Bits and pieces this morning from around the world of social media.
First, in the wake of the mysterious end to the MySpace/Photobucket war, comes an interesting quick piece by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Chen, entrepreneur in residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures, on the subject of monetizing widgets. Widgets=ad networks, Andrew argues. And that means widget makers are faced not only with the challenges of making great widgets but also with the challenges of building sales staffs and paying publishers:
This means that companies like Slide, Photobucket, and others will start having to pay a Traffic Acquisition Cost (TAC). For ad networks, this TAC looks like 60-80% to the publisher, but they are given a standard unit with little to no value to the end user. Let's say that the widgets will get a better position, like 40-50%.
But even once this is solved, they will have to figure out how to monetize the space. They will also have to build out ad sales teams in order to monetize the real estate, and it'll probably be brand advertising and not direct response. The former is much harder than the latter.
Andrew offers four things widget makers need to do to improve their earning potential including building sales teams and destinations sites of their own. And Chen is down on widget aggregators:
I think one major loser for this perspective on the market is widget aggregators. In those cases, every $100 needs to be split amongst the blog infrastructure, the widget market, the widget aggregator, and potentially the user. Yuck. That's a bad business to be in.
Second, regular readers know I'm a believer in the creeping decentralization of social networking-moving away from hubs like MySpace and Facebook and towards white label social networks and Net applications (like the browser) with embedded social functionality (with some kind of cross-platform portable ID). It's a future against which MySpace continues to erect barriers. Several blogs, and several forums for MySpace layout providers, have noticed that MySpace has begun to filter outgoing links posted in comments through a service called Msplinks.com-a property owned by fraud protection service Mark Monitor.
On one hand the move-which replaces direct links to outside sites with links through Msplink-will benefit users by targeted comment spam. On the other hand it gives MySpace the ability to defeat not only businesses it considers parasitic, but even defeat collateral brand building that come by placing links. Writes Hooman Radfar at Widgify:
For example, I posted a link to Widgify to my friend's MySpace page. I set the link target to:
When the link was published to his MySpace comment section, the link target was replaced with:
http://www.msplinks.com/MDFodHRwOi8vd3d3LndpZGdpZnkuY29t
This means that MySpace can now not only track link-out activity, but can also block outbound links. This only seems to be the case with new comments. Old comments still point to their original link targets. MySpace has already turned off links for Flash widgets, so there is definitely a pattern emerging. This activity is extremely interesting in light of the upcoming changes coming soon from MySpace competitor, Facebook. Facebook seems to be moving in the opposite direction - opening up to developers. I wonder if MySpace take a hint from web history, or continue to move along their current trajectory. I guess time will tell if Tom still wants to be everyone's friend.
Finally, in the world of social news, Seattle-based Newsvine launched a redesigned version of its service yesterday. CEO Mike Davidson gives a full wrap up of the new design on his blog. The central premise of the redesign is the ability of users to recreate not only "MY" style news pages but a customized front page for the service as a whole:
We have our own ideas for what the front page of a news site should look like and you have yours. Most major news sites attempt to solve this problem by maintaining their editorially imposed front page and then offering a "My" page which users can play around with and customize. The result of this strategy is almost always two-fold: 1) Barely anyone customizes. 2) Even among those who customize, there is hesitancy among users to give up their daily reading of the front page in favor of the "My" page. This is evident from sites like ESPN and Yahoo News, both of which have feature-rich "My" pages but do a ton more traffic on their front pages.
The move will be an interesting test of an important question in the world of customized news-do end users fail to customize because it's not easy for them to do so, or do end users fail to customize because they're more interested in having some third party provide a top level news filter in a world over information overload?
I think social news should function a lot more like Last.FM-I'm must more interested in knowing which news stories are being read by friends who share my interests than I am interested in knowing what news stories are being rated highly by an enormous general audience. A top level news filter based on social profiles and friends, plus distribution via widgets, would do a lot more for the social news business than individual customization or over all ratings at web hubs.
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