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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

twitter has finally added one of the most requested features to their service - people search.

We’ve just added Profile Search to Twitter! Now you can search across profile information like name, location, bio, and url. That means you can find more people to follow. The search box is over on the right when you’re signed in. Go ahead and find other Twitter-ers in San Francisco, New York, or Tokyo or find out your friends are already Twittering and you didn’t even know it!

Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-blogging, profile, people, search

recently, there have been a lot of articles of the sort ‘x number of ways to improve twitter’. what i find striking about these articles is that pownce, a twitter competitor, has already implemented most of these improvements that people are requesting to be added to twitter.

what we see is that either 1) people recommended an improvement or found something missing in twitter, which pownce later implemented in its version of the micro-blogging platform, or 2) pownce foresaw the need for some functionality and implemented it, which people liked and subsequently felt was missing from twitter. either way, this shows how pownce is really what many expect the next iteration of twitter to be. here’s a look at 7 ways in which pownce improves upon twitter.

1. groups: pownce lets you organize your friends into groups and then allows you to send messages to sets of people.

2. better url handling: rather than using a 3rd party service like tinyurl (which can be unreliable at times), on pownce you can use the actual url without worrying about wasting characters (there is no limit to message size).

3 . better design: if there’s one thing that pownce really nailed, it is the beautiful design. the interface is also skinnable, which means there will be something for everyone.

4. better message handling: there are a couple of ways in which message handling on pownce is much better than on twitter. 1) there is no minimum message size, 2) you can send messages to the public, to your friends, to a self-created group, and to individuals, 3) all replies to a message are threaded, 4) you can forward messages to other people.

5. privacy settings: only messages you sent to the public can be seen by everyone. other message can only be seen by the subset they are sent to.

6. more versatility: in addition to sending messages, you can also share files and create events. there are also much better options for which notifications you would like to receive.

7. friends: pownce makes it a lot easier to look for and add friends. if you go to the ‘add friends’ page, you are shown friends of your friends to see if you know or want to add any of them. in addition you can also search for people to add as friends.

the point of this post isn’t to say that pownce is better, surely there are several things that twitter still does better or that pownce simply lacks. while the twitter versus pownce versus [insert micro-blogging tool name here] debate will rage on, the bottom line is that though pownce is far from revolutionary or even a totally new product, it does fix a ton of things that are wrong with twitter (and the prevailing micro-blogging platform) and that we can expect to be improved in twitter 2.0.

References:

1. Five Quick Suggestions to Improve Twitter by Allen Stern
2. Six Ways to Improve Twitter by Josh Lowensohn
3. Introducing Pownce, Like Twitter But Better by Hong Kiat

ever had a song stuck into your head that you wanted to hear a piece of right away? with yahoo! audio search now you can do exactly that.

Now on Yahoo! Audio Search you can play samples of millions of songs. The new inline player provides instant playback right next to the search results. There are no intrusive pop-ups or multiple browser windows to manage — only a 30-second, uninterrupted instant audio experience. And, there’s also a ‘Select Preferred Audio Service’ feature that helps you link to your favorite audio provider directly from the results page.

simply search for a song, an artist, album, or lyrics from a song and listen to a snippet right away.

now this is the kind of innovation that is going to put yahoo! back in the game. also of interest are these yahoo! audio search apis.

while social networking and watching video clips are incredibly popular online activities, guess what activity eclipses both of these:

The research and analysis company Parks Associates announced Friday that games are still the most popular Internet activity in the United States. The report, “Casual Gaming Market Update”, found that 34% of U.S. adult Internet users play online games each week, compared with 29% who watch short online videos and 19% who visit social networking sites.

not only is casual online gaming more popular than these other activities, but the industry also has a better revenue model which includes advertising, try-before-you-buy, subscriptions, and micro-transactions, according to James Kai, a research analyst at Park Associates.

that said, the year-over-year growth rate of the casual online gaming industry is 79%, while online video streaming enjoys 123% and social networking is at 46%, which means that gaming sites need to act fast if they are to keep their lead in the long run.

you know that great facebook feature that let’s you share things with your friends? and you know how you run into a problem if you’re trying to send a message to or share something with all your friends but can’t (and have to email a few separately) because some of your friends aren’t on facebook? well, facebook has updated their sharing/messaging feature so that you don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Now you can enter a friend’s email address into the To: line when you send a message or share an album, and Facebook will email them the message. Your friends will be able to reply without signing up, and they will be able to see content you share with them.

rich skrenta, founder of dmoz.org and co-founder and ceo of topix.net, has some advice for jason and his human-powered search engine, mahalo.

We know this from experience: No one will ever go to Mahalo directly, just as no one ever went to About.com, dmoz, Tripadvisor, Nextag, IMDB or any other vertical or broad-but-shallow site. Google is where everyone starts and Mahalo’s distribution strategy has to be SEO. Its traffic is going to live or die based on SEO skill and Google’s continued favor.

given how passionately jason hates anything and everything that has to do with seo, that’s gotta hurt. here’s the response:

From where we sit we think that we can make a great service that is not driven by SEO. If we rank high because some of our pages are one of the BEST pages for a keyword on the internet we are honored to be considered. However, it’s not our focus. Our focus is on building the best pages and we think that we can capture a significant audience who will either come to Mahalo first, or side by side, Google/Yahoo/Ask.

Social media is everywhere recently. It’s almost hard to call yourself respectable marketer if you don’t know the in’s and out’s. So to hone your social media skills, here’s 5 questions about Digg with social media analyst/blogger and uber-digger Muhammad Saleem.

check out the interview.