I was wondering when someone was going to come out with this, and if other have before, sorry I missed it. Read/Write Web has just installed a comment reputation/rating system called SezWho.

What SezWho does is provides a means for each visitor to rate some ones comments. Over time this will build into a reputation that enables you to then filter out the comments others have not found useful when you come to a blog.

This is a real missed opportunity for E-Bay to break out of the auction mode. They are the masters of reputation, but have yet to release a way for people to use these reputations outside of E-Bay. If E-Bay wanted to they could easily become a powerhouse in this space.

The big question is do we really need it or does it just stifle the conversation?

I think that in today’s world you need all the ways to filter data you can get and no matter how much you want to believe it some peoples comments hold more weight in a conversation than others.

Tags: sezwho | Reputation | E-Bay

How many social networks do you belong to? If I include only the ones I use day-to-day seven. I suspect some of you have even more. That is a lot of networks to hand out to each contact when you connect. Who wants to deal with that? Which of your contacts wants to catalog all your social connections just to link to you and know what your up to? The answer is simple, no one.

The second generation social networks will need to figure this out. I have seen a lot of bursts in this direction, but no one has put it all together yet.

The first thing a second generation social network will need to tackle is the move from object connections to people connections. Current generation social networks are focused on linking people to your objects. They do this by building management and storage software to handle your shared objects. Look at Facebook. Facebook created a photo gallery. It’s ok, but not as full featured as Flickr or photobucket. Instead of building an ok photo gallery, they would have better spent their time building hooks to the existing social photo sites that would let them keep your network up-to-date on the photo’s you have added or updated.

This points out the big problem that needs to be addressed. I don’t want a social network to reinvent the wheel for me. I want to say that “Joe Smith” is someone I want to connect to me network. Oh! He is doesn’t have an account with this social network. Thats ok, we will create a contact for him and you can populate it with all the public social accounts you know about and send him an invite to join.

If “Joe Smith” decides to join the social network and create an account, most of his information is already in his profile because you created it. Now “Joe Smith” wants to take over managing his contact information because he is now a member. No problem. The system sends you, the contact originator, and e-mail with his request. You determine, yep thats Joe, so you approve the contact transfer.

No provide the value added stuff. For a perfect example of this check out the Socialstream demo.

Two companies are dabbling in this space. I know there are more, but these two are the only ones that seem to be on to something and have direction. Spokeo, who allows you to create “friends” and their links to social objects. The other is MyBlogLog with the recent addition of the Service tab that generates a list of your social objects as part of your contact information.

Ok! Who is going to build it?

Tags: Social Networking | Second Generation Social Networks

Both Robert Scoble and Jeremiah Owyang are making this claim. I agree that Facebook doesn’t let data out, but is that a bad thing? Is having one place for all of your data a bad thing?

I like the fact that I can connect to my network, add my blog feed, and add other services if they have built a Facebook application. One central place for everything.

This isn’t the optimal solution. I would rather have a more open architecture where I can connect all my social data and connect to my network in a way that allows my network to not necessarily be part of Facebook. We all have different needs from our social network. It would be nice to be able to use the network of my choice but still connect to friends that are one another network.

Today Facebook is the best we have. It only takes one development effort that is well thought out to push the community into the next generation of social networking, possibly open social networks.

Social networking is a young industry. I think calling Facebook a data black hole is not very helpful. Let’s explore some constructive ideas form improvement along with pointing out the flaws.

Tags: Social Networking | Facebook

Prodded to investigate social network aggregators by a Mashable post I began hitting the list and creating accounts. What I learned real quick is that this space is young, underfunded, and in need of a little creative thinking. If you want the list I looked at go to the Mashables post, I didn’t hit all of them. And most of the rest I found disappointing. What was offered was not well thought out or I got a frustrated feeling that it would be so easy to just go a little further.

Two of them stood out as having the most potential: Spokeo and SocialURL. Both approach the problem in similar ways of allowing you trying to tie you to your network and all the services that everyone uses. I think this basic approach is good, but there is so much more that could be done with it.

Why not build a social network around all of these connections. Let me add mine to my profile. I manage my own “card” of information, flickr for photos, RSS for my blog, del.icio.us for bookmarks, etc. When a friend wants to connect the get access to all these public connections just by adding me to their contacts list.

The social site should specialize in facilitating the contact and profile exchange. Let the bookmark sites specialize in bookmarking, photo sites deal with photo’s and the blog software makers with blogging. Between API’s and RSS/Atom feeds this information can be aggregated together and easily shared.

I don’t want just an RSS reader, and I don’t want to have to build connections to everything the people in my network are sharing by managing their profile as well as mine.

Why reinvent the wheel with every new social network application? Specialization will insure that each application performs the best in its niche without having to worry about how do I deal with connections or how do I host photos or videos.

The social network companies should give me a way to manage all the data, not create new ways to store the data.

Tags: Social Networking | Spokeo | SocialURL

If you ever needed an application that demonstrated the power of Facebook applications this is it.  I found this through Scobleizer and am excited at the potential.  The application is called Google Reader Shared Items.

The idea is you subscribe to all of your favorite RSS feeds in Google Reader. As you find items that you think are interesting you mark them as shared. The Facebook application lists your shared items and all your friends that are linked to you and have installed the application can see your shared items. You can also see all of your friends shared items.

Leveraging existing applications to stimulate conversation. Now take that one step forward and make sure that you subscribe to your friends blogs and via blog posts, trackbacks, and comments information relevant to you and those in your network flows well.

Spock is a search engine that incorporates traditional search algorithms and the idea of community interaction to become a people specific search vertical.

The idea behind this is great and a bit scary all at the same time. The example from the Scoble Show used the idea that we are searching for VC’s. So we enter venture capitalists and it returns a list of venture capitalists. You can do a number of things such as vote an entry up, tag, drill down. Very interesting. You can have favorites that are personal and from your address book. You can see the network that these individuals are associated with.

The scary part is that everyone will need to have their identity on the web and it will have to be defended meticulously.

Despite that I like the concept so it will be interesting to see where it goes. The innovative use of technology and wisdom of crowds is a nice combination I would like to see more often in applications.

Spock screen shots at flickr.

First Seen at: Link

Jeremiah Owyang, from the blog Web Strategy by Jeremiah, has a list of reasons why social media and the wisdom of crowds doesn’t work.

1. Opinions vs Facts and Analysis
2. Amateurs provide crappy content
3. Identity
4. Google rewards those that are popular and interesting
5. Crowds are not very wise
6. Socialism doesn’t work
7. Noise vs Signal

I don’t necessarily agree with all of these points. I think he doesn’t understand that the way the wisdom of crowds idea works is if you have a large number of independent individuals that are in general not aware of the results of any other individuals in the crowd. As soon as each individual in the crowd knows the outcome of everyone else in the crowd everything becomes skewed. A prime example of this is Digg. An article becomes popular because everyone I know is voting for it, not because it is accurate or I believe it is great information.

One item we do have in common is about search engines. Goggle’s search algorithm works on relevance and popularity. Unfortunately this becomes the Digg problem all over again. I think a better idea, if they can make it work, is human powered search engine called Mahalo. The idea is that you will get more relevant results from someone that has actually looked at the links and can provide some context.

This could all be changed by natural language search. So keep on the lookout.

When Yahoo! 360 started out I admit I was excited and had high hopes. But Yahoo! 360 never really lived up to it’s potential. I can think of three obvious issues that can be attributed to this failure.

1. It lacked real interactivity
2. It lacked a blog
3. It was full of abandoned accounts

Interactivity is key to social networking. Without it there is no real compelling reason for a person to return to the site. Yahoo! 360 was really great at allowing you to create lists. But once the list was created there just wasn’t a lot to do with it. People want to network together to share thoughts, ideas, photo’s and conversation. They want to know there are others out on the net just like them.

This transitions nicely into our second problem. Yahoo! 360 was missing a blog. Call it whatever you like, for instance facebook calls it Notes, a social site needs to provide a space that you can communicate. When Yahoo! 360 started out all they had were things called blasts (What the hell is a blast?). Later the Yahoo! 360 folks realized their mistake and added a “blog.” I used quotes around blog because it was only a blog in the strictest sense of the term. They limited everything. No Javascript, limited html set. What were they afraid of? And don’t let me get started on the url’s. Here is a good example of a blog url for an individual I am connected with on 360 http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-w6bqHC0ydKLXxL2.7wluWhSZcA–?cq=1. Is this really necessary in this day and age?

Finally we have the issue of abandoned accounts. Yahoo! has a big draw. Lots of people created accounts, generated the obligatory lists, connected to a few friends. Finally realizing there was nothing more to do they abandoned the site never to return. Let me give you an example of why this is an issue. I am a scifi fan. So I want to find other scifi fans to connect with. Yahoo! 360 gives you the ability to search for other people that list interests that match yours. A quick click on a topic from one of my lists provides me with hundreds of matches. The only problem is fewer than 1% have updated their space in months. A simply filter to order the results by last activity date would have resolved the issue. But nothing. Who would wade through hundreds of pages of results to find one or two active people? Certainly not me.

The single biggest item that caused Yahoo! 360 to fail is Yahoo! itself. Simple things could have made the site very worthwhile. I guess in this regard Yahoo! and Google are similar. They both have failed social networks. All is not lost though as you can read from this article, “” at TechCrunch.

• Write Articles, Not Blog Postings
• Socialstream
• Google and Yahoo: Finally Getting Serious About Social Networking
• Wrong On Hyperlocal: Google And Web 1.0 Killed Backfence

Chess.com has re-branded itself as a social network. In today’s climate, this is a wise move. I have taken a look at the site. Chess.com is a perfect example of what it means to be a “social network.” What I mean is that a social network is a buzzword that is really hot right now. If you look at what chess.com has done with a more critical eye you see that really they are basically a 1999 chess portal. The difference is that, instead of highlighting really interesting content, they are highlighting people. The other content features are still there, but they take a background to people and people interaction. The big key item that I think will make them successful is that they kept a message board. I think that social networks often toss the message board as old software. The message board is a lot like a book or pencil and notepad. Technology can emulate it, but never really gets it quite right. The message board is a good way to communicate for the average person online.

Go there for yourself (chess.com) and comment on what you think makes it a social network instead of a portal.

(link)