Tag Archives: Social Networking

Google Friend Connect

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Google has announced Google Friend Connect – a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social – and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect, any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming – picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web.

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The Value of User Generated Content

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Kenneth Corbin from Internet News recently wrote the following article on Internet Entrepreneurs and Social Networking sites like Perth’s very own Loconut:

It seems clear enough that the phenomenon of user-generated content (UGC) on the Internet has built enough momentum that it can no longer be thought of as a fad.

Yet the matter of how to make money from the galaxy of blogs, images and videos that people create and share in online communities is far from resolved.

And it grows all the more urgent to find an answer, as ever-larger mountains of venture capital are poured into start-ups built around the social and self-authoring features now widespread on the Web.

Not surprisingly, hearing entrepreneurs, investors and marketers grope for an answer to “What’s your business model?” many industry watchers are beginning to wonder whether the giddy wellspring of UGC plays is setting up the tech world for another spectacular collapse.

“UGC has prompted an investment gold rush to rival that of the dot-com explosion of the mid-1990s,” said media attorney Jeff Liebenson during a panel discussion here at New York’s Harvard Club, where executives from various corners of the interactive media world debated the issue.

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Does Your Work Block Web 2.0?

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Almost everyone on the net knows about Social Networking sites such as Loconut, Facebook and MySpace. Almost all of those people actively use these sites too, during work hours no less!

The blocking of these social networking sites and instant messenger services used to be quite arbitrary and specific – your I.T. department would set up a list of blocked sites. There are always ways to get around this of course – that is, there was until the boffins came up with a smart fuzzy-logic kind of firewall that decides if what you’re doing is wasting time or not!

Briony Smith from a news website recently wrote the following article:

Firewall and application control vendor Palo Alto Networks announced this week a few first-to-market features for its PA-4000 Series firewalls that allow organizations to identify and control applications and user behavior.

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Social Networking is the new Media Company

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Alexander Wolfe from Information week recently posted a very interesting article about Social Networking and Web 2.0. You can read the original article here, or keep reading the excerpt below.

The way in which we read and create websites is changing rapidly and the bar for minimum standards is constantly being raised. Customers expect user friendliness and interactivity – not just a static site from which they get your business phone number.

Alexander wrote:

“Remember, you read it here first. Wolfe’s three laws of the brave new Web 2.0 world are: Mobile is the new desktop, the home page is dead, and social networks like Facebook and MySpace presage the media company of the future. These catchy Web 2.0 catch-phrases popped into my head during a heavy week of session-sitting at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Here’s why I’m optimistic that those of us who are ready to embrace the virtual future are going to be in for a fun ride.

These aphorisms are part of my attempt to make sense of the rapidly shifting playing field, in which those of us who’ve spent the last several years ramping up our blogging efforts — and patting ourselves on the virtual back for being in the forefront of the new-media revolution — find all of a sudden that we’re no longer quite so cutting edge.

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