Social Media Influence

Social Media Influence has a new home....

Guys,

This is the final post on this Typepad blog. Starting tomorrow we'll be moving over to a new Wordpress site that will allow us to do lots of new stuff.

If you read us via www.social mediainfluence.com then nothing will change - the URL has shifted to the new site.

If you subscribe via RSS or directly through the typepad URL, please click through to the Social Media Influence link above and bookmark or subscribe via RSS or email.

Look forward to seeing you on the other side!

- Matthew

Facebook and MySpace face off at Web 2.0

Bobbie Johnson at The Guardian draws on comments from Facebook's Zuckerberg and MySpace's Chris DeWolfe to give an idea of the rival companies' audacious plans for the future: "MySpace chief executive Chris DeWolfe said that he was focused on beating the economic downturn, initially through expanding its advertising programme and also through the new MySpace Music site, which lets surfers buy and download tracks online. But he also intimated that the social network could have an even bigger target in its sights – Apple, the company behind the massively successful iPod. Asked whether the company would consider making its own MP3 player to build on its reputation in online music, DeWolfe replied cryptically that 'it's possible'."

"Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, said that he was not as interested in raking in profits as his competitors – but would instead concentrate on continuing to expand the website."

Dean Takahashi's live blog of Zuckerberg's address takes the time to note that he wore tennis shoes this year (as opposed to last year's sandals). What will the pundits make of that, we wonder?

Microsoft & Yahoo ain't gonna happen
Staying with Web 2.0, pity Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo, who is getting a rollicking across the board for being the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, following this week's news that Google had pulled out of a proposed advertising deal with Yahoo and subsequent quashing of speculation that Microsoft would step in with an offer.

Covering Yang's Web 2.0 presentation, Michael Arrington called Yahoo 'poor, alone and sad' and says Yang must go: "What Yahoo needs is a new CEO. They need their Barack Obama - someone to make everyone believe that a true leader is at the helm, ready to fight. Someone with a believable plan. Someone who can inspire Yahoo, and Yahoo users, to believe that Yahoo can once again become a force on the Internet."

Om Malik struggles to see a happy ending: "Yahoo has been on a downward spiral, with a declining stock price, plummeting morale in its troops and so far, no clear stratagem for digging out of its listlessness. Yahoo’s next likely move – buying AOL – will be like trying to fix a cut in the carotid with a Band-Aid."

Kara Swisher calls Yang the internet's human pinata but adds a shot of clear-sighted objectivity on the overall problems ailing Yahoo: "There are very real questions about whether Yang has the right talent and temperament for the job at hand, as much as he clearly loves the company he co-founded. ... Nonetheless, it is simply lazy to just call for Yang’s ouster as the panacea for what ails the company. It’s a feel-good suggestion mixed with a creepy mob mentality that offers no clear path to improvement."

Change.gov - Obama starts as he means to go on
Just hours after their contender won the US presidential elections, the team behind Barack Obama launched Change.gov, proving once again that his team knows all the right ways to tap the zeitgeist of the social media generation.

Rick Turoczy at ReadWriteWeb sums up : "In short, Obama has begun crowdsourcing the political agenda. And when it comes right down to it, isn't that what democracy is supposed to be about anyway? A government of the people, by the people, for the people?

"A few weeks ago when Gartner hypothesized that 'social networks will complement, and may replace, some government functions', it seemed almost laughable. But today, in the wake of what has occurred this week, it seems all the more accurate and attainable."

Adam Ostrow at Mashable is full of praise for Obama's people striking while the iron is hot: "For the moment, Change.gov is a pretty simple site that is more or less a continuation of the Obama campaign, but it’s encouraging to see the President-elect moving quickly to keep his supporters as engaged after victory as they were during it."

Jeremiah Owyang provides a rundown of the site features, adding: "I certainly hope the Obama administration applies for next year’s [Forrester] Groundswell awards , they’d be a fantastic case study of how institutions are embracing social technologies to connect with people. It’s really hard for anyone to be a nay-sayers about the adoption of these tools now, if the big ol’ government can start to connect with people, corporations can too."

FriendFeed adds maps
MG Siegler at VentureBeat was the first to notice that FriendFeed's sneaked in a new maps feature under the radar, something he thinks is: "A subtle, yet nice addition to the service and one that should help move the adoption of location-based services forward a little bit more."

Stan Schroeder at Mashable already thinks the feature needs tweaking: "The feature is nice, but is it relevant? Louis Gray asks in a recent update: 'The map shows I posted from Sunnyvale, but it’s not relevant to the post. Hey FF, how do I pull that map?' In certain situations, these maps are just going to show the same location - work or home - over and over again, so being able to hide the maps might be a good idea."

--Basheera Khan

Social media shows its election steel

In the wake of yesterday's big news comes a slew of stories about the role that social media played in the election campaign and results.  At VentureBeat, Eric Eldon provides an overview of performance stats from Facebook and MySpace, saying: "Indeed, the electoral importance of interactive online tools that helped people learn about the government was obvious yesterday. Twitter trumpeted its election-day traffic gains, as have social networks like MySpace and Facebook."

ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois delves into a comparison of the McCain and Obama social media campaigns, based on data provided by online statistics mashup tool Trendrr, reaching the conclusion: "There are, of course, a lot of reasons for why Barack Obama's campaign gained a lot more traction on social networks and blogs than the McCain campaign. The demographics of social media users tend to fall in line more closely with those of today's Democratic voters, for example. However, looking forward to the next campaign cycle, it seems clear that all political campaigns, especially at this level, will start ignoring social media trends at their own peril."

MG Siegler at VentureBeat comments on the notable absence of Twitter's Fail Whale during the election coverage, and asks: "Now the question for Twitter is: Where to go from here? With the election over, will Twitter be able to hang on to all of these new users? If they signed up for political discourse, they probably aren’t going to be content with the standard 'What are you doing?' updates. Or, to put it more bluntly, those that signed up to learn about problems at polling stations probably aren’t going to care that I’m brushing my teeth with cinnamon toothpaste."

After Ze Frank asked for his followers' thoughts and feelings about the election, prompting a flurry of responses, Mathew Ingram picked up on Frank's ability to build active online communities, asking: "Why did people choose to post such personal comments at Ze’s site? You could argue that they would have done it anywhere, but I think the community that he has created around himself and his quirky Web productions has a lot to do with it, and how free people felt to respond. I also noticed that he stepped in several times to respond, even in small ways."

All good advice to follow if you're thinking of changing the world through social media.

Election shocker: other stuff unrelated to the elections makes headlines
Elsewhere on the interwebs: Linden Labs tries to quell a rebellion in Second Life. Wagner James Au writing for GigaOM describes Second Life users' response to the proposed price hikes as "a case study in the challenges inherent in managing user-generated content".

Eric Krangel at Silicon Alley Insider says the proposed price hikes led "to the kind of histrionics Second Lifers do best: angry protest rants, sulky threats to quit the game, and avatars setting themselves on fire (an act we note involves no actual pain or sacrifice)."

He goes on to dissect Linden Labs' back-pedalling on the pricing issue, saying: "First off, since the price hikes were announced there's been the beginnings of a mass exodus to OpenSim, an open source Second Life clone that's rapidly coming up to speed as a fully featured alternative anyone can run for free. Secondly, a surprising number of Second Life users aim for a revenue-neutral existence, and pay their usage fees to Linden with profits generated running micro-businesses selling virtual goods. But with an expensive item in Second Life going for 250 Linden Dollars (a little less than a buck), a $50 a month rent increase is enough to price people out of the game altogether. And of course, there's a real-world recession going on that's forcing people to rethink their entertainment budgets."

TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn is cutting 10% of its staff; paidContent adds that video startup Veoh will axe 20%. Jason Kincaid writes about LinkedIn: "It’s likely that the cuts were prompted by investors like Sequoia pushing for cost cutting (the VC gave portfolio companies a 56 Slide Presentation of Doom last month in light of the economic crisis). But LinkedIn isn’t about to run out of money: the company just closed a $22.7 million infusion, which came on top of a $53 million Series D round in June that pegged LinkedIn’s valuation at $1 billion."

In UK media news, The Guardian names Janine Gibson as editor of Guardian.co.uk, which Jemima Kiss describes as "part of the latest move towards its integration of newspaper and website operations" and online journalism wunderkind Dave Lee (recently appointed co-editor of the BBC Internet Blog) posts this gem of a video in which a Birmingham Mail reporter effectively resigns by YouTube to pursue his indie publishing dreams - though his actions may be influenced by inebriation.

Blogging the bloggers - GObama!

There's only one story in the world today – or, as The Guardian's Charles Arthur tweeted: "It's a good day to bury bad news."

Given his progressive and net-neutral stance on technology, it's no surprise that President-elect Barack Obama is much admired by the digerati. He delivered his technology agenda around this time last year at a Google Talks event, followed by a Q&A with Eric Schmidt (worth watching just for his answer to a question about search algorithms) and in the run up to the elections, Tim O'Reilly was one of the many to endorse him.

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins at Mashable has pulled together an impressive overview of how the Obama campaign has used social media to achieve the desired result.

Meanwhile, Forrester Research's Jeremiah Owyang gives voice to the issue top of tech mind in the wake of Obama's landslide victory: "Now that the dust has settled between the candidates, we should keep an eye on the President’s promises he made to the technology community. Never before have we seen a president give this much focus on Technology (let alone use new technology in addition to old for his campaigns) and it’s important we remember what he has planned and promised."

Blogs force businesses to be better communicators
One of the tech-driven changes expected under an Obama administration is increased transparency in government, with federal spending and legislation being thrown open to public scrutiny and participation. It's going to require a massive culture change for everyone involved, especially those unused to such openness even in internal communications. But it's clear that this is the direction in which the winds of change are blowing, and it's not just the tech sector that knows it.

Elon Musk, CEO of electric car manufacturer Tesla Motors blogged about the company's October 15 layoffs even before some of the affected staff had been informed. As the New York Times reports, Musk felt he had no choice if he wanted to prevent inaccurate reporting.

The NYT story carries comment and reaction from industry sources which all serve to underline what those in the social media know have seen coming from a mile off: blogging is gaining rapid ground as a more immediate, more sincere and more effective way of communicating with staff and the outside world. The best quote comes from Andy Sernovitz, chief executive of the Blog Council: "There are hold-out companies that still wish there was traditional P.R. control of the message, but that day is long over."

Conserving street art through mashups
Banksy is undoubtedly a UK counterculture national treasure, much as the officious public servants of Westminster fain to deny it. Last month, they ordered a piece of Banksy street art near London's Oxford Street be removed on the grounds that it is vandalism.

While the wheels of local authority slowly spin into action, tech/PR blogger and appreciator of street art (did I mention he's also MD of Rainier PR ?) Stephen Waddington today highlights the work of Art of the state, which has produced an online collection of Banksy art and a Google Map of the top 10 Banksy locations across London. Wadds recommends: "The best examples of Banksy work in London are in an old tunnel off Leake Street within the shadow of Waterloo and the London Eye. Banksy brought together 39 artists together in May for The Cans Festival to create work in the tunnel."

--Basheera Khan

New York Times Goes Tag Cloud for Election Day

We're always on the look out for ways that good ol school media are catching up with the times. Today, it's the times (New York Times that is) catching up with social media in the form of an election day tag cloud where readers can express their emotions on this monumentous voting day.

Any one who has seen Brand Tags or Brand Advocacy will recognize the inspiration for what the NYT calls a "word cloud."

- Matthew

Blogging the bloggers - NYT, ProPublica want $1m to open up investigative journalism

The New York Times and the non-profit investigative reporting outfit ProPublica are seeking $1 million from this year's Knight News Challenge to launch DocumentCloud, an online repository of the primary-source documents which reporters usually dig up and discard on a daily basis.

Zachary M. Seward at the newly launched Nieman Journalism Lab kicks off his analysis of applications to the Knight News Challenge -- which is handing out around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs based on open-source digital technology which serves the public interest -- with a closer look at DocumentCloud: "The proposal relies on a piece of software called DocViewer, which was developed by the Times’ Interactive Newsroom Technologies team. The head of that team, Aron Pilhofer, recently confirmed that the Times will release DocViewer as open source 'sometime after the election.'"

"The project could lead to greater information sharing among news organizations and their audience. [It] would let news organizations upload their materials for public consumption and analysis. 'Readers will also be able to quickly search, annotate and bookmark documents — and for the first time link directly to specific pages or passages.'"

Jay Rosen seemed less than impressed by the news, tweeting his take on the situation: "I'd think the New York Times would be donating $1 million to the Knight News Challenge rather than applying for that amount. But that's me."

The NYT subtext commentary as Rosen sees it: "We didn't spend on R & D during the fat years. We don't think much of citizen journalism. Our company foundation can't help. So we'll apply."

Is Facebook's popularity its own undoing?
Jemima Kiss writing for the Media Guardian reports that "Facebook overtook the BBC's network of websites in September to become the UK's fifth most popular online destination."

Citing figures from web measurement firm comScore, Kiss says: "The social networking site saw its UK traffic rise 80% from September last year to to 18.4 million unique users the month before last. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke in Europe for the first time last month, appearing at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, where he claimed the site's global userbase had risen to 100 million."

ComScore's figures put traffic to the BBC's websites, including news, sport and its programming sites, as down by 2.7% year on year to 18.2 million unique users.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch adds a dollop of glass-half-empty circumspection to the conversation with his detailed breakdown of why Facebook may be growing too fast and what it may mean for the company's capital requirements: "It costs a couple of hundred million dollars a year just to keep the lights on at Facebook. But the real problem is keeping up with growth, particularly storage needs. Add another $100 million or more per year for capital expenditures, and you’ve got a company that’s doing exactly the opposite of printing money."

"If they don’t raise a big chunk of money now from someone who’ll pay whatever it takes to own a piece of Facebook, there may be a heavily dilutive down-valuation round for Facebook in the next 12-18 months."

Sam Diaz at Between the Lines is following this story too: "In response, Facebook basically responds by telling VentureBeat that it’s doing just fine - thank you very much - while other sources say that something must be wrong with the TechCrunch calculator."

Sam lists a few Facebook services that he'd be willing to pay for, adding: "Subscriptions and fees may not be the right path for Facebook in the long-term, but if the company is really testing the waters on revenue sources while staying focused on growth, one of my random ideas to help bring in a few extra bucks just might be worth considering."

Wikis get Creative Commons licensing
The Free Software Foundation has updated its GNU Free Document License, which essentially means that the Wikipedia community can now relicense Wikipedia under a Creative Commons license.

Lawrence Lessig heralds this as "enormously important news", explaining: "It would be hard to overstate the importance of this change to the Free Culture community. A fundamental flaw in the Free Culture Movement to date is that its most important element -- Wikipedia -- is licensed in a way that makes it incompatible with an enormous range of other content in the Free Culture Movement. One solution to this, of course, would be for everything to move to the FDL. But that license was crafted initially for manuals, and there were a number of technical reasons why it would not work well (and in some cases, at all) for certain important kinds of culture.

"This change would now permit interoperability among Free Culture projects, just as the dominance of the GNU GPL enables interoperability among Free Software projects. It thus eliminates an unnecessary and unproductive hinderance to the spread and growth of Free Culture."

--Basheera Khan

Blogging the bloggers - MySpace and MTV strike gold in Auditude deal (they hope)

TechCrunch starts the week with news of a deal between Auditude, MTV and MySpace that seems a complete turnabout in Corporate America's decidedly anti stance on users uploading and sharing music videos, all in the name of data-rich analytics and the promise of finally monetizing the long tail of music videos.

Jason Kincaid explains: "The new platform will automatically identify any uploaded video clips from a number of shows produced by MTV Networks (including my personal favorite “The Daily Show”), and will display an overlay when the clip is played that shows which episode the clip originally came from, its original air-date, and links to online stores where users can buy the entire episode."

Kincaid's verdict: "After years of being told not to upload these videos, users will probably take a while to warm up to the idea. But if it catches on (and it probably will), expect to see content owners flock to form partnerships with MySpace - there isn’t currently another video platform out there that is able to identify and monetize content this effectively. We’ll probably also see the Auditude platform implemented elsewhere as other sites try to catch up."

ReadWriteWeb's got a terrific explanation of Auditude's analytical technology. Commenting on the deal's antithesis to the take-down notices we've come to expect from content rights owners, ReadWriteWeb's Rick Turoczy writes: "The Auditude solution takes exactly the opposite tact: identifying content as a means to extend MTV Networks' reach with the MySpace audience. It's an incredibly innovative way to embrace the behavior of today's Web users while giving something back to the content owners.

"For an industry that lives and dies by audience analysis, this new windfall of data - from a previously untapped resource - is a veritable metrics gold mine, certain to provide reams of reports and analysis in the short term. In the long term, it could change how - and where - MTV Networks' programming is released and distributed."

Microsoft still Azure cloud contender
Horrible headline puns aside, Microsoft has the industry sitting up and taking notice of its definite commitment to cloud computing following its announcement of Azure at its Professional Developer Conference.

Dan Farber at CNet News thinks this is evidence that Microsoft will continue to be a major force for at least the next ten years even if this move does test the company to its limits: "Ray Ozzie has a track record of slowly but surely getting things done and Microsoft is famously persistent and cash rich. But building a platform, or Internet operating system, at planetary scale supporting billions of users and trillions of transactions per day, and having fleet Google as a primary competitor will be a major test of Microsoft's brain trust and resolve. Don't be surprised to find a recharged Bill Gates parachuting into the fray as Azure evolves and the cloud war for developers escalates."

Robert Scoble provides his collection of live web conversations around the topic, and sums up: "It doesn’t matter that Microsoft didn’t get all that much hype this year at the PDC or that it didn’t sell out or that other companies like Amazon, Google, and Rackspace are ahead in the cloud game. You just saw Ray Ozzie turn the creaky old cruiseliner hard to port and damn, it is impressive."

Social media for president
The US presidential race has got the point where to avoid hearing about it, you'll need to find a cave on a mountain-side accessible only by a three-day trek atop a mule, where you proceed to take a soma holiday. For those politico junkies who can't get enough, though, there are a multitude of interesting new ways to follow the dash down the home strait.

Twitter's Election 2008 watch has been filtering hundreds of Twitter updates per minute providing a window into real time public opinion about the election. Twitter Vote Report is actually unrelated to Twitter as a company but uses the Twitter and Google Maps APIs to create a grassroots non-partisan live view of voting conditions around the country. The site offers its data as feeds in turn under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.  Finally, at 24 Hours In America a team of British satirists and their special guests will live-blog the event. They also have a Twitter account.

--Basheera Khan

Blogging the bloggers - Magpie tempts Twitterers with bling

While Twitter struggles to find a business model, others are making hay while the sun shines. European company Magpie has launched an ad network for Twitter which matches targeted advertising -- aka magpie-tweets -- to participating Twitterers' tweet streams. Advertisers pay Magpie for the tweets they send in the Twitter user's name; Magpie pays the Twitter user for access to their friends and followers, and the ads are prefaced by the #magpie hashtag to clearly differentiate them from the user's normal updates. Anyone with a PayPal account can play. If that sounds a bit confusing to imagine, they've helpfully drawn a nice picture to explain how it works. 

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins at Mashable says: "The fact that just about anyone can make some serious money from doing almost nothing ... might overshadow the righteous indignation many may feel about this. No one will get rich from this, but quite a few folks might enjoy having an extra $50-$200 in their pocket at the end of the month."

Rick Turoczy at ReadWriteWeb says: "Magpie is promoting the service as a way to get into the tweet stream of 'popular twitterers.' One has to wonder, if those Twitter users - especially those who are already seeing value in their Twitter use - are going to be willing to trade their influence for cash."

As Mark points out, Twitter CEO @ev dismissed a similar idea when it was raised at a Mashable focused discussion a while ago. Given Twitter's past form though, it's entirely likely that if Magpie turns out to be a hit with the punters, they'll rapidly rise to the top of Twitter's shopping list.

I think you'll find it's pronounced 'Freemium'
In his Wired cover story, Chris Anderson writes with a sheen of optimism: "It's now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned. Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There's never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing."

Silicon Alley Insider's Nicholas Carlson is only a little dismissive of Anderson's thesis, saying: "Sorry Chris, but free is out again. Thank economy-wary investors like Sequoia Capital, which terrified its portfolio of startups with a 'RIP Good Times' earlier this month. Startups 'need to become cash flow positive,' Sequoia declared. They must recognize the 'need for profitability.' 'Cash is king.'

"Sequoia isn't the only VC firm preaching the precepts of profit, so startups are starting to return to a business concept many thought had faded into the past -- asking customers to pay for things. Namely: Pro accounts, plus accounts, premium features, enterprise editions, and white label versions. This pleases us."

Carlson also lists a bundle of companies that already have launched, are rumoured to be launching, or which Silicon Alley Insider expects will launch pro accounts in the foreseeable future. 

TechCrunch UK does its bit for the economy
Mike Butcher today announced a new feature on TCUK -- Send Me An Angel which, though it sounds plausibly like it could be an R&B hit tipped for the Christmas number one, is thankfully a far nobler endeavour. Aimed at putting seed investors in touch with the early stage start-ups that need them, the feature will regularly profile angel investors in the tech space. The first angel is Michael Smith, founder of Firebox.com and CEO of Mind Candy. We'll be watching this space with interest for the first marriage made in TechCrunch.


Friendfeed and Twitter combine to lower signal-to-noise ratio
Another new abuse use for the Twitter API comes from Friendfeed, which as of yesterday is giving its users the option of sharing their lifestream in its entirety with Twitter. Mashable's Adam Ostrow is on the money when he says: "This could get annoying."

--Basheera Khan

Blogging the bloggers - The Guardian opts for full-fat RSS

It's hard to believe that RSS has been around long enough for it to have traditionalist old school practices and 'new' approaches such as that the Guardian has recently announced (where new is essentially the old school 1.0 version of RSS feeds before people thought of making money from them, of course). From Matt McAlister at the Inside Guardian.co.uk blog comes the news of a major upgrade to the site's RSS feeds.

Matt writes: "Two significant new features are worth noting.First, every feed across the site includes the full content for each article. We've also embedded related links pointing people to more information on the web site. This way people can get the guardian.co.uk experience in whatever context is most useful to them. Second, advertising will soon appear within each full content feed item. Ads won't appear in the items which we display only as summaries."

There are some exceptions; cartoons, images and some of the other in-article elements that appear with articles on guardian.co.uk won't always be included, and if The Graun has any doubts about its rights to publish the full text of an article in the context of RSS, it'll only provide a summary and a link to the full version on the main guardian.co.uk site.

Guardian columnist Jeff Jarvis is all for what he calls a bold experiment: "I know this is somewhat nerve-making in media: Why should we put all our content out there on a feed without getting people to come to our pages and see all our ads? A few answers. First, many people won’t click through. Take ‘em when you got ‘em. Second, think distributed; that’s my first WWGD? rule for news organizations. You have to go to where the people are. RSS is home delivery 2.0. Third, the feeds will have ads and though there’ll be fewer of them, the potential for more audience reading more stories is great."

As always, one of the joys of social media is watching the audience engage with and thus influence the product - this case is no exception.

Google gets behind OpenID in its own special way
OpenID, the open and decentralized identity system designed "not to crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business", just got sexier and/or more credible with the announcement that Google is now an OpenID provider.

John McRea, head of marketing at Plaxo (one of the first sites to accept a Google account for signup and sign in), blogs a very excited description of the upcoming 'Open Stack' which in his words "will fix so much of what is currently broken."

"Today, every time you go to use a new website, you have to give the site your email address and choose a password; you have to upload a photo and fill out the same profile info you’ve done dozens of times before; and, you’ll probably be encouraged to import your address book and invite your friends. The new Open Stack approach can take almost all of the friction out of that process."

Eric Krangel at Silicon Alley Insider is cynical at best: "It'll never happen -- at least not the way it's promised. For better or for worse, OpenID is one of those utopian ideas championed by "open"-type nerds -- one that in actual practice never lives up to the "this will change everything" hype. Kind of like Linux as a consumer OS. [...] We don't think OpenID will ever work as designed. Instead of creating an open-source 'no one owns it' identity solution, the OpenID push will likely mean more small players will accept incoming logins, while the biggest players in identity management (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL) consolidate their hold on users. Which, as profit-minded competitors, they probably should. Not exactly the OpenID dream. But not surprising."

Flickr privacy map speaks volumes
On the subject of openness and privacy, Mike Arrington posted a revealing picture of global attitudes to privacy embodied in Flickr user privacy settings circa 2005. He notes: "The results are fascinating. The US is widely public except for users who seem to be hovering around Utah, and varies by state. Europe, by contrast, is largely private, and more so as you move north. The Middle East is wide open. South East Asia is mixed. India is private."

Of course, that was three years ago - a generation in social media terms. It'd be mighty interesting to see how that map looks today.

--Basheera Khan

Blogging the bloggers - LinkedIn takes a leaf from Facebook, launches its own apps

The buzz on everyone's lips this morning comes in the wake of LinkedIn's announcement of an application platform designed to get its users collaborating with each other through the business networking site.

Called InApps, the platform's initial rollout provides LinkedIn's 30 million users a bundle of applications which Rick Turoczy at ReadWriteWeb describes as in keeping with LinkedIn's specific purpose of helping you find a job: a trip application from TripIt , presentations from SlideShare and Google Presentation, blog feeds from Six Apart and WordPress, file storage and collaboration from Box.net, online workspaces from UK start-up Huddle, and Amazon Reading Lists that will allow users to share the books they are reading.

VentureBeat's Eric Eldon thinks it looks good but notes: "The question, of course, is whether LinkedIn’s ... users want to use productivity apps on LinkedIn — as opposed other productivity apps on their desktops or on the web, like Powerpoint. ... Productivity apps haven’t generally gained much traction on other social networks, maybe because those sites were too, well, social. Because LinkedIn is about business, this is perhaps the most obvious place for such apps to succeed."

Turoczy's verdict: "No matter what the economic conditions, people will always be looking for new jobs. If LinkedIn continues to add features and applications that facilitate that inevitable searching and hiring, they're sure to succeed. And this new application platform appears to be right in line with that focus."

More on the death of print: Christian Science Monitor leaps for the safety of online
From the turbulent world that is print media comes the news that the 100-year old Christian Science Monitor, winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes for journalism, will in April 2009 put its weekday print edition to bed one last time and head for the brave new world of online-only publishing. It is the first US national newspaper to do so. It's not abandoning print completely - a new weekend magazine is on the cards.

Mathew Ingram was more than a bit taken aback by the news: "I confess that despite having spent the past couple of years watching U.S. newspapers caught in a death spiral, cutting costs and laying off staff only to see their advertising revenue continue to sink, the closure of the CS Monitor’s print edition came as a shock. It’s one thing to talk about what newspapers have to do to survive, how online is the future and so on, but it’s another thing to see a 100-year-old paper leap off a cliff like that."

Writing for Salon.com, Cyrus Farivar thinks it's a sensible move for any publication that wants to stay in the game: "Yes, I get that a newspaper is more foldable and portable than reading electronically -- and yes, you can lose it on a train without worrying about it -- but honestly, how much longer can any newspaper executive justify the huge operating expense of printing and distributing the printed page?"

Arrington eats crow at Hulu birthday party
One company that is right at home in online publishing and distribution (in the US only, alas) is Hulu, which celebrates its first birthday today. TechCrunch's Mike Arrington confesses to eating crow given the company's success: "We provided nearly constant criticism of the site since it was announced in March 2007 (no name, billion dollar valuation, name translation issues, trademark absurdity, etc.). But despite a slightly bumpy launch, we had to admit that they did an outstanding job. And today I can safely say I spend more time watching Hulu than I do my standard home cable connection."

Arrington continues his public practice in humility by saying he was wrong to doubt the company's model: "Hulu rocks. Despite ridiculous odds, the company was able to pull off a joint venture between two humongous parent media companies and provide users with a compelling, sexy product. The only thing I can really criticize is the continued lack of international availability, which is a licensing issue beyond their control. Happy birthday, Hulu. Please add HBO soon."

–Basheera Khan