Here are five of the tips Comcast recommends for parents who are planning to speak with their kids:

• Choose your pictures wisely
• Don’t talk to strangers and use privacy settings
• Keep your personal information personal
• Don’t be a cyberbully
• Go outside and stay active

These tips sure seem like 1995 to me – with so many new networks and ways for teens to interact online, parents really need a full education.

Comcast does recommend that parents learn about the new online networks so they can speak intelligently about them. Perhaps there’s a business opportunity there – people who teach parents about the current state of online networks and keep them up-to-date moving forward. In fact these people could even be there to “moderate” discussions between teens and parents so the teens can’t get over on the parents.

Instant messaging and chat application provider Meebo is announcing the integration of Facebook and MySpace chat into the Meebo web client today. The concept is that you can now chat inside of Meebo with both the traditional instant messenger clients plus the social network chat clients as well. It’s a smart move for Meebo as the longer they can keep users inside their application, the more they can push ads via their marketing platform.

I have to admit I’ve never used MySpace chat and everytime I try the Facebook chat, no one replies when I ping them. I am still happy in my AIM/Skype world. I have wrestled with installing any chat service on my mobile as sometimes it’s nice to not be immediately accessible for a few minutes.

Meebo noted in their release that they are the first web app to support both Facebook and MySpace chat applications. Online chat aggregator eBuddy already supports MySpace on the web client and Facebook on the mobile client. So I can only assume that Meebo means first in supporting both networks simultaneously.

Meebo currently self-reports a userbase of over 40 million (not sure of active users). Check out our interview with Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg.

Editor’s note: eBuddy is a CN sponsor.

MySpace, Flock and Vidoop jointly developed OpenID for Flock which should help the Flock browser gain additional user adoption. OpenID for Flock is now available to all Flock 2.0 users as an alpha extension — my hope is that it becomes part of the default install over time. The companies note, "The MySpace, Flock and Vidoop (OpenID) implementation is a reference design released as open source under GPL, and as such, modifications by developers will be brought together and shared with the wider open source developer community."

Perhaps today’s announcement will push the other major browsers (IE, FF, Safari, Opera, etc.) to start looking at implementing OpenID into the browser as well. I am not talking about an extension or plugin, but rather a full integrated environment. If OpenID is going to gain in popularity and usability, it’s critical that using an OpenID login as easy as possible.

With all of the talk over the last few days about Facebook Connect, it sure does look like eventually we will have an old-style Western duel setup. Facebook Connect vs. OpenID – let’s get it on!

Here’s a few of his comments:

• it’s all a waste of time
• if you are over 15, you shouldn’t be on these networks
• people put everything on a blog like people give a fu**
• go get a job

Unfortunately embedding is not available so click here to listen to Stern’s commentary.

(found via Drama 2.0)

Nick O’Neill is reporting

Nick notes, "The service also provides targeting by gender, age, location, and specific interest categories. The current categories are Auto, Books, Fashion, Health & Fitness, Miscellaneous, Movies, Music, Sports, Television, and Video Games. Rather than typing specific keywords, advertisers are forced to select from a pre-defined set of “Genres” within each category."

It looks like MySpace offers a basic ad creation tool to make it easy for non-designers to create an ad. There’s also a live filter which displays the potential impression counts based on the above targeting selections.

After the high rates MySpace charges for their developer gallery, my guess is that the only musicians who will be able to afford this will be those shilling for fast food burgers.

If MySpace allowed external publishers to participate it could be a win-win-win for musicians, MySpace and Web publishers.

There are a lot of life lessons to be learned and many of the "rules" of trading can be applied to the world of technology entrepreneurship, especially in a day and age where startups are built to be "flipped" and entrepreneurial employees jump from one startup to another in search of the "big hit." Here are several trading "rules" that can be useful for technology entrepreneurs.

The Trend is Your Friend

In the startup world, spotting market trends in technology isn’t as easy as looking at a trendline on a price chart but it’s not too difficult either.

Most savvy and experienced entrepreneurs have a good sense of trends. They know which markets are meeting needs and seeing the creation of potentially valuable businesses, they know which markets are seeing increasing inflows of investment capital and they know which markets have a healthy level of M&A interest or activity.

While most entrepreneurs want to get into hot markets before they’re hot because there is the perception of greater profit potential, it’s worth noting that in the financial markets, the average investor only makes money in the middle of a trend. This is often called the "meat of the move." As such, entrepreneurs should consider that they don’t necessarily have to try to predict new trends and can instead place their bets when a trend has been established.

Example: Friendster popularized the modern day version of the "social network." It launched in March 2002 and it didn’t take long for Friendster to take off. Social networking was officially "hot." Yet a number of startups that launched after the social networking "trend" had been established have done far better for themselves.

MySpace, which launched in August 2003, sold to News Corp. for $580m in July 2005. Facebook, which launched in February 2004, has reportedly entertained 10-figure buyout offers. And Bebo, which launched in January 2005, recently sold to AOL for $850mn in the largest social network acquisition to date.

The lesson? You don’t always need to be "first."

The Trend is Your Friend Until the End

Some trends last longer than others but all eventually come to an end, hence the saying "The trend is your friend until the end."  Entrepreneurs should recognize that no matter how much they believe in the trend they’ve invested themselves in, the trend is only working in their favor while it’s intact.

In the world of startups, once a trend ends, if you don’t already have a viable, self-sustaining business and a revenue model that can realistically withstand a bit of a shakeout, any advantages that inured to you when you were going "in the direction of the trend" are eliminated.

Example: online video startups have raised lots of money and much of this money flowed into the market after Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in October 2006. And yet while online video has a bright future, the trend that supported online video startups looks to be waning. The fire sale of heavily-funded startups like Revver and PodTech is likely just the first part of a shakeout I predicted earlier this year and online video entrepreneurs relying solely on the "online video is hot" trend are not likely to fare well.

Don’t Try to Call Tops and Bottoms

One of the biggest mistakes a trader can make is to call market "tops" and "bottoms." In fact, this mistake probably accounts for the majority of the losses amateur traders make. Professional traders understand that they have no control over the markets. They are successful because they keep their emotions in check, think objectively, play probabilities and understand the importance of money management.

Amateur traders think success is dependent upon predicting what the market is going to do. They will rush head-first into trades because they think they can call market highs and lows. When it comes to startups, entrepreneurs should recognize that they don’t know when the hot new markets they’re in will lose their luster. Thus, getting greedy and trying to predict when it will "peak" so as to "get out" at the very top is foolish. See "Pigs Get Slaughtered" below.

Conversely, trying to predict when a market will rebound is equally foolish and the saying "never try to catch a falling knife" serves as a reminder to those who think they can call bottoms.

Example: with it becoming clear that many Web 2.0 startups aren’t going to make it, Om Malik suggested that it might be time to start a vulture fund that buys up distressed Web 2.0 "assets" at a bargain basement price. But just what is a bargain basement price? A startup that once raised $10 million but is being sold off for $1 million may still be overvalued and the worst could still be yet to come.

As I noted, "successful vultures don’t reap financial windfalls by buying everything that declines significantly in value." The bottom line is that most of the time, trying to predict when an asset has hit its lowest point in value usually leaves one holding an asset that continues to fall in value.

Pigs Get Slaughtered

Greed is the second most powerful emotion in financial markets (behind fear). Traders who are unable to control their greed and leave everything on the table inevitably become "pigs" and "pigs get slaughtered." While some "pigs" don’t think at all, many "pigs" believe that they will be able to predict the "top" of the market, as discussed above, giving them an ability to maximize profits. Few are successful and those that are typically mistake luck for skill.

The same goes for entrepreneurs. Knowing that trends don’t last forever and accepting that they have no knowledge of or control over when they’ll end, smart entrepreneurs recognize that there’s a time to take money off the table. In today’s Internet startup world, taking money off the table typically means selling your company. How do entrepreneurs know that they’re selling too early? They don’t.

Example: Facebook. The company led by wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg reportedly turned down 10-figure offers and instead choose to raise money at a ridiculous valuation, maintaining that he felt the company is better off remaining public and eventually going public sometime after 2008.

Yet Facebook’s valuation raised eyebrows – and skepticism. The company’s revolutionary advertising play (Beacon) flopped and the company’s shortcomings (especially around monetization) are now well-known. The public markets don’t look like they’ll be conducive to an IPO anytime soon given the company’s financials, leaving shareholders illiquid. Hence it’s no surprise that some Facebook shareholders are attempting not to be pigs – they’re looking to sell their shares privately.

Respect Support and Resistance

In the financial markets, support and resistance are key points at which supply and demand are in alignment. Support is the point at which demand keeps price from falling further and resistance is the point at which supply keeps price from rising further. Support and resistance are often found in the form of previous highs and lows, moving averages, floor trader pivots, etc.

While "buying into support" and "selling into resistance" are not hard and fast rules (support and resistance do break all the time), not recognizing support and resistance levels is a huge mistake. In the startup world, a similar dynamic of supply and demand exists.

Every "hot" new market gets hot because there is some demand. This leads, of course, to the creation of startups to meet it. Yet at some point, the supply exceeds the demand and the market is left with a field of companies that have essentially failed.

Entrepreneurs must be realistic and should observe the supply and demand dynamics in their markets.

Example: social networks. It’s unlikely that MySpace and Facebook are going away anytime soon because there is demand for them (support), yet the rise of the social networking market led to literally hundreds of social networking startups (more than a few of them funded). Clearly, the supply of social networks now exceeds the demand (resistance). Thus, launching a social networking startup today would be akin to "buying into resistance" and unless an entrepreneur has a valid rationale for that, it’s probably not a wise move.

Patience is a Virtue

In the fast-paced world of financial markets, it’s really easy to lose patience. When you miss a great trade, the desire to "chase profits" creeps in. When you’re looking too hard for trading signals that just aren’t there, "overtrading" can occur. The same problems are present for entrepreneurs who often find themselves scrambling to enter hot new markets when they feel they’re missing the boat or who feel the need to explore every opportunity that they think exists even when these opportunities are objectively dismissed.

Patience is a virtue for both traders and entrepreneurs.

For traders, patience often means sitting on the sidelines when there is no opportunity that gives you a discernable edge. It also sometimes means sticking with a trade (i.e. letting your stops take you out of a long trade despite your emotional desire to get out sooner).

For entrepreneurs, patience also often means waiting for the right opportunity. And while it’s far too easy to get emotionally attached to a company and not "cut your losses" when you should, patience can mean sticking with good opportunities even when they don’t get realized overnight.

Example: one need go no further than the conference and party circuit in Silicon Valley to meet entrepreneurs chasing opportunity and jumping from ship to ship in search of it. Most will not be rewarded by chasing success in this fashion.

And one need look no further than a company like Shutterfly to find entrepreneurs who were patient and "stuck with it." Shutterfly struggled to make it through Bubble 1.0 and its future still has a lot of uncertainty but it was able to go public in 2006.

Conclusions

Obviously, there are a lot of similarities between "traders" and "entrepreneurs." But there are a lot of differences too. While a considerable amount of wisdom gleamed from the financial markets can be applied to the entrepreneurial experience, I personally don’t recommend that entrepreneurs treat their business decisions like pure trading decisions.

Unlike with trading, some emotion is good for entrepreneurs – starting a new business (or going to work for a startup) shouldn’t be a detached process that is driven solely by profit. After all, the best entrepreneurs truly believe that their companies are doing something important and that they have what it takes – the best traders believe in no such thing.

Yet exercising the objectivity and discipline traders strive for and which the rules above demand can help entrepreneurs make better, more logical decisions. And that’s a good thing, especially at a time when so many entrepreneurs (and wannabe entrepreneurs) have discarded logic for hype.

Addendum

My predictions on Schlumberger and Google proved to be quite profitable.

comScore

On the advertiser side, Microsoft leads the pack with 5.5 billion ads purchased. In second place is the University of Phoenix with 4.7 billion ads – guess they have some open seats. Vonage and Netflix came in eighth and ninth respectively with just over 3 billion ads purchased. Experian Interactive is the company who pushes the dancing women/bear/monkey ads for Lower My Bills and the FreeCreditReport ads.

– 19 days in production
– 275 million users
– 66 million installs
– 2,000 applications built on OpenSocial
– 20,000 developers
– 10 million daily app users

AOL

The AOL OpenSocial discussion was brief as the panel was almost out of time but the discussion focused on the third-party and advertising aspects.

imeem

imeem focused on music and showed off some basic OpenSocial goodies you could build on imeem. Apparently you can access the entire music library on imeem using OpenSocial.

MySpace

MySpace came out of the gate boasting how large they are and noted they are twice as large as the nearest competitor (without naming Facebook). The pitch was simple, "want to reach the largest OpenSocial community? Build on MySpace." Staggering stat: 12% of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace! The MySpace guy wouldn’t answer my question about the costs associated with being a "featured app" – said something about being a developer and not a business guy. I don’t buy it for a minute mister!

hi5

For some reason, the hi5 guy decided to open by putting on a gray shirt – he said that all business people wear blue shirts and khaki pants (luckily he didn’t take his pants off!) – the stunt didn’t seem to get much of a reaction from the audience. It felt like hi5 was the little engine that could from his presentation. They do have very strong adoption of the OpenSocial apps by their community.

Andrew Chen does a great job articulating this phenomenon, Metcalfe’s Law dictates how social networks can grow or shrink. If a network is adding users, its value grows, if its losing members, its value shrinks – exponentially.

I’ve been thinking about Andrew’s post and MySpace a lot lately. Why is MySpace still so dominant? It’s owned by NewsCorp, has a terrible UI, it’s search doesn’t work and there is enough glitter to drive you mad. Yet here we are, 2008 and MySpace still has a ton of users. What keeps MySpace going?

MySpace, wisely, creates value from more than just user-to-user (U2U) interactions. U2U interactions, as you may have guessed, occur when two users interact. If I’m your friend and we discuss something or share a photo, those are user-to-user interactions. It’s the foundation of social networks. Even though U2U is fundamental, it’s incredibly hard to keep and maintain. Look at Friendster, it was built solely on U2U. What was keeping Friendsters’ users on Friendster? The users were. But, what prevents people from jumping ship (i.e. moving to a new network, say FaceBook)? If U2U interactions are the only value-add on your network, there is little you can do. The way to prevent users from leaving, or the social network death spiral, as Andrew calls it, is to establish pillars.

Pillars

To keep users on your network, one must control the number of people coming and going – encourage users to join, discourage them from leaving. This can be done by establishing pillars. In social networks, a pillar is a static, non-regular user entity that adds value. On MySpace, musician profiles are excellent pillars. They are static (they aren’t going anywhere), they add value (music, tour dates) and are not regular users.

Just as a 2×4 holds your house together, pillars can hold social networks together. They provide a reason for people to join, and discourage them from leaving. If you want access to a pillar’s value, you’ll have to access it via the network.

Pillars are relatively unchanged by social network fads. For example, pillars won’t change because others users Twitter, add Zombie apps or Super Poke each other. Pillars are constant, they provide structure and stabilize a networks’ value.

I believe this is why MySpace remains a dominant network, even as FaceBook grows and casts it as yesterday’s news. If you don’t have a MySpace page, you can still get value from a band’s page on MySpace. This pillar, the band, attracts new users and prevents old ones from leaving.

In short, users use a social network for a reason (value). If your network only has U2U interactions, it is in danger of the social network death spiral (when users leave, it encourages others to leave.) U2U networks are highly susceptible to fads. On the other hand, if your network is built with pillars, it can avoid the death spiral. If some users leave, it is unlikely more will follow because pillars provide a reason to stay.

Think about it, what’s keeping you on your social network of choice?

Gregory Schnese is a co-founder of SoUrban.net, an East Village blog about music, tech and fashion, and is the Web Producer at beYOU.tv, a fitness and wellness video community.

Since these announcements were made I’ve been asked for my opinion about what it means to web publishers, the market and KickApps. I believe all three will be useful but the key point if you’re a publisher is to what degree do YOU want and need to own YOUR site’s audience’s’profile data and activities data. This will dictate how you use or don’t use any of the three.

At the highest level, core to every publisher is its brand, editorial content/voice and relationship with its audience. As the web becomes more social, access by the publisher to their audience’s Profile and Social Graph (audience data and activities) becomes extremely important. Having this information becomes a powerful tool that delivers deep insight into their audience, which informs editorial programming and marketing. Crucially, it plays a huge role in delivering truly targeted advertising.

While Google, MySpace and Facebook’s initiatives allow publishers to import more data from the big social networks into their own users’ experiences which will help to seed a new niche community, the CORE piece that is missing is that they don’t empower publishers to aggregate their own membership and fully access their member’s Social Graph.

To achieve this, publishers will want control of their own community profile management, reporting and social graph engine–the heart of what KickApps provides. It’s also important to publishers that core applications (UGC, social networking, widgets, programmable video players, media management, member management), along with 3rd party apps (OpenSocial and Facebook), are also fully integrated with their members’ social graph and member data out of the box.

Net-net, I believe the data portability initiatives are a good thing for the industry. KickApps will integrate with MySpace Data Availability, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect such that our publishers can quickly accelerate growth of their own audience by tapping into the “friends” their members already have on the big social networks. In that respect KickApps is not only the foundation of your social graph engine but is a serious accelerator for publishers looking to get the benefits of any “openness” provided by the big social networks while retaining ownership and control of their own audience and social graph data.

As always, the devil is in the details and we’ll all have a front row seat as it develops.

I’m sure the discussion around this will continue in the weeks and months to come. So far, Mike Gunderloy of Web Worker Daily’s post, “Google Friend Connect: What’s the Point?” resonates most with me as he examines this from a web publisher’s point of view. Charlene Li’s blogs about Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect are also a good read, as is Stacey Higginbotham’s post on GigaOM, “Prying Open the Social Graph.”

UPDATE: Eric, KickApps’ founder’s take on this can be found here. Also, Marshall Kirkpatrick has great analysis of this as usual.

This column was provided by Alex Blum, KickApps CEO. KickApps is a hosted, white-label platform that puts social media and online video functionality directly into the hands of every web publisher who aspires to be a media mogul and turns every web designer and developer into a social media rockstar. Check out the KickApps Web site for more information and our KickApps coverage.

1. some of the data (photos, videos, text) stored on MySpace will be available to their friend networks which include: Yahoo!, eBay, Twitter, and Photobucket.

2. it’s not really data portability, more like data sharing

3. it’s live data sharing — if you change your status from male to female, it’s instantly zapped to all of the places you’ve shared the info. This is awesome because it makes it easier than having to remember to change it in a million social networks.

4. They will accept Facebook into their data sharing plan but Zucks gotta be the one to make the call.

SAI has notes from the live conference call and Venture Beat has detailed analysis of the announcement. Check out all of our DataPortability coverage.

Here’s my favorite question/answer from the conference call:

Q: Will this be available to world MySpace users?
A: On a global basis. Starting on a worldwide basis.

Chris Saad, data portability leader sent over the following video that explains the companies that have signed up to push info in and those who have signed up to suck info out.

How much is a placement? Nick O’Neill says it’s $100,000 per WEEK. And guess who has all four slots — the company supposedly worth half a billion dollars, Slide. So basically the app gallery will now feature those with deep pockets and MySpace tells all other application developers to f-off. How many app developers can afford that kind of money? Few. Of course if MySpace can show that a week in a sponsored slot leads to enough users installing an application to justify the cost, other developers might scrape every penny to get in.

To play devil’s advocate, SimplyHired also allows you to pay for your job listings to show up first on results pages. Google let’s you buy keywords for terms  you are interested in. If you see the apps gallery as a search result page, why shouldn’t MySpace be allowed to sell the space to the highest bidder? 

Peter Kafka goes with the "I am a stockholder" view which is to suck them dry. Adam Ostrow makes the point clear:

Applications like Top Friends and Super Poke have huge brand recognition, and the fact that those apps can now be front and center is going to make it nearly impossible for an upstart with little cash to gain big-time popularity. It also means that the big developers can piggy back on the little guys for innovation – copying promising ideas and then writing a check to MySpace to steal all of the exposure.

Here’s the difference between the MySpace platform and the Facebook platform. Facebook needs the developers and their apps for growth. MySpace doesn’t and that’s why they can charge and get away with it. If Facebook were smart they would play this up bigtime as to why they are the better choice for developers.

Here’s the hard sell slide, the other slides can be found on Nick’s site.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn shows growth at 319% while Facebook only grew 98% and MySpace barely grew at 9%. I’d suggest that Facebook and MySpace have the market nearly tapped so their growth will be slower than LinkedIn. Buzznet also grew nicely at 49%.

A year ago the Facebook fans claimed LinkedIn was dead and that Facebook would replace LinkedIn as the business networking tool of choice. I haven’t seen that happen and if anything, I’ve seen more LinkedIn requests than Facebook requests lately. Do you believe Facebook will still replace LinkedIn as the business social network?

Update: Dave Barger said something I think is worth repeating, "More people wokeup to the fact the LinkedIn wasn’t just for JobHunters than Facebook was not just for College kids."

Drama 2.0 also wonders Are the Most LinkedIn Really LinkedOut?

MySpace notes the ways they will promote the gallery:

• The MySpace.com home page will feature an Application Gallery icon at the top of the page, so users can easily be directed to the Gallery
• Users will have one-click access to the Application Gallery from their home page through their individual “Control Panels”
• The Application Gallery splash page will be launched with featured apps in effort to further promote applications and support developers

The gallery will also be accessible in multiple languages based on the user’s preferences. With the current health status of Facebook applications, MySpace needs to capitalize on this and do whatever they can to sign on developers to their platform. It’s the perfect time for a potential switch operation.