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steve rubel wrote a post on three strategies that help you succeed on the decentralized web. here’s a look at how the four big social sites have integrated those strategies (part 1) into their plans for social web domination.

think ‘web services’ not ‘websites’

web services allow developers to interact and exchange information with a platform. for example, with the release of their api’s, sites like digg, facebook, flickr, and youtube allow developers various degrees of interaction with their information repositories to develop new tools, which in turn give the end-users (the community) new ways to access the original site’s information.

socially driven: digg - officially announced their api (along with a flash toolkit) about 4 months ago. in that time, there have been 10 contest-winning applications built on the api and countless more equally impressive and useful ones. as a result people are visualizing and accessing digg from many additional sources from where it wasn’t previously accessible and are enjoying the site in ways that the site’s own developers can’t possibly find it feasible to make available (and still find time to do their day jobs).

social networking: facebook - launched their api or rather the f8 development platform on may 24. in less than 3 months, there have been thousands of facebook applications developed, which integrate the the smallest to the most established sites with facebook. this move has caused the site to grow almost 4-times as fast as myspace and has increased the site’s valuation 3-fold.

photo-sharing: flickr - was the first one out with their api (out of the social media four), which turns 3 years old this september. this also means that they have a quite inclusive and well-developed api which can integrate most of the functions of the site into an off-site application. additionally there is a comprehensive collection of tools built on the api including development tools, desktop and mobile applications, and more.

video-sharing: youtube -unveiled their api around the same time facebook did, and has gotten more than its fair share of attention with numerous tools and mashups already built on it.

all four of these sites have abundant competition. digg faces del.icio.us, netscape, reddit, stumbleupon, and more. facebook faces myspace, bebo, tangler, and so on. flickr faces competition from zooomr, photobucket, and others. and youtube faces competition on all fronts from more video-hosting-and-sharing sites than one can count or name.

in spite of this competition these sites remain the most popular and the some of fastest growing in their respective niches and it is fair to say that this is in no small part because of their shift away from being just social media ‘sites’, and towards being social media ‘platforms’ (or social media ‘services’). by opening their proverbial ‘walled gardens’ to outsiders they allow hundreds of innovative minds to play with their data and come up with new ways to present and interact with the information which is beneficial for the platform owner (i.e. the social media site), the developer, as well as the end-user.

Technorati Tags: digg, netscape, reddit, stumbleupon, facebook, myspace, bebo, tangler, flickr, zooomr, photobucket, youtube, socially driven, social networking, photo sharing, video sharing, social media

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

with all the hoopla over the freakonomics blog switching from full feeds to partial feeds because they have a new home at the nytimes, dubner has written a long post that does exactly what it claims, it pleases no one. long story short,

For the readers who have no idea what a feed is and don’t care, this post is probably of zero value. Feel free to skip it.

The people who do read the blog via feed, meanwhile, and prefer the old full feed to the current partial feed, won’t be receiving the outcome they wanted.

so with that in mind and without further delay (and contrary to what the freakonomics people will tell you), i present to you the freakonomics blog’s full feed (just click to subscribe).

Technorati Tags: freakonomics, blog, rss, feed, nytimes

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

i know a lot of you have been asking me, well i finally got some invites for streamy. let me know if you would like one, i have five left.

check out all the other private beta invites i have.

update: we’re all sold out (i.e. i gave ‘em all away already).

Technorati Tags: streamy, private, beta, invite