Facebook is getting ready to open source its year old application platform. What this means is that other social networks will be able to host the same applications that are all the rage on Facebook without building their own application platforms.

I honestly can’t decide whether this is a momentus occurrence or a non-event. I guess we’ll have to see whether all the applications that have been written for Facebook migrate onto other social networking sites and what the resulting network effect is. My gut is that some of the popular ones will migrate to some of the other major social networks but most will not.

I’m voting for “non-event”. I understand why the applications drive a lot of traffic and page views on the site, but don’t see the value to Facebook to allowing other social networks to leverage this resource. Perhaps they have a strategy I haven’t figure out yet or maybe it is a knee-jerk reaction to OpenSocial. This will be worth watching.

Thanks to Techcrunch for the heads up.

I was recently invited via an email from Omni Hotels to check out their new, sorta-social networking portal which they have called “Live Like a Local”. The intent is to allow anyone to upload tips on cities around the world where Omni has a hotel.

Ignoring the fact that the execution in this example is really poor (basically no content, poor SEO page optimization, etc.) I think the bigger question is whether an individual hotel brand such as Omni can hope to compete for traffic with the likes of Virtual Tourist, IGoYouGo, Trip Advisor and of course, my site TravelGator who already have thousands of attractions for hundreds of cities around the globe.

I’m guessing the folks over at Neighborhood America, the company hosting the Omni site think so as they’ve built a business based on the assumption but I’m not so sure. For specific categories I think it might be possible to get some level of audience participation in a brand, but in other areas - travel being one - where there are very established players the major brands would be better of partnering as opposed to going their own.

I’m thinking this is an experiment by Omni Hotels that is going to go nowhere.

I stumbled upon an interesting article written by Robert Cringely at PBS in January of last year. It is a decent presentation of the argument about why Google will eventually power most of the Internet based on an analysis of the dark fiber that they have under contract.

I read the article, thought for a moment and concluded that the argument was plausible if a little 1984. Google is pretty dominate in a lot of areas, although they’ve failed pretty miserably in others like social networking. They have also bought a lot of their capability (e.g. YouTube) when their own efforts came up short. In other words, they are acting a lot like a well run large company - spin out something cool every so often from internal R&D and buy the rest using the cash flow from their mainstream operations. Microsoft is the same, as are most large, growth oriented corporations.

So maybe we will all be running our lives on Google infrastructure a decade from now. I wouldn’t bet on it though. Big growth companies have a habit of turning into… big slow growth companies. And big companies have a hard time attracting innovative, risk takers who start new trends. Google is no different.

Engage, a social network for dating by letting your friends get into the mix recently launched. TechCrunch did a better job of reviewing it than I’m likely to but I wanted to highlight the comments that are being posted as they are great. This might be one sector that social networking cannot crack.

A few months back I was brainstorming Internet startup ideas in a bar in midtown, New York City (great bar by the way) and one of the ideas that we came up with was sort of a social network for data. The concept was a centralized database infrastructure where anyone who wanted could upload data sets that they had created to share, trade or sell. We never got far with the idea but at the time it sounded pretty cool - subject to the effects of three glasses of single malt of course.

Of course like all good ideas, there are many others out there who are thinking along the same lines. Bret Taylor, formerly of Google expressed the same desire in his blog and Read Write Web published a list of current sites that allow you to share data sets in some way.

I’ve played with a few of these sites and while they are interesting, the thing I keep coming back to is that they need to be much easier to use. I think the problem here is that most of the existing sites are built for techies by techies and as a result aren’t very user centric. It should be as easy for a university researcher with a huge, complicated data set to share it, as Joe Smith down the block who has a passion for coin collecting and has documented (with pictures) every US penny minted from 1850 to today and wants to share what he’s built.

The site that always comes to mind when I think about this topic is Geni.com. They have made a complicated data issue – geological research – really really easy. I put my direct family into the tool about six months ago on a whim and at last count my relatives have added 2000+ people to the tree with pictures, email addresses, birthdays and all sorts of data. If my aunt who can barely turn on her computer can do it then the tool has met the usability test. The other tool that comes to mind is FileMaker – creating data sets in it was brain dead simple.

What is necessary in this particular space is to make it really easy to model complex data elements. The startup that manages to do it will win and should be huge. If they also allow people to connect data sets together and pull them off to their blogs, websites, and so on then they will really win. Combine the business with either the Amazon or Google cloud computing databases and things get really interesting.

I hope someone solves this soon. I’ll be a user…I love data.

I’ve been a bit delinquent in putting up new posts lately as I’ve been distracted with some other projects but more important I’ve just not found anything that I wanted to write about. There is certainly a lot going on out there as is clear from the latest TechCrunch postings from the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam but so far I’m not seeing much in the way of new trends.

That being said, there are a couple of things that I’ve written about previously that seem to be gaining steam.

Widgets are in general, picking up steam. It seems like daily (hourly?) you hear of yet another Facebook widget or iGoogle widget that is going to change your life. No some of these are pretty cool, don’t get me wrong, but I’m beginning to wonder whether we are seeing a fundamental break between a self contained, fully functional site like WebMD that solves a specific problem and a world in which everything is a collection of much more specialized widgets that you access from lots of different channels - and ideally follow you around from channel to channel.

This is worth more thought (and postings!) in the future. I’m also waitig for a widget search engine to launch - finding all these things is a major pain today.

The other rumor I thought was particularly interesting was the one about Google launching a cloud database solution that would compete with the one started awhile back by Amazon. As I’ve written before, the key with these services is to get true generic, scalability without sacrificing the real power of the database. As every developer knows, often you need to do some funky stuff to get a database to perform which is why I’m really curious as to whether the cloud computing approach will work for the majority of web sites out there - which are the obvious target for these sort of services.

The other really challenge here is not so much getting the database up and running (and scaling), but actually designing and loading it with data. That might be the value add that really gets these services off the ground. Imagine a situation in which you could just grab a set of database components from a central library (say a list of the cities of the world) for use on your web page and someone else would keep them up to date. Now there is a service that would be worth paying for. Oh yeah, and what about loading those feeds.

More to come on this trend I predict.

Beneath the surface of Facebook’s $15 billion valuation and the slew of niche social networks cropping up in its shadow like mushrooms, is a big assumption - wherever audiences congregate, advertisers will follow. After all, the hardest part of marketing is finding the people you’re trying to reach and getting them engaged with your brand. If social networks are where they’re hanging out, why wouldn’t marketers pay to be there with them?

This was the thinking during the Internet bubble, when every business plan said “ad-supported” and it was a given that you’d monetize whatever users you attracted. Early adopters among advertisers were paying $50 CPMs for banner ads, and the future looked rosy. But users were ignoring static banners, the recession hit, and CPMs plunged. It wasn’t until several years later that ad spending finally took off, thanks to a combination of PPC text ads, rich media banners, targeting technologies and reporting analytics.

 Lonely ads, looking for clicks Social networks are in the same place content-driven web sites were in 2000. People are starting to question their revenue potential now that there are indications that the ads being placed in them aren’t performing as well as expected. Click-throughs are abysmally low, and members are rebelling against efforts to monetize their activity.The big question is whether this is just a temporary dip just like the web in 2001. Will someone figure out the right way to link advertisers to social networks, and allow the dollars to come gushing in? Some media just aren’t suited for ads, the movie and music industries still rely mainly on consumers and not advertisers for their revenues.Monetization of audiences is far from a given - a lot of work needs to go into developing the right techniques, and the solutions are usually unique to the medium. What worked for TV didn’t work for the Web, and what worked on Web sites won’t work in social networks. Will anyone figure it out? And if so, will it be Google or someone we’ve never heard of?

This is going to be a short post as I’ve been caught up with holiday stuff but one of the things that caught my eye this week was a whole range of posts and online articles on a recent study by Blue Lithium Labs that ad conversions on user generated content sites are substantially lower than on other sites.

In retrospect this makes sense as people on sites like Facebook are pretty focused on what they are doing - interacting with their friends - and not predisposed to click on an ad that will take away that focus. So social networking does not equal browsing, at least from a marketing perspective.

Of course the important questions is how do you capture a social networker’s attention and get them to recognize your brand or even to spend some money. Welcome to the wonderful world of social introducers. The key here is to get people to pass your marketing message along as part of their normal social interactions. It is very hard to do and no one has really cracked the code in my opinion but if you can pull it off it is absolute gold.

Something to puzzle over as we head towards 2008. Happy holidays everyone.

So after all the fuss over Facebook’s announcement of their Beacon program and subsequent flipflop when users rebelled, they then announced a compromise opt-in program. Funny thing is, that was over 2 weeks ago, and I just checked my profile and there weren’t any external websites for me to opt into. Maybe external partners aren’t exactly lining up to join a service that’s gotten so much bad press?

Sponsored listing - in hebrew??

But on a more rudimentary level, Facebook has clearly begun targeting their ads. I just landed in Tel Aviv a few hours ago, and when I logged into Facebook (gotta keep that status up to date), all the ads were in Hebrew. It makes sense on a macro-targeting level, sell ad inventory by country and use the IP address to determine a user’s location. But in my case (and any other foreigners who happen to be visiting) the advertisers are wasting their money. I wonder how they handle even more multi-lingual countries like Belgium or Singapore?

This is one case where I wouldn’t mind them knowing a little more about me so they could at least send me ads I could read.. which is ultimately the argument marketers make in favor of targeting - that it results in ads you’re more likely to want to see. Then again, it’s kind of nice to not be able to read them, they become more decorative somehow. But in terms of the online business model, not so effective.. ultimately it’ll be a moot point, with the higher CPMs it will bring, better targeting is inevitable.

Social shopping/retailing has been getting a lot of press lately, especially its role in helping small retailers reach customers. Top sites include stylehive, Kaboodle and ThisNext, which are all dedicated to online shopping, with users flagging favorite objects available at any online retailer.

Like more general-purpose social networks, these sites play to users’ egos by having profile pages that show off a user’s individual taste. As is typical in most communities, you get a small handful of alpha-users who generate a disproportionate share of the content.. sites like stylehive encourage these people by allowing users to “follow” lead trendsetters and receive updates when they flag new items.

While social shopping is getting a lot of buzz, the volume generated from these sites barely registers - I wasn’t able to find any stats as to what percentage of online retail dollars come from social shopping. Keep in mind, too, that online sales are still only about 5 percent of total retail in the US. But the phenomenon is likely to spread, especially when it migrates to more general social networks like Facebook and Myspace.

When it comes to shopping of any kind, only a tiny minority of the population can be called tastemakers and the rest are followers, buying whatever friends or magazines say is stylinsh, or whatever is put in front of them by retailers. But there’s also been a resurgence of interest in original and unusual goods. For all the homogenization that’s been happening in the retail landscape, flea markets never really went away. As online shopping matures, it will be interesting to see the balance between the walmart.com-style megasites and the bazaar-like style represented by social shopping.