engagement as the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day).

these touch points are:
- canvas page views
- link clicks in fbml
- mock-ajax form submission
- click-to-play flash

The number of engaged users is calculated by putting all of these touch points together.

it’s good to see that we are slowly moving beyond absolute numbers and towards interaction-based measurements. as for how this is going to affect facebook applications, the ‘zombies’ application, one of facebook’s most viral add-ons went from 3 million users to 90,000 users in one day.

Technorati Tags: compete, attention, metrics, facebook, engagement

as bloggers become the quintessential workers on the web, there is a need for a blogger-specific ‘getting things done’ mantra and Leo Babauta has delivered.

it tailors the system to fit the needs of bloggers — and incidentally, can be used in the same way by almost any web worker.

gtd for bloggers: the art of stress-free blogging is a short but incredibly useful read and will help you get more done in less time by collecting information in one unified inbox, processing this information more efficiently, creating a system to organize your life, and accomplish more while worrying less.

Technorati Tags: blogging, gtd

with the recent launch of yelp and the ever-increasing popularity of social networking sites, the question is becoming more important than ever: do we still need ‘events sites’?

yelp is a way to announce, find, review, and talk about upcoming events and events the users have previously attended, and is not unlike yahoo’s upcoming.org.

while both these event sites, along with multiple others have been getting a lot of attention lately, the future of these sites may not be so bright. to see why, let’s first look at some statistics for the two leading social networking sites and then how they are going head-on against these smaller sites.

even by these compete figures (according to some estimates, these figures are underestimated by at least 20 million users) the two networks account for about 90 million users, and doubling yearly. both myspace and facebook have launched their versions of on-site events creation and sharing.

events on myspace

give myspace events two minutes and you will see that you have all the important features of any events site available to you.

you can create events with event name and summary, created/hosted by information, the when and where, ability to upload pictures, option to indicate whether you will be attending the event, add it to your calendar, share the event with others, and finally discuss the event with others interested and attending. as for the question of whether people use this feature, i found over 12,000 upcoming events listed (within this week).

events on facebook

facebook offers a similarly (if not more) robust events feature set.

unlike what your first instinct would suggest, these social networking sites don’t restrict you to events just in your network. facebook, for example, let’s you browse events by your network or by choosing a global setting, by date, and by event type (party, trip, sports, etc.). again, you can create events with all the relevant details, can keep it open or restrict it to a select geographical network or social group, create a guest list, and allow users to interact with the event (share, upload pictures, create and participate in discussions, and more). as for the number of events, i was able to find over 500 events per category per day.

so are event sites dead?

with over 200,000 new users signing up for myspace daily, and with facebook’s growth at over 200%, and looking at the extensive events-related features that both social networking leaders offer, though event sites aren’t dead yet, the future seems rather bleak. not only do these sites offer most of the features of events-only sites, but they offer much more developed social networking abilities along with a much larger network to advertise to or share your events with (keep in mind you can also share events with people who aren’t actually members of these networks).

as for the question of whether events-functionality will be fully embraced by users of these networks, we have already seen that both the networks are seeing substantial events creation and sharing. as networking becomes easier and more mainstream, people are more likely to create and share events with people they know and can easily connect with and invite to their events through these online networks.

lastly we have to keep in mind that this information is only from the two leaders in the social networking space and there are countless others who have embraced or will embrace events-functionality.

Technorati Tags: yelp, upcoming.org, yahoo, events, social networking, facebook, myspace

jay neely, a boston-based entrepreneur and a social strategist takes an informative look at the linkedin versus facebook debate.

LinkedIn is smarter than a lot of people are currently giving them credit for. Compared to Ryze and some other business-focused social networks, they’ve put together a really well-developed site. I can’t blame them for being caught off guard by Facebook suddenly going from a college student network to the next hot business trend with platform potential.

For business networkers, the fate of LinkedIn vs. Facebook will depend on a few things:

jay points out the weaknesses of both social networking sites and what each must do to overcome them and gain ground over the other network.

Technorati Tags: jay neely, linkedin, facebook, business networking

it seems like this is going to be one of those weeks. following yesterday’s digg redesign, boing boing has now unveiled their new layout and features. at first glance, the new look seems like a cross between the federated media design and the wired blogs, but you start liking it after a little while. the design is much cleaner and since it displays less content at a time on the screen, it is not as overwhelming as the previous layout (which displayed multiple posts with graphics, etc, at one time).

in addition to the new look, boing boing is also reintroducing comments and they have hired a community manager to oversee the conversations on the site, and have launched a companion gadget site.

Technorati Tags: social media, boing boing, blog, design

digg just updated their site and to clarify what has changed and what has been added, here is a tour of the updated site with before and after screen-shots.

first of all, here’s a ‘before’ screen shot of the home page followed by the new look.

starting from the very top, digg has removed the three-level layout which had the option of content-type (news, videos, and podcasts) on level one, the topics/categories displayed under it, and collapsible subtopics hidden within each topic. instead, they have opted to use a much more streamlined interface with each content-type displayed at the top and expandable as follows:

accessible from right under the content-types you still have the popular topics (such as world and business, technology, and so on).

the next big change has been made to the submitted story box.

with the new design, more importance is given to the title and the summary of the story. information about who submitted the story, when it was submitted/made popular, now joins the interaction options (like commenting, emailing, burying) at the bottom and all of the options are accompanied with fancy new buttons. the new layout is more efficient because it focuses on the content first and then gives you the option to interact with it and the rest of the extra information.

the one addition to the box is a button that allows you to select a story as a favorite. the button appears once you have dugg a story, and clicking it will add a story into the same archive where the ‘my number one’ stories were previously displayed.

the single most important change in the update is the new ‘one-click bury’ system digg has instituted. you are no longer required to give a reason for burying a story (though you still can if you want to). simply click the red x at the bottom of a story and you’re done. note that the option to bury a story exists only as long as you haven’t already dugg a story. unlike before, you can’t digg and then bury a story without undigging it first.

going back to the menu bar at the top, checking out your friends’ activity has also been made much easier. the total activity is displayed in a collapsible button at the top, and clicking it opens a drop-down menu allowing you to see the activity in more detail.

while much anticipated changes like a new comment system and a pictures section were not released in this update (which is largely cosmetic), there were some additional smaller changes as well. for example, the recent top stories section is now being displayed more prominently (thanks in part to the orange color), news and videos have been combined into one section (users can change this), and the ‘top in all sections’ lets you choose between all, news, and video.

overall, the update is great. the interface has been streamlined and compacted so that there is minimal clutter. the new design is not drastic and ensures that users will find it both easy to adapt to and more efficient to use.

Technorati Tags: digg, social media, social bookmarking, socially driven, design