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kevin hinted at some of the many new features we can expect to grace digg in the coming months. included will be the much-requested pictures sections and overall site improvements.

We’ll soon be rolling out improvements to the home page that allow you to see all content, including news and videos, on a single page we call “All”. If you prefer just News or Videos, you’ll still be able to switch back to that view and set it as your home page.

We know you’re eagerly awaiting a dedicated images section. In terms of navigation and back-end code, the home page update helps pave the way for images - which we’re excited to roll out in the October timeframe.

Technorati Tags: kevin rose, digg, new features

playboy, which has been losing readers and money, is embarking on its biggest expansion yet. the magazine has launched a social networking site with a touch of sexy, called playboyu. the site will focus strictly on college students (like facebook initially did).

“This is one brand that is relevant to 18 through 81-year-olds,” said Scott Stephen, executive vice president of operations for Playboy’s entertainment division. “We’re looking at this as a way to introduce and escort someone through their adult life.”

it makes sense that the company would try to regain its momentum by attempting to ride the coattails of the hottest trend on the web right now, but at the same time i don’t see them being very successful. even though the social network won’t have anything to do with pornography/erotica the stigma associated with the brand should be enough to prevent most people from signing up and publicly associating themselves with it.

Technorati Tags: playboy, playboyu, social networking

cnet is reporting that 43% of employees said that their employers had completely blocked facebook at work, according to a poll by security firm sophos. what i find surprising is not that facebook is being blocked, rather that only 43% of all employers recognize the loss in efficiency and productivity due to employees spending time on social networking sites instead of working.

“I think it’s a growing concern for employers for a number of reasons,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. “The most pressing concern at the moment is one of productivity…Some people are spending an inordinate amount of time on nonwork-related Web sites.”

while the use of social networking sites as valuable networking tools is understandable they are probably best suited for use during personal time because it is incredibly easy to get distracted or carried away while using them. sites such as linkedin, on the other hand, remain open for access from workplaces because they are laser-focused on purely business networking and don’t give employees the opportunity to linger.

Technorati Tags: cnet, facebook, social networking, blocked, work, sophos, productivity, efficiency, linkedin, business networking

epicenter, one of the many wired blogs, has an interview with troy young, the chief marketing officer of videoegg, with respect to youtube’s latest advertising adventure. as troy mentions, youtube’s move is nothing new. videoegg has been doing invideo advertisement overlay for a while now and has already managed over a hundred campaigns for companies like apple, fox, paramount, and so on.

what’s more interesting is that youtube might be infringing on a potential videoegg patent.

Wired News: OK, but what about a formal business response?
Young: Well, we filed a patent on it a while back.

Link to VideoEgg patents on file

Wired News: Do you plan to take action to protect the patent? What was the patent specifically for?
Young: The patent has been applied for, who knows where that will go. The patent was for invitation-based video advertising… the overlay, pausing the video, bringing up the advertiser video…

Technorati Tags: wired, blog, epicenter, troy young, videoegg, youtube, apple, fox, paramount, patent

in the same vein as what the hitwise blog mentioned last week about ‘youtube’ being the new ‘funny videos’, research this week shows that social networking sites are the new ‘chat rooms’.

We found a strong negative correlation between the weekly share of UK Internet searches for “myspace” and “bebo” with “chat rooms” and “free chat rooms” over the past two years. The charts below illustrate this nicely.

here’s a look at the correlation between ‘myspace’ and ‘chat rooms’, followed by ‘bebo’ and ‘chat rooms’.

all this great research is part of an initiative at hitwise to see how consumer search behavior has changed over the past couple of years.

Technorati Tags: hitwise, blog, youtube, funny videos, research, social networking, chat rooms, myspace, bebo

videosift, the largest community built on pligg (with over 1 million monthly unique visits), emailed techcrunch today to announce that they have developed their own content management system and will discontinue using pligg.

VideoSift says their new platform is built exclusively for video aggregation and will serve their needs better than the Pligg software. They were also hesitant, they say, to continue to contribute to the Pligg open source project. They cite a “serious security breach” that compromised part of their database and was based on a simple exploit that shouldn’t have existed.

this news comes less than two weeks after the founders of the cms put pligg up for sale.

Technorati Tags: videosift, pligg, cms

now here’s an advertising campaign for our times. a new social networking and dating site for geeks, appropriately called geek flirt has launched an incredibly viral (and may i say very cute) lolcatvertising campaign that makes you go ‘i can haz gurlfrend?’. here are the 5 ads:

Technorati Tags: lolcats, advertisement, geekflirt, geek, dating, social networking, site, viral

in an attempt to simplify the users’ profile page interface, facebook has added ‘mini icons’ under your photograph. these mini icons show thumbnails of all the facebook features that you have enabled and the applications you have added to your profile, and is a much better (cleaner and clutter free) way to display these.

you don’t have to browse a friend’s profile to see what he has added, just look at these icons. as you can see, i’m not a big fan of facebook applications.

Technorati Tags: social networking, facebook, mini, applications

if you asked me, i would’ve said nothing, but the american intelligence agencies have something else on their minds: a-space, a myspace for spies.

Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, believes the common workspace – a kind of “MySpace for analysts” – will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community. He says the technology can also help process increasing amounts of information where the number of analysts is limited.

this really underscores the strengths of the social networking model championed by sites like myspace, facebook, bebo, and so on. on another note, knowing that the cia has openly used facebook for recruiting purposes in the past, we have to wonder, does what happen on facebook stay on facebook?

Technorati Tags: myspace, spies, social networking, analyst, cia, facebook, bebo

jordan mccollum has an interesting post detailing the impending launch of invideo advertising on youtube.

As an alternative to preroll and postroll ads, InVideo ads offer more engagement, less disruption for viewers and lower video abandonment rates—a win all around.

while anyone who has watched cable television in south-asia knows that this isn’t anything new, i have to agree that invideo advertising (if done right) will definitely be much less distruptive and much more palatable than pre-roll or post-roll ads. these ads will start 15 seconds into a clip, will occupy the bottom 20% of the player, and if not clicked on within 10 seconds, will automatically disappear for the remainder of the video’s duration.

according to research done at yourube, invideo ads offer a deeper level of engagement and will result in improved conversion for marketers, making the site a much better marketing platform.

Technorati Tags: youtube, invideo, advertising, marketing, engagement, conversion