MySpace Archive

With Yahoo signing away their advertising business today to Google, I thought it would be interesting to look at the major search engines and see who handles their advertising. Have a look at the list below and check out just how dominant Google is. You wonder why no one is using the other search engines — it’s easy, if the search engine can’t sell ads, perhaps their technology isn’t as good either, right? Please add other engines in the comments and I will add them to the list.

	Company	Advertising Partner	Notes
	Google	Google
	Yahoo	Yahoo/Google	Google ads to begin in three months.
	Ask	Google
	Microsoft	Microsoft
	YouTube	Google
	AOL	Google
	Facebook	n/a	Facebook runs their “social ads”.
	hakia	Yahoo	Per the conference call today, hakia will now be able to run Google ads as well
	Mahalo	Google	Mahalo no longer claims to be a search engine
	Wikia	Google (see note)	No ads are displayed currently — Update: June 13 – Wikia is now displaying Google advertising
	Twerq	n/a	No ads are displayed currently
	MySpace	Google
	a9	Amazon	Ads are related items from Amazon.com

Today at Graphing Social Patterns, executives from hi5, AOL, MySpace and imeem provided updates on their OpenSocial platform usage. Patrick Chanezon from Google opened by explaining that Chinese service OpenPNE out of China and StudiVZ out of Germany are the two newest OpenSocial providers. He also shared some updated stats:

– 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.

It seems like successful social networks grow like weeds. Just look at how massive Facebook and MySpace have become. A good social network establishes the foundation for its users, then allows them to do their thing – with minimal interference. This plants the seed for organic growth. One user attracts another, who in turn attracts more. From here Metcalfe’s Law kicks in: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²). As a network adds users its value grows exponentially.

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.

By now we’ve all read the recent data portability announcements by Google (Friend Connect), MySpace (Data Availability) and Facebook (Facebook Connect) to extend social functionality outside of their walls to any website.

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.

The super big news this afternoon is that MySpace has joined the DataPortability movement in a big way. Here’s all you need to know about this announcement:

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.

Let the "featured application" wars begin! Today we’ve learned that MySpace is now charging to be listed in their "featured apps" section on the MySpace Apps Gallery. The Apps Gallery launched to all MySpace users a week ago.

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 community evangelist Mario Sundar has posted a chart from Nielsen showing the top social networks and their growth over the past year (March-March). I’ve embedded the chart below. The analysis is based on U.S. home and work traffic and does not include international traffic.

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?