Relevance of social networks

There is a lot going for social networks, a hybrid service new on the internet which is a take off from the personalised groups like yahoogroups etc.,

The way http://www.orkut.com/, http://www.facebook.com/ etc., has caught up with the people is ample evidence people want to be together in one form or the other even in the world wide web which technically promise a borderless world.

Here is a news item I just read about this from http://www.techtree.com/ quoted in rediff.com

The year 2007 has seen the launch of several new social networking Web sites targeting the youth in this country. Two such newbies: iShare, launched by Rediff in July, and the very recent BigAdda, launched by Reliance ADAG. Both portals qualify as social content sharing platforms, allowing users share videos, music, pictures, and more. They combine elements of various sites including Orkut, Youtube, Flickr, and Limewire, to name a few. Yet, they aspire to be more than just platforms for people to catch up with pals or find dates online. An increasing number of people are actually looking towards these sites as more than just meeting ground. One such aspect, video sharing, is gaining currency the world over. For instance, aspiring music artists get to showcase their work by uploading their videos. Others in turn, get to know of the existence of diverse and varied talent. (more from the techtree link)

I am reading more on the social networks and the way they are evolving and I cant at the moment make head or tail of the following news excerpts from various blogs but eventually I will I guess.

here goes

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=122. This is one is about someone trying to set up social network in Oracle
There is another which is chiding KPMG for its enterprise software saying the social network face book has been left out of the KPMG software. I quote from this entry
"KPMG’s report Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future? The Business Role for Social Software Platforms is a disappointment. Here we have one of the world’s leading consultancies publishing a 19 page glossy brochure that is short on substance and long on consulting sales bait. Perhaps it’s a reflection of KPMG’s belief about its clients understanding of the topic" more from this entry

watch this space for more!

I am simply copying back an blog entry I had made five days ago which is relevant under this head

Way Too Good for Facebook or MySpace? For the rich and well-connected who don't want to rub elbows with those who aren't, exclusive social networks pledge to keep out the riff-raff by Catherine Holahan Roger Allen Conner Jr. has little use for the common folk who frequent MySpace (NWS) and Facebook—you know, the clubs anyone can join. "A lot of social-networking sites are very low-quality," says Conner, the 22-year-old founder of a North Carolina consulting firm named SiloIQ. "The type of individuals that are on these social-networking sites are generally not well-networked themselves." Not even a business-oriented network like LinkedIn will do. To put it bluntly, Conner wants powerful friends: the kind of people who board private jets after cutting business deals. People who don't get stopped by the bouncer at New York's Bungalow 8 nightclub. People with connections who can open doors and get his company noticed. People with log-ins to aSmallWorld. While there's little argument that aSW is growing fast, what constitutes too fast is open to debate. In the three-and-a-half years since its launch, membership has grown from 500 users to about 260,000. But MySpace has grown to more than 100 million members over a similar timeframe, making it a major recipient of the $900 million that research firm eMarketer estimates will be spent on social-network advertising this year. For now, aSW appears to be an online gateway to the upper echelons of the social stratosphere. Although Wachtmeister won't name-drop when it comes to aSW users, a search of the site's member lists reveals plenty of twenty- and thirtysomething investment bankers, fashion-industry types, CEOs, and recognizable last names: Firestone, Rockefeller, Forbes, Trump (see BusinessWeek, 8/20/07, "High-Net-Worth Networking"). Notably, the site already features classified ads where people sell classic Jaguars, yachts, and Cartier watches. Advertisers include champagne producer Moët & Chandon (LVMH) and private-jet company Sentient. Yet to make aSW a financial success, Wachtmeister has to balance demand for exclusivity against an advertiser's hunger to reach more eyeballs. Wachtmeister says aSW, which has 35 employees, is nearing profitability. And he rejects any suggestion that standards are being lowered as it grows. "The new members we get today could be as good, if not better, than some of the members we got a year ago," he says. "We can go a long way before we have to worry." Safaricom: On a Tear in Africa The continent's mobile-phone operators are soaring -- witness the joint venture between Kenya's government and Vodafone, which plans an IPO by Jack Ewing Visitors to the headquarters of Safaricom in Nairobi must first face the scrutiny of a pair of imposing uniformed guards who peer sternly at vehicle occupants before lowering a hydraulically operated metal roadblock that looks strong enough to stop a speeding truck. The tight security is a reminder that Kenya, though relatively prosperous and stable by African standards, is still a difficult place to run a mobile-phone company. Safaricom, a 60-40 joint venture of the Kenyan government and London-based Vodafone (VOD), wrecks an average of one maintenance vehicle a month on the country's abysmal rural roads. Even in urban areas, cellular base stations require diesel-powered generators to compensate for unreliable or nonexistent electrical power. And Safaricom must surround the base stations with electrified fences and alarm systems to discourage theft of fuel, as well as the generators themselves. Blogs Will Change Your Business Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later By Stephen Baker and Heather Green of Business Week. MAY 2, 2005 Your Business Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later Monday 9:30 a.m. It's time for a frank talk. And no, it can't wait. We know, we know: Most of you are sick to death of blogs. Don't even want to hear about these millions of online journals that link together into a vast network. And yes, there's plenty out there not to like. Self-obsession, politics of hate, and the same hunger for fame that has people lining up to trade punches on The Jerry Springer Show. Name just about anything that's sick in our society today, and it's on parade in the blogs. On lots of them, even the writing stinks. There's a little problem, though. Many of you don't visit blogs -- or haven't since blogs became a sensation in last year's Presidential race. According to a Pew Research Center Survey, only 27% of Internet users in America now bother to read them. So we're going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story -- call it Blogs 101 for businesses -- in the style of a blog. We're even sprinkling it with links. These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story's online version to another Web page. This all may make for a strange experience, but it's the closest we can come to reaching out from the page, grabbing you by the collar, and shaking you into action.First, a few numbers. There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. "Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo," reads one April Posting. Let's assume that 99.9% are equally off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush. How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size. His printing press, unveiled in 1440, sparked a publishing boom and an information revolution. Some say it led to the Protestant Reformation and Western democracy. Along the way, societies established the rights and rules of the game for the privileged few who could afford to buy printing presses and grind forests into paper. Google (GOOG ) is regarded as a secretive company. So in January, when a young programmer named Mark Jen started blogging about his first days in the Googleplex, folks in the 'sphere instantly linked to him. Jen certainly wasn't dealing out inside dirt. But he griped that Google's health plan was less generous than his former employer's -- Microsoft (MSFT ) -- and he argued, indignantly, that Google's free food was an enticement for employees to work past dinner.Two weeks later, Google fired Jen. And that's when the 22-year-old became a big story. Google was blogbusted for overreacting and for sending an all-too-clear warning to the dozens of bloggers still at the company. A Google official says the company has lots of bloggers and just expects them to use common sense. For example, if it's something you wouldn't e-mail to a long list of strangers, don't blog it.Jen clearly flunked that test. "As the media got hold of it, I was quickly educated," he says. He says he should have understood the company's goals and concerns better and been more sensitive to them. Still, his adventure turned him into an overnight celebrity. He was wooed by recruiters at Amazon.com (AMZN ), Microsoft, and Yahoo! (YHOO ) A month later, Jen landed a job at Plaxo, an Internet contact-management company. A key part of his job, says a company spokesperson, is to help coordinate Plaxo's blogging efforts -- a pillar of Plaxo's promotional strategy. So what got him fired turned out to be his trump card. Plaxo, like many other companies, is now drawing up norms for blogging behavior, so that employees know what's in bounds, and what's not. The role of the blog startups is to build tools for this grassroots uprising. Six Apart, a four-year-old San Francisco company, leads in blog software. Technorati and PubSub Concepts are battling it out in blog search. The founders all insist that they plan to remain independent. But if recent history is any guide, most of them will wind up in the bellies of the blog-minded Internet giants -- led by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. The latest to disappear was Flickr. A photo-sharing service that spread madly across the blog world, 13-month-old Flickr was still running its software in its beta, or testing, phase when it was acquired by Yahoo in March for an undisclosed sum. Caterina Fake, Flickr's co-founder, wrote about the deal in her blog the day it happened: "Don't forget to breathe. It's not the end, it's the beginning." David Sifry looks at it a bit differently. He's a serial entrepreneur and founder of Technorati , the blog search engine.For Sifry, it's not the growth of the same Web, but an entirely new one. It's wrapped up far more in people's day-to-day lives. It's connected to time. The way he describes it, the Web we've come to know is mostly a collection of documents. A library. These documents don't change much. Try Googling Donald Trump, and you're more likely to find his Web page than a discussion of his appearance last night on The Apprentice. The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Five years ago, a blogger named Dave Winer, working with software originally developed by Netscape, created an easy-to-use system to turn blogs, or even specific postings, into Web feeds. With this system, a user could subscribe to certain blogs, or to key words, and then have all the relevant items land at a single destination. These personalized Web pages bring together the music and video the user signs up for, in addition to news. They're called "aggregators." For now, only about 5% of Internet users have set them up. But that number's sure to rise as Yahoo and Microsoft plug them. Winer also ushered in a second tech breakthrough, podcasting. A back-and-forth between Winer and Adam Curry, a blogger and former MTV host, led last year to a system that easily distributes audio files. Looking for National Public Radio's On the Media or the latest ska compilations from a disk jockey in Trinidad? Sign up on a Web page, and the program gets automatically delivered to you -- as an audio feed. Last summer, Curry created software called iPodder so these MP3s could hitch a ride on an iPod (AAPL ). That was the birth of podcasting: radio programming whenever and wherever you want it. Since then, some 5,000 podcasting shows have sprouted up. They cover everything from yoga to the blues. The big companies have what the bloggers lack. Scale, relations with advertisers, and large sales forces. They can use these forces to sell across all media, from general audience to bloggy niches. Already, Yahoo and Microsoft have been investing heavily to position themselves for niche advertising. And in February, the New York Times (NYT ) laid down $410 million for About Inc., a collection of 500 specialized Web sites that smell strongly of blogs. "What's to stop them from turning those 500 sites into 5,000?" says Dave Morgan, founder of TACODA Systems, an Internet advertising company. So why not start here? We've done our research on blogs, made our dire pronouncements. Pretty soon, someone in production will press the button. But this story should go on, as a conversation. And it will, starting on Apr. 22. We're launching our own blog to cover the business drama ahead, as blogging spreads into companies and redefines media. The blog's name? Blogspotting.net. See you there.