To start a social network today you need only flip the switch. Ning, KickApps, Pligg, GoingOn, are all players in the ever growing space of social network providers. I see the rapid commodification of social networks having two major impacts:

1. Social Networks are Features

Om Malik got it right when he said social networks are features, not properties. Friends lists, collaborative ranking, private messaging, public commenting, widgetable profile pages - this collection features strengthens any site.


2. Unified Identity Becomes Essential

The proliferation of social networks as a site feature means a proliferation of personal profiles, which makes identity management more and more of an issue for Joe User. He wants to participate in the social network features of the sites he visits, but managing multiple identities is a pain.

So, if you're considering the addition of social networking features to your site (and you should be), you should also be looking at the new identity standards and tools to help your users manage their own profile identities - and the one with the most momentum right now is OpenID.

Henry Abbott, the sportswriter behind TrueHoop.com (worth the daily read for any hoops fan), wanted information, and now he's got the world working to get it - with a wiki. On September 7th, 2006, Abbot posted a TrueHoop blog entry titlled "Things that Should be Online, But Aren't". Number 1 on the list: A complete list of NBA agents and their clients. One month later, TrueHoopWiki.com is making that a reality.

In four short weeks Abbott went from wishlist to growing online resource - a great testimony to the power of the network and simple online collaboration tools.

Here's how it unfolded:

September 7th:

Abbott Laments the Lack of an Agent-Player List with a Blog Post

September 8th, 11:03 AM:

Doug, a TrueHoop blog reader comments:

Someone should start a collaborative site where fans can postagent-player links. Whenever a player's agent gets mentioned in a localpaper story it could be posted on the site. Just from reading Pistonsarticles from the last few years I've compiled a list of the agents ofall their current players. Though it's tough to know when a playerswitches agents.

September 8th: Later that day:

Abbot Reiterates the Need

let's just set up a wiki and collaborate on making that list. Everytime any one of you sees in an article somewhere that it says somethinglike "Al Harrington's new agent, Arn Tellem..." then you could updatethe wiki.

...and sounds the Wiki call:

I'm not exactly Mr. Technology, so I have been poking around: is there an easy way to put a wiki like that on TrueHoop?... Anyone out there feel like spearheading the technology of such an effort?

3 Weeks in September :

Abbott hooks up with TrueHoop readers Rolando de Aguiar, J.P. Given, Engineer Scotty, and Matt Bailey - the build TrueHoopWiki in 3 short weeks.

October 3:

TrueHoopWiki.com is released into the Wild

Here's how we hope it will work. If you see an online article about a certain NBA player that mentions their agent, please update TrueHoopWiki (which already has "stub" entries for every current NBA player, or darned close) with the name of the agent and a link to the source article. With lots of people contributing, it shouldn't take long to have a fairly complete and up-to-date agent resource.

technorati tags:wiki, collaboration

AOL has acquired Userplane, the maker video chat, messaging, and other online community tools white-labeled by more than 100,000 sites. The financials of the deal were not disclosed.

Userplane CEO Mike Jones noted that Userplane will continue to support all of its existing customers and move quickly to allow AOL messenger users to contact Userplane users. Currently, Userplane users are registered by the site offering the service - Facebook.com, for example. Integration with AOL messenger could help unify a person's identity across sites, making their experience more seemless.

More coverage here:

Userplane Acquired by AOL, TechCrunch.com

AOL acquires Userplane to expand AIM network, Jeff Clavier's Software Only

Yahoo! Messenger 8 is now out of beta. It's interoperability with MSN Messenger is huge, but the most exciting new feature is it's support for web standards based plug-ins.  Now anyone can build tools for the 100 million + messenger users.  Plugins for file sharing and ecards are already popular. Those and about 120 others are available on the plug-in gallery.

This is yet another opportunity for Online Community purveyors to extend their community beyond the borders of their destination web site. Your community members are out there communicating and collaborating away in places that are not your site. You can now give them the tools to take their community with them by developing useful widgets, plug-ins, and bookmarklets that operate all the places they do -which isn't just your destination website.

eBay has hit upon yet another way to turn their enthusiastic user community into value creators with the launch of eBay wiki. The service lets any registered eBay user contribute articles on any eBay related topic. Topics seem to cover the gamut - from buying, eBay policy, category specific selling tips, and just about anything else related to life as an eBay buyer or seller. The service is powered by JotSpot, Joe Kraus's wiki startup. From eBay Wiki:

The eBay Wiki is your place to get and share knowledge about anything and everything that is relevant to eBay.

They have also launched a blog service, eBay Blogs, that lets buyes and sellers reveal a bit more about themselves. While eBay Wiki already looks like a great resource for eBay'ers, ebay Blogs looks to me like a "we're web 2.0 too" statement, without much immediate benefit to the community.

technorati tags: eBay, onlinecommunity, wikis, blogs

MySpace.com, the internet's largest online community with 75 million users, is starting to lose musicians. Some popular artists, including Weezer and Nine Inch Nails, and scads of undiscoverd bands have long used MySpace to build awareness with the young demographic that spends so much time there. But things may be changing.

Popular British folk rock artist Billy Bragg just pulled his music from the site. He is now using his MySpace page to shine a light on MySpace Terms of Service, and is asking MySpace users to use the site itself to encourage a change in MySpace policy, his page now reads:

SORRY THERE’S NO MUSIC. Someone who we work with was bright enough to read the small print of the MySpace terms and conditions and found that once an artist posts up any content (including songs), it then belongs to My Space (AKA Rupert Murdoch) and they can do what they want with it, throughout the world without payng the artist. Because of this we've had to take all of Billy's songs down. I'm working on getting small clips put up instead, but in the meantime please visit www.billybragg.com to listen to and download songs.

Below is the offending clause. We are hoping to start a small revolution (in true Bragg style) to try and put a stop to this. You can do your bit by posting out a bulletin to all your friends, esp artists, and badgering Tom with e-mails letting him know how unfair this clause is (not least because you can't hear Billy on here anymore!).

Thanks for your help and support. The amazing thing about My Space is how fast we can all communicate so if we all do our bit we should be able to change this.

The troublesome fine print informs users that by posting any content, “you hereby grant to MySpace.com a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services.”

It will be interesting to see if the MySpace artist user base will simply flee, or if the online community can wield any power over its provider and get the terms changed.

technorati tags: onlinecommunity, myspace

So, on the heels of my post about Google AdSense as a community monitizer, I ran across this MediaPost article documenting the trend back toward more traditional CPM advertising on social network driven sites:

StyleDiary isn't the only social networking property to recently start offering image ads. Photo-sharing site Flickr also recently struck a deal for its first branding campaign. In Flickr's case, the marketer was the camera company, Nikon.

So what's happening here? The use of AdSense as a mechanism to motivate user participation is very different than monetizing the community for the sole benefit of the community purveyor. AdSense is great for the former, and if your community's popularity can attract them, traditional advertisers appear to be preferable for the latter.

technorati tags: onlinecommunity

RateItAll.com, an online community and social network built on user reviews and opinions has announced that it has used the Google AdSense API to allow users to montetize their participation in the community. From RateItAll.com:

Pioneering online community and social network RateItAll.com today announced that it had integrated Google Adsense into its service via an API in order to share advertising inventory with RateItAll members. By leveraging the Google Adsense API, RateItAll has enabled its members to create Google Adsense accounts, earn cash for their content contributions, and track their earnings without ever leaving the RateItAll.com Web site.

The notion of allowing community users to place google ads on their pages is a great participant incentive. The idea has been used before - Simpy lets you serve up your own AdSense ads - but it takes a pretty geeky community member to make it happen. By letting users take advantage of Google services without ever leaving RateItAll, it significantly increases the ease of use for the casual user who may not even know what Google AdSense is. On the downside - it will likely attract spammers and new registrations just there for the money - and those users are typically low value community participants.

technorati tags: onlinecommunity