Yes much like in the movie Blade Runner the replicants already walk among us, virtually at least. In Second Life bots are nothing new, however what is new is their heavy usage in marketing to boost traffic numbers and increase virtual sales. You can find some good coverage on Grid Expectations and New World Notes for the back story. Once you’ve read up why don’t we take a look at the good, the bad and the ugly of bots in Second Life. I’ll even tell you how its done….

The Good

While not a popular opinion I support the use of bots in Second Life. I deal with plenty of dead, automated systems that mimic humans (ie telephone directories, web sites etc) every day, why not in the virtual space as well? One thing companies have failed to invest in for their virtual properties is a proper staff. Avatars arrive at virtual ghost towns when they should be greeted and shown the right direction to get started. A combination of paid live staff and bots with crude AI (already possible thanks to Pandora Chat Bots) can greatly increase the visitors experience at your destination.

Bots used as virtual models at B&B Skins

In a virtual world where clothes, skins, and body shapes are by far the most prized commodity using bots for display purposes is another example of the good. Here a customer can see the truest representation of what they are about to buy. Images are flat and take forever to load, avatars load quickly and offer the best preview.

Adding a layer of Artificial Intelligence to these bots open the doors to a lot opportunities beyond staff, above we see an example of a their use in machinima. In this scene we see several bots playing sports together, some players are bots, others live actors. Sine Wave has a great web based interface for setting up and controlling your bots, you program the triggers and define the actions.

The Bad

Cafe of the Dead!

In the first image of this blog post and above we see another image from B&B Skins. High in the sky (well above the standard flight limit) we find the virtual worlds most quiet cafe. Here I found over 75 bots sitting among themselves, enjoying whatever a bot enjoys (one can only assume that’s CPU cycles). So what’s bad about this? They aren’t hurting any one up there other than perhaps causing some extra lag. Right?

Well as some know Second Life traffic is based not only how many avatars visit a location but how much time they spend there as well. So if you camp bots for 24 hour periods your location will get a significant boast in ranking and in some cases a spot on the much beloved "Popular Places" list. In the case of B&B they do make the popular places list and as a result get a steady flow of new (and live) traffic through their shops. Gamed? Tricked? Scamming? Sure maybe a little, but B&B offers something different, a very high quality product. Other places who artificially inflate their ranking typically offer shit products or scammy pyramid schemes for Linden dollars. Vendors in Second Life continue to get more competive, it’s hard to blame some for using this tatic to get noticed amoung the 1000s of other retailers.

The Ugly

Say hello to our new masters

So what’s next? An army of millions of undead and unrezed avatars plaguing the metaverse, stealing your very soul and of course lindens? The eventual enslavement and overtaking of the entire grid, turning us into pawns for a heartless, tax dodging super race of corrupt replicant powers? Well not exactly, out of hacks and gamed systems will come a new way to calculate traffic. Much like how we record traffic for web sites Linden Labs (or TNBT) is going to have to give us a few upgrades. There has already been plenty of talk about this but I imagine as with many much needed upgrades they are low of the "to-do" list right now. Until the loop hole is fixed (lets hope it eventually is) you might as well enjoy and experiment with bots for your own business.

How Its Done

Creating bots in Second Life is done several different ways but all are based around the libsl frameset. If you have prior programming experience (or just an ungodly amount of free time) you can create your own scripts and start logging in bots. For those that want a little more user friendly experience try one of the following:

Thoys SL Bot

Thoys SL Bots by Thoys Pan

For a one time fee of $2000L (about $8USD) you can turn any existing avatar into a bot. Thoys is one of the better ones available because with your purchase you get a nice light Windows client to control your bot. With this client you can set a "Owner" (yourself), chat, make payments and execute several other commands. One of the more interesting tabs lets you setup your bot for use with Pandora Chat Bots where you can easily install some very crude but effective AI. I’ve used this on my land for staff and preloaded the bots responces with marketing messages and helpful directions. Specific keywords trigger the values I program through the Pandora web site.

Lastly Thoys SL Bot has one very nice feature, avatars logged through it do not appear "ruthed". This is where the avatar remains gray and custom skins/clothes do not properly render. You’ll find many SL bots face this fate making them much easier to spot and less engaging.

Sine Wave Robots

Sine Wave Robots

With a web interface as sexy as their branding Sine Wave has one of the best services on the market. Setup is quick and easy and allows you a dizzying amount of customization to your bot’s behavior. Bots are appropriately called actorbots and will cost you around $1USD per day, per robot to run. Since there is no client to run connectivity is reliable, they will even auto re log your bot at a time you designate.

SLeek

SLeek Light Windows Client

SLeek is a very light Windows based Second Life client for logging in avatars. Here you can perform most of the basic actions of the full client minus the CPU intensive graphics. The program works well but from my experience can only run about 3 instances (logged in bots) before they all crash. Additionally your bots appear "ruthed" to other residents but hey its free so as they say, you get what you pay for. I’ve found this client helpful when on a laptop or public terminal and need a quick way to login for chat.

Please feel to share comments on ethics of bots in Second Life or any additionally questions in the comments. Just please…no comment spam bots.

If Facebook Beacon somehow survives the recent onslaught it will likely become a powerful advertising platform. They are doing everything right, you just aren’t ready for it. Yes you, the same person who fills their various social nooks with all types of juicy personal information yet throws up the privacy flag when its convenient. I understand the concerns, and I would even say they are more than valid. It just seems to me in this new web landscape there is very little middle ground to stand on. You are either a social media whore, sharing your thoughts/friends/relationship status/actions freely for all to see, or opting out completely.

Data Sharing Is Not Something New

Information is power as they say, and marketing companies thrive on it. When you signup for a credit card or simply enter your information online this data is almost always shared in one way or another. Companies like Choicepoint have built huge businesses out of it and they want more. Social networks already contain some of this information and they want it. Your credit score and address are one thing, but your personality and social actions are the real "holy grail" here.

Keeping Up With the Jones

Referral based marketing is sexy, if you run in tight circles of friends on social networks your connections are watching you. Facebook Beacon taps into something formally out of reach to most companies, your friends. Where "word of mouth" marketing is simply a whisper in your ear referral based marketing is something more tangible. Something you can click and run with, a passive but effective call to action.

So for now I’m going against the grain and as an "Internet Marketer" supporting Beacon. For those wishing to block it without having to delete your account I recommend visiting here. For best results you’ll probably want to make a tin foil hat as well.

Coming Soon: Twitter Beacon! Now when you thrill me with your updates on recent sandwiches eaten I get a advertisement from Subway.

Check out the trailer above and tune in November 5th for the first episode of the Mahalo Daily staring Veronica Belmont.

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So I’ve been sitting on this huge MySpace story for several months now, well in my little world its pretty huge at least. I’ve had to keep it private while I confirmed some of the details and got consent from of the some parties involved. In the last few days I’ve finally been able to receive enough of both to write something up. Is the suspense killing you yet? Well hold on for just a minute for a quick history lesson.

I guess you could say MySpace and I have had love/hate relationship since it’s inception in 2003. Prior to this I was a member of lipstickandcigarettes.com (now located at www.yousuckatlife.net), one of the first and for the most part unknown Social Networks. This was the first web site I used where you could customize a profile, leave comments and create friend networks. It was run from a dorm room by 2 guys who were too young and busy with school to capitalize on what they had created. It was invite only (old school beta) and catered to a very specific demographic of indie music kids. It felt very exclusive and even though the users were spread out across the county there many real world friendships in conjunction with the online ones. I met a lot of great people there, and of course some very fun (and flexible) lady friends.

Friendster launched a few months later and we all know how that went, however what’s most important about its demise is what it started. MySpace launched and I was lucky enough to setup one of the first 3000 accounts. After the mass exodus from Friendster and when everyone and their mom (literally) signed up for an account MySpace exploded. For me the idea of a Social Network quickly lost it’s cool, independent and private qualities. I flopped back and forth with the site and ultimately decided to use it for marketing a recent e-commerce site I created. The returns were amazing, enough that Forbes magazine took notice and wrote up this little piece. These were the hey days of MySpace marketing, I could precision target my demographic (20-30 year old males who drive a VW) and the advertising was actually embraced by my niche community. This is any marketers dream come true…

Of course automation helped make this possible and the scammers and spammers quickly caught wind of new technologies. To them their campaigns are only effective if they are able to reach millions in a single push. Doing this manually wasn’t efficient and they were desperate to get a presence in the space. The idea of using robots to them is very familiar and boy have they used them. It wasn’t long before MySpace itself became so polluted with "marketing" for adult web sites and MLM schemes that the user experience quickly went down hill. It’s still an issue but I have to commend MySpace for making some recent attempts to curb it.

While my business profiles were growing larger and larger so was my personal MySpace page (25K+ friends before MySpace pulled the plug on it). Since I’m some what of a shameless self promoter it displayed my full name and bio. My profile was very well "ranked" since the profile number was so low even proceeding Tom’s public profile. This caused it to appear on just about everyone’s first page of friends and by default in the top 8. This got me a ton of attention on the web site and naturally I received tons of spam and several very strange messages. The strangest one was received about 6 months ago and read along the lines of:

"Hello,

I was clicking through profiles and noticed your last name is Percival. By chance is your fathers name XXXXX, I think I am your half-sister

Please let me know."

My first impression was that this was some type of scam, as far as I knew it my Dad didn’t have any other kids out there. Naturally I was curious so I went back and forth with my new MySpace sister and to get some more details. The next step was to talk to my Dad about it and see what his side was. I confirmed all the details with him and they all lined up, he even said "Yes, I do remember her mother. She was a cocktail waitress". I know that sounds cliche but turns out it was the truth. Ultimately we asked her to send some hair for a DNA test which she did. As the weeks passed I asked my dad several times about the results, each time he changed the subject. She send in some more pictures and I did some Photoshop CSI work on them. While my dad continued to dodge my questions about it I no longer needed confirmation. To me, a photo can be worth a 1000 DNA tests and the facial features were too similar to be coincidence

A few weeks later I received another email from someone else.

"Hello Sean,

Today I ask to be one of your friends. Is your father XXXXX XXXXXX, if so we may be related."

Ok…. now I’m starting to worry, how many more emails like this should I expect to recieve? As you can see by now my father was a little cavalier when he was younger. Additionally his history was some what unknown to the family, we knew he had a few marriages in his past but had no clue there were other kids out there. As you can probably imagine news like this flew widely through our family and has caused a few issues for us. Apparently this was part of his life he had long closed the books on but thanks to MySpace it has all resurfaced.

The best I could figure is that during the last year MySpace went from a cultural phenomenon to complete mass adoption. Both of the parties who emailed me were older (in their 30s and 40s) and only recently created a profile. Not having heard from their dad in many years they took a chance and popped in our last name to the search box. Since I’m very public about displaying my information it wasn’t difficult to find me, my own social media whoredum had for once worked against me. While data mining companies like Choicepoint continue to catalog our personal details they are still not completely accessible (sorta) to the general public. Social media web sites however are different, many of us volunteer massive amounts of information about ourselves, our current activities and even thoughts of the moments. Eric Rice like to make the point that it would be pretty easy to stalk and or rob many of us, just read out Twitter and plan your "operations" accordingly. I only say rob because lets face it, most of us have a pretty nice collection of toys and electronics that we have of course openly bragged about online.

I’m not sure what the point of this blog post is, its really just a story I wanted to share. The Web 2.0 landscape has begun to break down many walls of privacy so if you have a skeleton in the closet don’t be entirely shocked if they surface via social media. For our family we are now dealing with our new extended family and one rather embarrassed father…

It’s done, finished, complete…

After months of exhaustive and strange research my Second Life Travel Guide is on it’s way to you. Whether you are an avid user or just slightly interested in Second Life this is the book for you. I curate the best the Metaverse has to offer in the following areas:

When you hear about something called Gnomedex personally I can’t help but think about that adorable Travelocity Gnome. Turns out it’s actually a conference about trolls. Yes those endearing people like myself who stand outside the echo chamber and yell shit in. Ok really it’s a conference for bloggers but lets face it, trolls are a big component of the blog-o-ecosphere. In fact we were even treated to 3 new species of troll. How exciting! Lets exam the specimens:

• The Chat Troll: I attended the conference virtually thanks to the feed from ustream.com and saw there was a chat room available. While I’ve watched tons of conference video I’ve never had the chance to join a live chat, sounded good to me. Quickly I was treated to all the keyboard diarrhea that is the Internet with most of the chatters commenting on the female speakers breasts. I found Eric Rice in the chat room who gave me fair warning of what to expect. After having some fun there we were able to get the crowd to yell out things including Eric’s name (and I think mine as well). As far as I know this is the first trolling to make it from cyberspace to meatspace in real time.
• The Live Troll: Yes that’s right, a troll seen doing his trolling in the wild! RSS pioneer and "more disruptive than your drunk uncle" Dave Winer just couldn’t contain his Twits and no doubt future blog posts to himself. He heckled with taunts of "Spam!" from the back row, apparently upset by Jason Calacanis promoting Mahalo. This carried over into future presentations which I’m sure the already nervous presenters enjoyed.
• The Linked Troll: Jason and Dave went at it a bit virtually and caused even more bloggers to write about it. Jason has even begun to catalog them here. Since both don’t allow comments on their blog posts at the moment what other way can we the trolls respond?

Naturally by making us create more blogs post which I started to do, worked on for about an hour and just now completely erased the rest of this post. I’ve decided that I like to read about the Internet drama but not necessary join in sometimes. I defended Mahalo in the chat room and would do it here or to anyone else I talk to. I’m sorry but Dave only seems to have dollar signs in his eyes when it comes to a new platform or concept. Odd from someone who helped invent something as great and FREE as RSS. You guys are all just bouncing off each other as usual and now you’ve got us caring the tune!

So I’m done but I should also say that a blogger convention crowd is the not the right demographic for Mahalo, their parents and the millions of other search challenged users are. It is however a great place to drum up some press and classic Internet drama.

Watch the Presentation:

Try the new product for yourself:

Mahalo Follow

(Disclosures: I work in the Mahalo Greenhouse and don’t trust anyone over 40. This and most others posts are bias to my interests, isn’t that what a blog is for?)

East Coast – Tea Partay
 

VS

West Coast – Green Tea Partay

A great viral video campaign from the good folks at Smirnoff, more info available here. Over a year old but for some reason they are still making the rounds. Also New England looks better than ever, hello Buffy. Can’t wait to move there in 2 months, where my wasps at!

As a follow up to the original Mahalo Badge I made last month I’d like to share the new and improved version. This one pulls several sources and can be changed using the pull down menu. For a bonus I’ve created a feed for the Mahalo Top 50 which displays the most popular pages on the site. Looks like Veronica Belmont has finally been knocked out of first place thanks to Michael Vick and the amazing guides created by Nicole. Why Sexsomia is still up there I have no idea but it sounds like fun.

This is also a belated thank you to Mahalo for giving me chance to be a part of the Greenhouse and of course the Jesus phone they gave me as part of their iPhone Contest. Want your own? Just signup and create 100 pages for Mahalo, they will even pay you for what you create. Lets hear it for getting paid to surf the tubes and if you like, doing it in your underwear at home.

Embed Code
<embed src="http://www.seanpercival.com/mahalo/widget/mahalofeeder.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="200" height="300" align="middle" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />

Sharing is caring, please embed on your blog or social network profile.

Say what you will about Jason Calacanis, love him or hate him he certainly has the ability to get people talking. The subject now? No its not Mahalo, or SEOs, or even his dog Toro. Instead it was this post about Facebook Bankruptcy that started a snow ball of opinions from many A-listers and now thanks to this post yet another D-List blogger. Well I’ll give it to you as quick as possible so we can move on to some of the best ways to combat the dreaded social network fatigue syndrome.

While I’m a bit surprised to see it was Jason who brought this to the forefront the feeling has been growing exponentially for many. With the addition of each new web service yet another piece of digital real estate to follow and if you have time, maintain. I talked about this recently on my love fest of a post about Pownce where some users felt using the web site was like cheating on a perfectly good spouse (Twitter). For myself I like trying them all but certainly can’t even begin to use every single one on a daily basis. I can’t imagine how people with normal 9-5 jobs are able to without becoming unproductive on Office Space levels.

On social media sites I also run in what I call "loose circles" meaning I’ll accept a friend request from anyone. At one point my profile on MySpace had 50,000 friends until it was "mysteriously deleted". It was however no mystery that this profile (and others) generated tons of web traffic for me and believe it or not serious revenue. People like Jason and Robert Scoble are good examples of loose circle friends, social network whores even. In between their conversations about recent tech and personal news they sneak in their web properties. The messages goes out to 1000′s of highly engaged "friends" who typically click through and hopefully blog about it themselves. Great for them but what about those that just want a platform for communicating with or forming new relationships? How can you reduce the background noise and simplify your time spent on social networks?

• Live in Tight Circles: Be a social prude and only allow real friends into your social networks. If the web site doesn’t offer you a way to lock you profile down fort knox style complain about it. Send them emails, blog it, and even better post it all over their site.
• Do Something About it: Build applications that integrate these web sites into a usable fashion. Where is my simple form with checkboxes that allows me to post to (or read email) from several social networks at once. Do we have to wait till Web 5.0 when OpenID tools and free flowing data is more important than corporate greed?
• Smash Your Cell Phone: Do you you really need to be so connected that even when offline you still binge on these web sites? Twitter on my cell phone? No thanks, I’m away from the computer I don’t care what CD you just bought or what’s for lunch. Unplug Neo, trust me those twits and status updates are archived so you aren’t going to miss much.
• Go Outside: Something I should probably take my own advice on. If you find you’ve just spent the last few hours bouncing from network to network stalking friends you probably need some better off the grid friends. If you only spend these countless hours using social networks because you’re at work and your job is boring then quit. Might as well, you are just wasting their time and more importantly your own.

Obviously there is no easy answer here as everyones usage is different, the problem is like in real life we all have to coexist in these spaces. Maybe I’ll start a Ning network to help with this problem. Oh wait, I already have trouble managing the 5 networks I run there and 10 others I belong to….

(Disclosure: I don’t do disclosures but this one time when I was a kid I stole a pack of baseball cards from the supermarket. Also this post is biased and written at 3am which might explain why there are so many questions.)

One of the biggest Second Life related stories broke this week and naturally was quickly ignored for the more favorable "SL is Dying a Horrible Virtual Death" headline . What happened is Second Life has made some of it’s first steps away from a client based solution to a web based application. New World Notes covers all the details here along with an interview from the brilliant (and 15 year old) developer Katharine Berry. Utilizing the open source libsecondlife she has incorporated some of the basic functionality like messaging, teleporting, search, and map functions. While the "big piece" of actually viewing the environment is missing this is a great step towards the future of virtual worlds. For now this application will greatly benefit those lacking the hardware and the international residents with metered bandwidth usage (can you believe this exists?).

All the code is open source and works primarily on Firefox and Safari. The developer also says it works on your Wii, now that’s metaverse.

Screen shot:

View Full Size

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

SL Mobile
Clunky 2 Shiny UI
SL @ Work

This isn’t really related to social media but I just had to share this image. I like to call it "Hard Day at the Office".

From techsnap

There I said it…. after a few day usage I can now protest some love for Pownce. The application is like Twitter on steroids with options for posting messages, links and even files (hello DRM free music sharing). The web site itself has the polish of an Italian sports car with the horsepower to match. There is even a small Adobe AIR (formally called Apollo) application you can download and communicate through. So far the application is limited but everything is still much in the very alpha/beta mode.

Now more than ever Email seems to becoming a dead medium so can micro blogging sites fill in the gaps? Sadly I don’t know if email could ever truly die so we can all look forward to many more years of Nigerian money scams. Since these services work like a "white list" of friends they obviously represent the best type of SPAM protection possible. As far as small team collaboration though there is also great value in an application like Pownce for sharing ideas, events and files.

Some interesting notes from the Pownce launch include the backlash of loyal Twitter users. Many felt and expressed in one way or another that using Pownce is like cheating on a perfectly good spouse. Chalk it up to "Social Network Fatigue" or loyalty many users have been reluctant to embrace the new service. How many social media applications can one person use? I enjoy them all but can only be a truly active user on my favorite of the moment. On the opposite side of the spectrum there has been such demand for this private beta that many users have started selling invitations on Ebay. Sponsored ads on the web site are so subtle it makes me *almost* want to click them. They also use this image for their 404 pages which is naturally HI-LAR-IOUS:

You can add me on Pownce here, if you need an invitation I have a few to give away. Just leave a comment on this post and use the email you would like the invite sent to (only I can see this).

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

Web2Desktop
Social Network Fatigue
Future RIAA Target
Vaginal Based Development

Women withdraws $100,000 to purchase iPhones and sell on eBay. Pays $800 to buy the first place in line. Then finds out there is a 1 per customer rule. Guy first in line still gets his iPhone (plus some extra accessories). The above video is surely a big hit at the womans office the following Monday.

view full size

From CreativeBinge

From Eric Lavenac, and via Valleywag.

O M G, I’m going to get really tired of mocking up these MySpace logos. Something tells me this won’t be the last of them. Now rumor has it that MySpace has begun talks to swap the site for 25% of Yahoo (a value of 12 billion). Is MySpace worth this huge price tag? Only if they are able to maintain their current traffic rankings for the long term which seem to be in question as of late. If Yahoo does go forward with this instead of continuing a Facebook acquisition I’m preemptively putting them in the dead pool!

Rumors about a possible MySpace and Ebay partnership are popping up again. While I think any type of ecommerce platform through MySpace would be a great thing I wonder about using Ebay. Why not develop an in house system or :: shutter ::, offer some type of API service for users to build their own store solution. I’ve built at least 50 ecommerce stores and my experience has always been that the customer is too unique for a blanket solution. They want many levels of customization in both the look and feel and checkout process.

Lastly, and at the risk of ranting too much I’d like to throw up the paid business profile idea again. Something that small business can afford and offers them ecommerce ability and a clear policy for advertising their business. Either way MySpace needs to kick in with something before they lose even more ground to Facebook. While most companies are utilizing the new Facebook platform to extend their service based web site, it just a matter of time before we see some major commerce going through the site.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• A+++++ Friends
• MySpace Marketing
• Social Shopping

Man is God.
He is everywhere, he is anybody, he knows everything.
This is the Prometeus new world.
All started with the Media Revolution, with Internet, at the end of the last century.
Everything related to the old media vanished: Gutenberg, the
copyright, the radio, the television, the publicity.
The old world reacts: more restrictions for the copyright, new laws against non authorized copies. Napster, the music peer to peer company is sued.
At the same time, free internet radio appears;
TIVO, the internet television, allows to avoid publicity; the Wall Street Journal goes on line; Google launches Google news.
Millions of people read daily the biggest on line newspaper. Ohmynews written by thousands of journalists; Flickr becomes the biggest repository in the history of photos, YouTube for movies.
The power of the masses.
A new figure emerges: the prosumer, a producer and a consumer of information. Anyone can be a prosumer.
The news channels become available on Internet.
The blogs become more influential than the old media.
The newspapers are released for free.
Wikipedia is the most complete encyclopedia ever.
In 2007 Life magazine closes.
The NYT sells its television and declares that the future is digital. BBC follows.
In the main cities of the world people are connected for free.
At the corners of the streets totems print pages from blogs and digital magazines.
The virtual worlds are common places on the Internet for millions of people.
A person can have multiple on line identities.
Second Life launches the vocal avatar.
The old media fight back.
A tax is added on any screen; newspapers, radios and televisions are financed by the State; illegal download from the web is punished with years of jail.
Around 2011 the tipping point is reached: the publicity investments are done on the Net. The electronic paper is a mass product: anyone can read anything on plastic paper.
In 2015 newspapers and broadcasting television disappear, digital terrestrial is abandoned, the radio goes on the Internet.
The media arena is less and less populated. Only the Tyrannosaurus Rex survives. The Net includes and unifies all the content. Google buys Microsoft. Amazon buys Yahoo! and become the world universal content leaders with BBC, CNN and CCTV.
The concept of static information – books, articles, images – changes and is transformed into knowledge flow.
The publicity is chosen by the content creators, by the authors and becomes information, comparison, experience.
In 2020 Lawrence Lessig, the author of ‘Free Culture’, is the new US Secretary of Justice and declares the copyright illegal.
Devices that replicate the five senses are available in the virtual worlds. The reality could be replicated in Second Life.
Any one has an Agav (agent-avatar) that finds information, people, places in the virtual worlds.
In 2022 Google launches Prometeus, the Agav standard interface.
Amazon creates Place, a company that replicates reality. You can be on Mars, at the battle of Waterloo, at the Super Bowl as a person. It’s real.
In 2027 Second Life evolves into Spirit. People become who they want.
And share the memory. The experiences. The feelings. Memory selling becomes a normal trading.
In 2050 Prometeus buys Place and Spirit. Virtual life is the biggest market on the planet. Prometeus finances all the space missions to find new worlds for its customers: the terrestrial avatar.
Experience is the new reality.

Nick Denton, publisher of Valleywag has had a blogger or two stolen from his network in the past. Well now he has taken one for his own in the form of Owen Thomas from Business 2.0. Reportedly he will join Gawker and one can only presume continue his hunt for the elusive fake Steve jobs.

Nick Douglas is still writing for the site but as of late seems to be getting the "red-headed stepchild" treatment. I imagine he’s working on something new and great, but like most of us doesn’t have the money or resources to make it happen. Here is a start at least…

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

Career Blogging
Rojas Revenge
Arrington’s Queasiness

*** Update, ok maybe I was right that Douglas was working on something new. Today he started broadcasting a bit through Justin.tv at http://www.justin.tv/lookshiny. Now we can all hear him sigh in real time and tell people on the phone that the check is in the mail. Sweet!

Part 1

Part 2

So speaking of community involvement, there has been some talk about widgets and badges for this application, so I thought I would whip something up. This badge will display the most recent edits made on Mahalo. Still needs some tweaking but perhaps the Mahalo team can take this idea and build upon it.

This example is done using Dapper, a great DIY mashup service. The only bummer is it seems like they are caching the results so it might not be up to the second. With a direct RSS feed from Mahalo this could be done much better. Until I can figure out if the cashing problem is with Dapper or the widget setup itself, you can also click the bottom to see the Mahalo page for this. Enjoy!

Here is the embed code:

<embed src="http://www.dapper.net/widget/tnwidget.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" flashvars="dappURL=http://www.dapper.net/RunDapp?dappName=MahaloRecentUpdates&v=1&showTitles=undefined&showGroups=true&fieldsNames=SeRP Page^SeRP Page|Updated By^Updated By&argsFixed=&argsInputs=&menuMode=1&boxTitle=Mahalo Recent Updates&bkgColor=885458&isLogin=false&contentSiteURL=www.mahalo.com/Special:Recentchanges?days=1&limit=100" width="251" height="304"></embed>

**Update

Well first of all and to confirm the power of social networks, minutes after adding this page to del.icio.us Jason came across it and and linked us here.

And in true Guy Kawasaki fashion I shipped before I tested it properly. The results aren’t coming through as smoothly as I’d like so its going to take a bit of tweaking. Good news is if you embed that now it will still work in the future, just better. Anyone with experience with Dapper is more than welcome to contact me .

**Update 2

For those of us who use Netvibes, here is the module for the last ten updates:

And of course for those who just want the plain ol’ RSS

**Update 3

Today Mahalo made RSS feeds available, more info here. In addition to recent updates you can also pull results based on the latest new pages.

From Randi Zuckerberg (Sister of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg) comes Valleyfreude.

PS. Why no embed? That’s SOOOO Friendster of you!

Poor Guy Kawasaki, he wanted to create a social rumor based web site called Truemors but instead created a tumor. He gives us all the details in a blog post yesterday in very typical Guy fashion. For anyone who has read Guy’s books you’ll know that he preaches about running a lean business and rapid deployment. Two concepts that have served myself and many others very well. Lets take a look at one of his more famous quotes that confirms this:

"Don’t worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test… Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap – but it was a revolutionary piece of crap."

Truemor has it that the first version of MySpace was built in 10 day and it was certainly a revolutionary piece of crap. The idea behind Truemors was also revolutionary too but Guy missed a very important part of the current Web 2.0 environment. *Everyone* is now part of it, not just the valley tech heads that would actually enjoy a service like this. So instead of juicy gossip and provocative conversation the site receives postings like "Clark Kent is Superman" and marketing in the form of "Need Viagra? Click Here". Want to see more examples of this social pollution? Take a look at the comments of just about any popular YouTube clip. It appears that while there are many smart people using social software there is also many users who have the keyboard equivalent of verbal diarrhea.

So can Truemors be saved and emerge as something great? I’m an optimist so I would probably say yes. Here are my ideas for radiating the web site into something useful:

So lets meet a few of them:

	Jason Calacanis
Title:	Founder and CEO (Big Kahuna)
Guides Created:	0! (Maybe to remain impartial or he is just too damn busy)
Web Site:	www.calacanis.com
Notes:	"Entrepreneur in Action" (does anyone else get an image of a super hero when you see this title?) of Web Logs Inc. and Netscape fame. Hates SEO, Spam, Pay-Per-Post and wants to put the human back into search. Remember even Yahoo was started as a manually edited directory and they didn’t do so bad.

	Rupak (Rupak Ginn)
Title:	Guide
Guides Created:	216
Web Site:	www.rupak.com
Notes:	Actor and Harvard grad who has created pages for Bob Marley and Cigars.

	Nicole Gustas
Title:	Lieutenant Commander Data (Unofficial)
Guides Created:	194
Web Site:	http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2226542/
Notes:	Another Harvard grad who enjoys encyclopedias and the plague.

	C.K (C.K. Sample III)
Title:	Managing Editor
Guides Created:	72
Web Site:	www.sampletheweb.com
Notes:	Author and Blogger who worked with Jason at Weblogs Inc., AOL and now Mahalo.

	Ray Manukay
Title:	Guide
Guides Created:	344
Web Site:	rayslucky13.blogspot.com/
Notes:	Father and self proclaimed sports nut. Prior to Mahalo Ray was a manager at Laser Blazer an independent DVD store.

	Andrew Kaufman
Title:	Guide
Guides Created:	196
Web Site:	http://www.myspace.com/mybandisthegreatest
Notes:	A native Californian, mosaic artist and audiophile who went straight from college to odd jobs.

Its interesting (to me only I’m sure) to know who is behind web startups other than the founders and VC’s. Since a bulk of the work is done by these peoples it’s great to be able to drill down and learn a little more information about them. On Wikipedia you can also do this to an extent, but as smart as some of theirs users are they just aren’t that interesting. On another similar web site About.com you can also do this however they seem to employee a little too much of the "house wife expert" demographic. I want to know what people like myself have to say, which is probably why I spent waaaaay too much time reading blogs.

** Update

CK posts a great and comprehensive history of his career the last few years here. He also closes on just how enjoyable it is to work at Mahalo and his passion for the product. Nicole also emailed in singing very load praises for the Mahalo "Factory" environment. So much so she had to add a disclaimer that she does not work for HR there, she is just *that* happy with the opportunity to work there. Sounds like lots of creative freedom and coloration going on at Mahalo which ultimately produce the best product.

Dang, you guys make even me (who enjoys a very comfy stay at home job) want to try to put my resume in for a shot. However I soon remember that the OC to Santa Monica rush hour communicate would quickly turn any passion into complete rage! Anyone who has driven in LA surely knows what I mean…

Such a rich history between these two, would of loved to have seen this in person. However thanks to the D conference (allthingsdigital) we can all see this historic event online now. You’d think that these two being in the same place might fold space time itself but instead we get to see two icons share a conversation. Enjoy!

Videos after the jump:

Bonus Material:

Some Old School Flavor:

Please digg this.

They say a 1000 monkeys at a 1000 typewriters would eventually produce a great work of literature such as a Shakespeare play. Well what if you just had 40 monkeys but they were very very smart monkeys? Jason Calacanis wants to find out with his new web startup Mahalo that launched today at the D Conference. A human powered search engine that spits out high quality results created by Mahalo employees or "Guides".

Instant Impressions:

• Very slick interface
• Search terms that are available (only top 4,000 live) are very content rich.
• Results look like a links page *I* would create for something I’m passionate about
• Embed Media, nice!
• No Ads! (this will eventually change, but its certainly clean without them)

Testing It Out:

So I thought I would test with an important keyword for one of my web sites which is "european license plates". I didn’t expect this one to be available because its a very nichey search term and it wasn’t. When a search term doesn’t have a page setup you get the option to be notified (1) when its created. Would be interested to also see the ability to get notifications when certain pages have been edited as well. Since my term was not available I get the Google results and luckily for me my site (2) is ranked in the 2nd position . I also get some related pages from Mahalo, in this case they were related but not relevant.

After spending some time with the site I gotta say its a pretty cool product and concept. However some don’t agree with lots of initial criticism on blogs. Many saying "Its no Google Killer" and they aren’t looking to be as Jason points out in the PR. Think of this as more of a supplemental to your search needs, like Wikipedia and About.com. I’ve hit both of these web sites 1000′s of times and would gladly welcome a new entry into this space.

The real value of the site is going to come from the Guides and community itself. In the name of transparency you can even view the profiles of the Guides and find out some basic information about them. I’m sure some will have issues over this type of content control because they are ultimately the gatekeepers to all pages. It will be important they are non-bias and dedicated to the work in order to keep producing quality pages. Speaking of, are they hiring? I like to say I know something about everything but nothing about anything. Sounds like a great job (or hobby) for someone like myself and I’m sure millions of others. Right now it’s unclear how outside contributes can get involved other than recommending links. As far as how businesses can benefit from the site the rules are the same as with any search engine, produce great content or products and the links and placement will follow.

Also do you know there are still huge amounts of people who haven’t figured out the basics of using a search engine? These are the same people that type the domain name with .com into a search box or actually fall for phishing web sites. They are going to greatly benefit from services like this and frankly need the most help. So call your Grandma in Tennessee and tell her she has now has some help online. She might just tell you Mahalo (Hawaiian for Thank You).

The Ham:

• This web site is based on the Media Wiki software as we can see on this error page (Already Fixed)
• Lots of financial backing, some even coming from NewsCorp
• Can recommend links on existing pages
• Message board for page discussion
• Top 7 Links = The New Page Rank

More Coverage at TechCrunch, Mashable, and Jason’s Blog

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

SeRP’in
Social Search
Man vs. Robot

* Update: Hey cool, they already added this post to their press page (http://www.mahalo.com/Mahalo_press)

One interesting part of the "Social Software" movement has been the canyouhearme blogs. Some recent examples include Google, YouTube and now MySpace. Here the little guy goes out of his way to get the attention of a large and usually hard to reach web company. In each case their approach is unconventional but surprisingly effective. They all got an audience with the company which is pretty astounding by itself. Trust me I’ve emailed MySpace many times and just about all the A-list bloggers, they respond about 1% of the time. Can’t blame ‘em though, they are probably way too busy changing the world to answer every email. Additionally even I sometimes have trouble keeping up with my email so I can’t imagine what their Inbox is like.

In any case you have to commend those companies that do listen to their users when they go this far to reach them. LoLo from canmyspacehearanyone.com is looking for a job but mostly is just sick of the spam and other issues that are plaguing MySpace. That separates him a little from the others who were mostly looking for personal promotion or a taste of fame. Here the goal is also to improve the community and user experience, something MySpace is well in need of. LoLo is also one of our few loyal readers so we want to support him however we can. Keep us updated and best of luck!

At the time of posting canfacebookhearme.com was available in case anyone wants to give it a shot themselves.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

Resume 2.0
Blogging for Jobs
Thanks for the Add! Thanks for the Job!

Huge knockout today for Facebook who hosted the F8 event and launched a treasure trove of goodies. This some what quiet rivalry is getting very loud and perhaps for the first time MySpace’s Social Network dominance is at risk. So if these two are going to battle it out who is going to emerge the winner? Lets take a look at the pre-fight weigh in stats:

As we can see Facebook is the clear underdog however they win the last two items which might turn out to be the most important. By allowing developers into their system they have started the process of turning a Social Network into an application. This is going to be very powerful in the future as more and more people use their profiles as base of operations for whatever they might be doing. Who do you think will be the winner in lets say….5 years?

* Regarding the stats above, they were the best I could find online and might not be completely up to date. If you have other data please feel free to share.

More Coverage Here, Here, Here, and Here

Spock is a great new personal search engine currently in private beta. Some of us have been lucky enough to get invitations and I must say the site is great. We have already seen the demand for personal search services with many businesses and individuals turning to sites like MySpace to dig up the dirt on someone. Yes it happens all the time so you might want to consider making your profile private or at least remove the pictures of you intoxicated with your buddies. Web sites like Spock and Linkedin could even be the death of the resume as know it. Now you can find all the information you need on someone before hiring them or in some others cases going on a date with them.

So it’s up to you know what’s out there and verify the data collected. Thanks to a few Spock invites I received you can get a sneak peak of what they are working on. Right now I just have 3 which i’ll give to the first few commenter’s, just include your email address and I’ll send it your way.

The Internet has seen it’s share of applications or services that can best be referred to as a "Wild West". Some examples are Napster, P2P, Online Porn, MySpace, and even Second Life. In the beginning these new frontiers are wide open with few rules or policies in place. However after time and increased popularity these online destinations are soon enforced, tracked, and of course eventually abused. Naturally some freedoms are taken away to maintain the community and adhere to real world laws. These changes usually coincide at the point when serious money starts to change hands or becomes lost due to piracy of some type. It now seems that Blogs are next on the list thanks in part to some recent events:

• Apple Gate – One of the most read blogs Engadget posts a notice about some Apple product delays and causes a 4 billion dollar loss of market capitalization in less than 6 minutes. Turns out the story was bogus even though the source was reliable and the announcement was sent out direct from Apple’s email system. Engadget could have tried to confirm the announcement better but can you blame them for the itchy trigger finger? For them a story like this is worth 10 Anna Nicole Death’s to CNN. Valleywag and Gawker (former and clearly bitter owners of Engadget) drop in on the story in true tabloid style.
• Josh Wolf – A video blogger who was jailed for refusing to turn over videotapes recorded during a July 2005 demonstration. He served 226 days in prison, longer than any US journalist has ever served for protecting a source. How much longer is the mass media going to take Blogs having all the sources and scoops?
• Kathy Sierra vs Chris Locke – Long story I’m sure you’ve heard about already but if not there is more info available here and here. Story reaches millions through blogs and CNN, many question what can and can’t be said on a blog post or comments. Also proves that crazy people have just as much to say as smart people do.
• Gold in them ther Hills! – Guess what? Interesting people started blogging and in the process gained millions of readers. That leaves plenty of room for advertisements and plenty of eyes to see them. WebLogs Inc. claims to make 1 Million per year on Google Adsense alone, sells for 25 million to AOL, Jason Calacanis buys any expensive toy he wants. Over 70 million blogs have been created, only 20% with stories about cats.

Freedom of speech isn’t so much at risk here however the top Blogs will continue to face increased scrutiny and even possible liability. What started out as an online journal service has now evolved into a very powerful platform for news reporting in addition to personal ranting. I can’t remember the last time I purchased a newspaper, but I usually don’t miss a day reading my favorite blogs. The "A-listers" are quickly becoming the hubs for information that only the mass media previously received. As their readership continues to grow its going to be very interesting to see how it all unfolds.

PS. Yes of course that’s Nick Denton in black on the image above, that big ol’ head just wouldn’t fit in frame! His targets are Guy Kawasaki, Jason Calacanis and Michael Arrington.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

Fair and Balanced Blogging
RSS FTW!
Yeeeeee Haaaaaaaw!

The AP is reporting that the Department of Defense will start blocking social web sites like MySpace and YouTube for enlisted members in Iraq and other locations. Until now this has been a vital medium for deployed solider’s because it allows them to easily update friends and family. The DoD is citing bandwidth and network security concerns as the reasons for this new ban saying "The U.S. Army’s not going to pay the bill for you to get on MySpace and YouTube". I have a brother in law in Iraq, he has told me about some of the new web technology on the battlefield that allows him to receive email and even web cam with his family. These new options are of course under tight controls and the process for sending an email through official channels feels more like a home loan application and cavity search than a private communication.

Safe guards are important to protect our troops however its pretty clear they are also concerned about stopping the next Abu Grab picture/video leak. In previous wars bad press was mostly confined to private conversation however with the emergence of online video and blogs this information can now reach untold millions overnight. Controlling information (and even misinformation) is very important in any war and the Internet is making this increasingly more difficult to do. It’s no shock the troops have embraced these web sites, after all they allow them to escape for a few minutes and perhaps even help remind them what they are fighting for. It may also be safe to say that the pin up girl pictures sent through mail in previous wars has now been replaced with MySpace "hotties" in their underwear.

Other web sites included in the block are Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos and FileCabi, BlackPlanet, Hi5, Pandora, MTV, 1.fm and live365. Solders in need of a good laugh from a YouTube video or to communicate through a social web site may want to explore web sites (or proxies) that can mask your usage like workbrowse.com.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

lonelysolider15
User Driven News
Soldier 2.0

clickz

So read this first then take a look over here. Nobody isn’t surprised by this announcement but I think Valleywag is approaching this the wrong way. It’s also no secret that African Americans are a minority when it comes to valley startups, so why ponce on them when they are given a chance? I can remember many years ago at Comdex when an executive affectionately referred to Africans Americans as "road kill on the information superhighway". We can only hope that this attitude has changed (and that dbag has since moved on) since then and encourage people like Michael Arrington and Jason Calacanis to keep extending opportunities like this. Now if they could just make their conference affordable to guys like myself

I think many are underestimating MySpace’s effect on the upcoming presidential election. In January they are launching there own election and I’m sure many will take notice of the results. The teenager demographic is notorious for its low voter turn out but MySpace stands a chance to actually change this. When I was younger MTV’s "Rock the Vote" never did it for, but MySpace does. Of course there are many who are going to throw up flags because of Rupert Murdoch’s personal and political preferences and how easily such an online election can experience fraud. In fact one MySpace user has already claimed they are censoring his bulletins that support Ron Paul. You can view this video below (recommend full screen):

While it appears the issue is actually related to linking a MSNBC poll results URL and not Ron Paul specificly it still makes me wonder why. The fact that MSNBC is a direct competitor to Murdoch’s Newscorp is just going to get the conspiracy theorist fired up more. I’m still trying to tract down exactly which URL is not passing the filters.

On a related note I’ll be appearing on this show next week to discuss how politicians are using MySpace and other Social Networks this election. Ron Paul for example has a MySpace profile, a YouTube Channel, A CafePress store, and even a Facebook Profile. The only thing he is missing is a Twitter account, something other presidential hopeful Obama has already embraced.

So far Ron Paul has 13,000+ friends on MySpace with many displaying their support directly into their profile names.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

Fair and Balanced
Election 2.0
Thanks for the Add! Thanks for the Vote!

View Full Size

As reported by Valleywag and Mashable this morning, Photobucket is being sold to MySpace for an undisclosed amount. Why? I’m not sure as MySpace’s own photo hosting service is clearly moving in the direction of offering the same features of Photobucket (and even Flickr). Maybe they needed a big expense this year on the books, who knows. Photobucket’s response, "Thanks for the Add!"

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

Fox Widgets Coming Soon
Glitter Graphx!
Case of the Mondays

Sadly classmates.com is usually credited as the first online Social Network, yes that annoying web site where you can reconnect with people you don’t miss. It’s in the wiki so it must be correct right? Instead I would like to credit the BBS system as the first (all be it crude) online Social Network. While they quickly went the way of the Dodo bird when the new shiny Internet came on the scene the history and subculture of this medium is rich and worth noting. Maybe I’m biased though, after all I spent most of my childhood on BBS’s and these times are typically my fondest technology related memories. These systems were far from the "circle of friends" and heavily interactive web sites we have today but they still offered millions the ability forge new online relationships and connections. Alright, I really need to stop before I start sounding like that old guy who loves to talk about when computers were punch card based and the size of a warehouse.

So while doing some research for a personal project I came across this, BBS The Documentary an 8 episode mini series from Jason Scott (he runs www.textfiles.com, a huge depository for text files of the past) . He traveled for years interviewing the colorful cast of characters that made the BBS scene what it was including Vinton Cerf "The Father of the Internet". It’s on the way to my house now, I’m sure my wife will *LOVE* sitting through this one (I routinely bore her with crap like this). If you need me i’ll be watching the mailbox for the next few days. Order your copy today here.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

300 Baud Love
ANSI Missing
0-Day

Pete from Mashable and I tried to capitalize on the recent lolcat phenomenon (see also this, and this for examples) but apply it to MySpace profiles images instead. Turns out Tom was the most fun but you can easily apply this to any profile you find on the site. Here a few that didn’t make the cut but might make you lol anyway:

Tom:

Forbidden

Random Male

Make your own, you can submit them here in the comments or over on the Mashable post.

Today Linden Labs held a Town Meeting to respond to the recent open letter they received from over 3000 residents. The letter addresses concerns over performance, inventory loss and problems with the in world friend list. Ironically many could not attend the meeting because the SIM (or server) that was hosting the event quickly became full. This left many avatars including my own stuck on the edge of SIM unable to join as we see below:

Not even a jet pack helped my fellow stranded resident

When I did finally get in I soon discovered why there was such a problem, everywhere you looked it was wall to wall avatars. The interface quickly turned to molasses as some poor server somewhere tried to keep up with the processing.

So many avatars, not many furries though

This level of company2community involvement is becoming more and more important these days. Companies like Linden Labs and Digg are making huge statements by listening to their user bases while companies like MySpace and Amazon are slow to adapt. If the "wisdom of crowds" is telling us anything its that companies better listen or risk a mass exodus. You can view the full transcript of the meeting here or just see some of the main points below:

• Adding in world Mozilla support is taking much longer than excepted. Right now its difficult to view a web page in world so the client redirects to an external browser.
• Scaling and stability are a huge focus right now with up to 60% of company resources devoted solely to improvements in these areas.
• Having some trouble responding to customer trouble tickets and assigning staff to bug reports.
• We all cant afford Maya (up to $7K), are there cheaper alternatives for external development? The answer is yes but how? Open Source?
• Slowing upgrading all servers to run MySQL 5
• The search is flawed due to keyword miss use and "campers" artificially inflating the traffic numbers. Linden Labs is working on ways to improve this.
• They will not boot non paying residents during high grid usage, they like everyone and don’t want to turn them away.
• 65% of users are from Europe, Linden Labs plans to deploy servers there in the future to improve performance.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• Snow Crash’n
• Lag-o-Pently
• Internet Democracy

Funny image circulating today from Randall Munroe of XKCD.com (down for the moment).

View Full Size

Talk about an Internet Drama Jackpot! Visit mashable for some of the best coverage of today’s huge fiasco over at Digg. Maybe Steve Jobs was right when he said that DRM doesn’t work? After posting of the HD-DVD encryption code to Digg they quickly received the usual cease and desist notice and pulled the offending links. With such a democratic user base it exploded from there, this crowd doesn’t take well to what they would call censorship. What would have been a "here today, gone tomorrow" story has no become a huge mess. I’d have to say the "wisdom of crowds" has probably gone too far this time but commend Digg for listening to its users. They are taking a huge risk and making an even bigger statement with this move.

:: Que the Napster Effect ::

That’s when a huge investor backs the company to help with the legal nightmare that is bound to follow. See Also Gootube Vs Viacom.

Let’s hope for Digg’s sake that it works out better for them than it did for Napster…

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

Giving Kevin Rose a Migraine
Crowd Sourcing DRM
Internet Gone Wild

The only thing I enjoy more than examples of natural or organic web traffic is a great link baiting scheme. I am a however a little surprised to see Jason Calacanis openly soliciting and even offering some guidelines for link baiting him. After all he doesn’t believe in SEO and loves to express his concerns about PayPerPost but lets face it, seeing your name on Google/Technorati is the new "Your Name in Lights". He does however admit to actively monitoring the blog-o-sphere for mentions of his name (can’t say I wouldn’t do the same in his position) so I though I’d contribute as well.

Initially I thought about creating a PayPerPost campaign for this because getting 10-20 "posities" to contribute would be much more fun and effective. I soon came to the conclusion that this might be taking the idea a bit too far. Besides, it would probably not make it through their approval process (yes they actually do manually review everything submitted to them) and who wants to be on the shit list of an A-list blogger. He seems to have a great sense of humor but who knows how he would take that. So instead I’ll just say I admire Jason for his multiple online successes and hope he returns a link to this little blue collar blog. Unlike Jason I do believe in SEO since I owe most of my meager online successes to it. While they haven’t generated a huge buy out for me they do pay for my new Audi and keep me out of a 9-5 cubicle job which affords me one of life’s greatest luxuries…sleeping in everyday or at least on days when its needed most.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

Crowd Hacking
Link Bait’n
SEO Value

**Update! Jason did include a link from his blog to this article. What a stand up guy!

http://mashable.com/2007/04/29/myspace-who-tom-sued-and-why/

This covers some of the recent outgoing lawsuits against companies who spammed MySpace.

Friendr is a new service that helps boost your MySpace friend counts similar to SS Friendship and FakeYourSpace (which recently had to shut down due to "legal problems"). Unfortunately Friendr might soon succumb to the same fate as MySpace is quickly building a reputation of "not playing well with others". The service is relatively harmless however it could easily be abused like many MySpace advertising tools have been in the past. Additionally MySpace has been actively shutting down "piggyback" web sites including friend robots and layout/graphic web sites.

The process is simple, signup and post a unique link via bulletins and comments to signup other users. For each user you sign up you earn points which help you rise to the top of their user list. You can also earn points by adding existing Friendr users and track your process with detailed stats. The design and programming behind the service is very well executed. They also offer some featured listings which have already been snapped up by two band profiles.

I posted my unique link to a network of 100,000 or so friends and within minutes received 80 points and several friend requests. I’ll update this again in a day or two with more complete stats.

*** Update: Here are the results after 2 days, 70 incoming friend requests. Since MySpace Marketing for the most part has been reduced to an "opt-in"/incoming friend request strategy this service appears very effective. 70 friends gained without sending messages or friend requests.

*** Super Update: In addition to deleting some of my MySpace profiles for this blog post they also removed the friendr profile and sent the legal/abuse team on them. Read the full story on their blog here. I’ve extended the branch to MySpace several times to help offer businesses and individual guidelines for how to promote themselves on the site but as with most members concerns they fall on deaf ears. I thought about lots of ways to respond to this but instead i’ll keep quite and plug my book for those interested in effective and solid ways to market on MySpace. See the below quote for "historical reasons"

"We recognized from the beginning that we could create profiles for the bands and allow people to use the site any way they wanted to. We didn’t stop people from promoting whatever they wanted to promote on MySpace. Some people have fun with it, and others try to get more business and sell stuff, like a makeup artist or a band, and we encourage them to do that."
Tom Anderson
MySpace Co-Founder

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

Pissing off Tom
Social Networking
Crowd Hacking

In the name of full disclosure I should mention that I’m a huge Howard Stern fan and have even started a Ning based Social Network for fans at www.socialstern.com. Sometime in the last 24 hours the most popular MySpace profiles for Howard Stern staff members were deleted. While fake celebrity MySpace profiles are nothing new these had gathered a huge following with some profiles including over 160,000 friends. Even though these profiles had been on MySpace for over 3 years they were recently discussed by the show which sent the Howard’s News Team to investigate and remove the profiles in question.

I was able to track down the owners of the profiles Jake and Jennifer who provided some information on what happened. Being huge fans of the show they originally created these profiles for fans but soon forgot about them. A year later they logged in to find 1000′s of incoming friend requests and messages from other fans. They took it and ran with and started including some advertisements to various affiliate programs and other Howard related web sites like HowardSternInternetRadio.com and HotRetards.com which they also own. No doubt a very savvy business move because these profiles were receiving huge amounts of page views from targeted visitors (in most cases other Howard fans). In fact many fans made these profiles as part of their top 8 which further increased their popularity and reach.

The main problem with these profiles is they did not indicate they were "unofficial" so droves of MySpace users would send show related messages. Jake tells me that they never responded to these messages or did anything to promote the profile, their growth was organic and natural. He also tells me "Anyone who thought the profile was actually run by Howard Stern himself should have their internet privileges revoked immediately!" and to a certain extent I would agree. The Howard Stern Show was right to try to protect their brand however in the end the fans and Sirius Radio are the real losers. After all, the advertisements displayed on these profiles were for Sirius radios and DVD’s/Books related to Howard Stern. Instead of removing these profiles the smart move would of been to work with the owners by adding some type of disclosure and leveraging all that traffic.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• IP Watchdog’n
• Bababoey
• Affiliate Program Riches

At the age of 18 I found myself living in Las Vegas working as a janitor for local office buildings. Needless to say it was not the most glamorous time of my life but because of that shitty job I found my calling. You see one of the offices I cleaned belonged to www.Vegas.com and I’ll never forget the first day I walked in with vacuum cleaner in hand. The year was 1997 and the dotcom boom was still going very strong in Sin City with several companies fighting for their share of online hotel booking and online gambling revenue. We cleaned the offices late at night but every time the Vegas.com offices were full of activity (thanks in part I’m sure to the free Mountain Dew in kitchen). Night after night I saw these guys arguing about web site layout and code, playing ping pong, or even sleeping at their desk. I knew right then that this was the career for me. My web development career was started and I soon found myself arguing over code and drinking far too much Mountain Dew as well.

So fast forward to present day with the latest batch of Web 2.0 companies, do they have the same ability to generate this type of inspiration and interest in The Internet Generation as well? From the surge of "fan boy" blogs (present company not excluded) that pop up every day its probably safe to say they do. How far could a doey eyed web developer go to get that dream geek job at today’s hottest company?

Here are some to try at your own risk:.

Camping

Company won’t return your calls or emails? Resume ending up in the "round file" time after time? Go to their lobby and wait (for days if necessary) until someone will interview you. Seems to have worked for this guy and now you can update your adventure on Twitter in real time. "Day 3: The Muzak and constant stare of the receptionist may be too much to take, fighting urges to leave"

Break Something

Take their product and break it, hack it, fix it, mash it, and make it better. If they offer an API join it and create something cool with it and extend their product into new areas. Publicize how great you are on Digg and everywhere else, make them find you. Avoid trademark infringement as much as possible and leverage any cease and desists notices into partnership.

Send a Singing Telegram

One I’ve always wanted to try and will no doubt pull out at some point. If you just can’t seem to get the attention of a specific executive this is sure fire way be heard. Just make sure you send them to the right office and you might also want to ping their email to check for "Out of Town" notices. Bonus points for writing your own song that includes some good quips about the company. This will at least get you a thank you email unless of course the executive is so horribly embarrassed he blacklists you.

iGimmick

Make yourself a gimmick of some type, think justin.tv meets monster resume. Draw attention to yourself either online or in the real world with a hook. Some ideas include sandwich boarding yourself close to the corporate office, setting up billboards, or get a tattoo of their company logo. Generate eyeballs to whatever you do and hope the company catches wind of it. TIP: Local TV nightly news and newspapers love stories like this.

Create the Next Big Thing

Yes I know, easier said than done and we all wish we could create the next big thing. The truth is most of you won’t, but don’t let a little thing like that that stop you. It’s going to take a lot of hard work and several failures but your dream job might just come looking for you instead. If all goes well things can only get better from there.

If anyone has any other ideas please share and good luck!

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• Networking
• Bubble’n
• Guerilla Career Marketing
• Mark Zuckerberg Chase’n

MySpace has taken some of the first real steps to addresses the spam and phishing problems of the web site. Mark Monitor who offers online security and brand protection services are now offering some type of much needed help to MySpace. I couldn’t find any announcement of a partnership between the two companies however the domain msplinks.com was recently registered through Mark Monitor this month and is now being used to filter some outgoing links posted on the site. Currently it seems to only effect messages and comments but it will probably encompass other areas of the site as well.

When a link is posted it is converted into link from msplinks.com with a long string of encrypted information.

Example:
www.msplinks.com/F4Ffd32FHjsk7kjgMhG5Ff$

This will allow MySpace to track outgoing links and better identify spammy or phishing schemes. Overall a step in the right direction however this could present a major problem for companies that use MySpace to drive traffic to their web sites. Just as with the recent Photobucket controversy MySpace could easily kill an outgoing link and cut off the flow of traffic.

* Update: The official notice from "Tom", you get those "dirty spammers"!

Here is a sample of MySpace Conspiracy text that is already going out from bulletins and comments:

"Hackers/phishers are gaining access, I am told, through comments we are unknowingl"y passing along from page to page if we are infected.

The infected comments begin with "www,msplinks" if you have that in comments, you are infected and are most likely passing it on to friends in your comments. Take this for what it is worth. I hope you have not been infected, but there is one way to find out.

You need to go to edit your profile, go to safe mode, edit comments and look for ANY comments back to the 19th that begin with "www.msplinks"..this is the virus and I am finding it in many comments. Delete those comments. Then change your password. There is a hacker/phisher hitting MS and this is the way they attack pages. If you have your security set to APPROVE COMMENTS…before you approve any, hit REPLY and read the comment code. If you see www.msplinks at the beginning of it, deny it and let the sender know because thier page is infected too."

And a thanks to mashable.com for the linking us.

**Update 2

I was wrong to cite Mark Monitor as being behind this, turns out MySpace just uses them to register their domain names.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• News Corp’s Wrath
• SEO Devaluing
• Death of "Thanks for the Add" Comments

Certainly seems like everyone is "Web 2.0′ing" these days and after attending the recent Web 2.0 Expo this seems truer than ever before. Previously some entrepreneurs or small teams were unable to get into the space due to the high level of programming and database work required to launch a web startup. That however has all changed thanks to a tidal wave of services like Dapper, Ning, Etelos, Yahoo Pipes and many more. These services can help with a lot of the initial leg work and open the doors to a whole new demographic of web developers. Luckily for them this demographic is up for the task as they are used to running on the cheap and quickly, two much needed traits in the industry today. Still too earlier to call "Bubble Deux" however by the size of this packed conference the next 24 months are going to be very interesting….

Some other highlights from the show include:

• Social Networks: Winner and Losers - The main reason I attended the conference and the best session I caught. In addition to being one of the prettiest women in tech Gina Bianchini from Ning.com had some great things to say about Social Networks. When questioned she defended the size of a niche market on the internet (the biggest benefactors of the Ning service). In a world with 1 billion people online even the most obscure niche can develop a very rich Social Network. With Ning you can create your own Social Network in seconds and if you ask they will even through in access to the source files. More coverage to come on Ning, right now I can possibly say enough good things about their service.
• Netvibes Universe – I’ve always been a big fan of this startup, their product achieves what most portals failed to do in the first dotcom boom. They also embody the Web 2.0 experience which is all about contributing to and developing your own spaces on the Internet. Netvibes Universe takes the product one step further by allow you to share your personal spaces with the others as well. I had the good fortune of sitting next to the CEO Tariq Krim at The Future of Web Apps and was surprised when he returned my emails and even asked for feedback. This type of community development is vitally important to any Web 2.0 startup these days. Lastly they throw the best parties
• Dapper – Why I haven’t been playing with this for months now I have no idea. Mash up or strip data from just about any web sites.
• Exhibit Hall – Wow everyone has a product to make my life easier, awesome.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• Bubbling
• Internet Celebrity Spotting’s

Also I wasn’t able to afford full passes for the wife and I so if anyone has any extras please let me know! With travel expenses and a $1500 price tag that makes it hard for an indie web developer to swallow. If you can help I’ll gladly compensate you for your troubles with money or SEO work.

Otherwise you might see me sneaking into some sessions. I call this guerrilla conferencing

*Update, if you go into the session rooms during lunch there is pretty much zero security.

MySpace recently shut down all of the major providers of automated MySpace marketing applications or "robots". What started as a great tool for small businesses had become a spammer’s paradise. Instead of targeted and ethical marketing campaigns MySpace quickly became polluted with everything from free gift card scams to adult web cam sites. Add this to the increasing problem of MySpace accounts being phished and members found themselves receiving huge amounts of advertisements from deceivingly fake profiles. My profile receives up to 500 messages each day with 99% of them clearly coming from automated software or phishing campaigns.

So in the end its a big win for MySpace and the community however a lot of work is still needed to protect its members. They have added spam tagging to messages but just like an ISP they need filters to stop the flow before it arrives to a member. If someone sends the same exact email 500 times a day, that should probably be a clue to shut down the account.

Here is the dead pool so far:

• www.spacepromoter.com
• www.badderadder.com
• www.silent-products.com
• www.friendadder.com

Space Promoter seems to be have been the main target for MySpace who according to the blogoshere asked for the following terms to avoid a lawsuit:

• Turn over the domain spacepromoter.com to MySpace
• Owner can’t update or support the program
• Owner can’t talk about MySpace marketing or anything against their TOS again
• They wanted 100% of the profits (supposedly this was talked down to 50%)
• Owner can’t use MySpace or another Fox News web site ever again
• Turn over customer list.

I contacted the owner Joseph Tierney to verify this info but have not received a reply as of yet. He had contacted me some time back for help promoting his new application and while it was certainly a very creative tool it was too spam friendly for me. In a few minutes you could create 100′s of fake profiles and post all your advertisements and tricky links with great automated ease. Thanks to this software MySpace now has millions of fake profiles among its ranks which can easily distort some of its total member numbers. Their legal problems (real or not) caused a cascade throughout business and the other sites closed within a few weeks of each other. For MySpace this is much cheaper than a day in court and overall better for the community itself.

RIP little robots…

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• Social Networking
• News Corp’s Wrath
• Thanks for the Add!

**Update 04/11 – Badder Adder application is now down as well, it had continued to work even after they closed shop. They recently lost their domain due to the closing of registerfly which I’m sure has caused massive problems for others as well. They are in the process of getting the domain back now but its going to be a few days. The software makes a DNS call to badderadder.com to check the serial number before letting you proceed to using it. Registered users are now getting messages that their 30 min trial has expired.

www.socialham.com/diggcrunch

*Update – Didnâ??t win or even get an honorable mention for this! Guess it was too far away from the original idea of trashing Techcrunch. Reading some of the winners though are some real snore fests. Oh well…

Crazy Guy with a Knife or Gun

Do yourself a favor and don’t click on any of these. Its usually an ad for a free iPod anyway or worse a message from a real life crazy guy.

Bands

These come in many flavors but most are nice requests to visit their profile and listen to their tunes. Only click on these if you like their default image or if they trick you with a deceptive subject.

Great Abs Guy

Well Michael™ you do have great abs but I also have a request for you. :: PLEASE :: put your shirt back on! Sadly if you click these you find out these are not spam emails, these are real guys, with real great abs. They are just apparently very proud of them, as you can see.

Dead Spam

Nine times out of ten when you see these it was a spam message but the profile was deleted before you could open it. Thanks to companies like spacepromoter.com users were able to create 1000′s if not millions of fake MySpace accounts. Their sole purpose to send out messages or post links in their profiles to all kinds of wonderful affiliate programs. MySpace has improved their ability to detect these profiles but still has a long way to go.

Sexy Time Girl!

Come on now…we both know she is way too good looking to messaging the likes of you. She is usually a fake profile and the message contains a link to a web cam or adult site.

Bling Bling Rapper

More music promotion, usually southern based rap. These profiles are usually among the worst designed with an over the top amount of blinking graphics and videos. Don’t click these unless you want to crash your browser. Also, do you think this guys necklass is big enough?

send me an IM

In true MySpace style they allow their instant messaging program to send these types of messages to your friends. If your social network is small you might not receive these but for networks of 1000K and higher you get about 100 of these per day. For the record if I was ever to send an IM to someone it certainly would not be you giuseppe!

Faceless

These can be one of two things, someone who is so new to MySpace they have not added an default image or its a message spamming profile. With a name like "KILLA 1" I’m going to guess its the later.

Alright for starters this will be the last Digg related post for awhile! I mean jeez looking at last few and I feel like the apple touting "top ten list loving" fan boys that dominate the site. However having said that Digg is certainly attracting more attention then usual as copy cats begin to pop up (some very fat copy cats). Can you blame them? They took a very basic voting concept and executed it perfectly while keeping up with any traffic surges its army of users brought. So how can the small guy get a piece? Well first off don’t try to be Digg, sorry they have already done it and can do it much better than you. Instead your Digg clone should be niche specific like some of these web sites. Creating a Digg clone that aligns with your main demographic is a great place to start. What are they passionate about? What sites do they visit and talk about? Wouldn’t you love to find out..

Supplies Needed:

• Pligg Software – Lucky you! Some smart guys have already created an open source Digg application you.
• Domain Name – As always, the shorter the better.
• Web Space - Linux web hosting that supports MySQL, bonus points if you have access to root. You might need it to enable SEO safe URL’s.
• Some Ninja Skills – If the line above made you say "HUH" you probably aren’t ready for this. Find someone who has experience installing and editing open source PHP applications.

Now in typical Digg fashion here is the top 5 ways to launch your Digg clone!

1. What is your hook?

So like we talked about earlier, if you try to be the "all seeing eye" of internet stories you’ll probably find yourself with a very slow site. Instead find a niche market related to your product or something you are passionate about. In my case I wanted to create a sister site to my ecommerce site which sells car parts. Building a community around your web site or product can be very valuable because of its "stickiness". My main demographic is 25 year old male Volkswagen owners so I setup www.vdubit.com. Even though I drive an Audi (shhh don’t tell them) I know this demographic very well and how much time they spend on VW related message boards. Creating a social bookmarking site for them not only gives me additional marketing options but adds to their online community as well.

2. Content Seeding

The most time consuming part of launching one of these sites but one of the most important. Take time to pick out good categories add seed each with at least 5-10 stories. We all know the feeling when you come to a message board with no threads…you hit that back button before the site finishes loading. Try to pull friends and colleagues into the site and get them to contribute.

3. Dangle a Carrot

You’ll find as I did that many visitors who aren’t regular Digg users "don’t get it" at first. Try to explain Digg to one of your non techie friends to recreate the experience yourself. So in addition to doing some education with them you’ll do even better if you give away something. Yes give away free product, shirts, gift cards, hell paypal cash to reward your top users. Adding some type of incentive at launch will greatly increase your chances of the site catching on.

4. Ring the Dinner Bell

Announce your new site to all your customers, clients, mailing lists, myspace friends, mail men, and Aunt Gracie. Mention your incentive if you have one and explain what the site is all about. Invite them to join and respond with any feedback they have about the site. Do your usual SEO and site map work to get your pages indexed as quickly as possible.

5. Monetizing

Don’t blast advertisements on the web site at first, in fact you should launch ad free. After you have built the community begin to include your advertisements throughout the site. Direct traffic to your other web sites by submitting links to these domains, as admin you can bring them right to the front page. The Pligg software supports Google Adwords nicely and has plenty of room for banners along the right side.

Final Thoughts

I’m not going to cover Design because that is a whole other subject, but do make some effort to create a unique look and feel for your Pligg based site. The templates are nice but if everyone uses the out of the book look we really are going to have "attack of the clones". After running our Pligg site for 1 week we have signed up 100 users and recieved 2000 unique visitors. We have just begun to market it so I expect to greatly increase those numbers and along with it the sites value.

Look, we want you to express yourself, ok? If you think the bare minimum is enough, then ok. But some people choose to wear more and we encourage that, ok? You do want to express yourself, don’t you?

STAN – Office Space

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• Social Networking
• Social Engineering
• Viral Functions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Next months issue of Wired Magazine has a nice article about "Crowd Hacking" and talks about Digg’s trouble with gaming the system. "Wag of the Finger" to Wired for not contacting me to talk about our recent experiment. In any case the full article is not available online until after 03.01.07 where you can read it here. Until then here is a preview and of course our unique commentary…

They cover all the classics including Spike the Vote, The Nerd’s Guide to Getting in Shape and User Submitter.

They highlight "4 Way to Manipulate the Mob" and they are as follows:

• The Buddy System – Where users organize groups to vote up other members submissions. This is probably the biggest threat to Digg because they are difficult to track. Kevin Rose says they are looking for the basic patterns but a sophisticated group could easily behave like random users and fool any system.
• Geek Baiting – Companies publish geek friendly articles to lure traffic to advertisement filled web sites and blog’s. This is where the classic "Blog SPAM!" flames in the comments section come from. Unfortunately now it seems like if the site contains any ads at all this flag gets raised over an eager Digg fanboy’s head. Those interested in doing this should probably read this first.
• Network for Hire – Like in the in case of Geekforlife top Digg users are being approached to sell their profiles or promote stories. The majority of the top users are far too loyal to succumb such temptation I am sure! (Send paypay requests to me@seanpercival.com)
• Did I say 4? – The forth is about Ebay and so lets skip it!

Something interesting they bring up is the "Friend Adding Tool" that Jim Messenger also purchased and gave to Digg developers. Tools like this are used all the time for Myspace and with great success. I can see some benefits to a large Digg friend network but the "social" pieces of the site are under developed and under used. They then go into talks about del.icio.us and I nod off because that site has never really grabbed me.

In closing its pretty safe to say that this will always be an issue to some degree. Systems will improve on both sides but until the Digg demographic becomes inundated with "internet road kill" (think Myspace and AOL users) its user base will be strong enough to protect against most schemes.

"The result is an arms race:
The crowdhackers vs the developers and user who patrol the system"

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• Social Engineering
• Black Hat’n
• Giving Kevin Rose a Headache

Lets face it, "googling" someone is becoming more and more common practice among the general populous. Every one from employers to friends (and lets not forget enemies) to just about any demographic looking to dig up the dirt on someone. Do you know what’s out there about you? Click here to find out and then come back.

How did you do? Was there something about you on page 1?

Don’t worry when I first looked I wasn’t even listed in the first 10 pages which was a surprise to me because my full name is not common. I soon discovered that I shared a name with a semi famous British Comedian who was dominating the first few pages of results. So for the last 6 months I’ve been working on SEO’ing my name and now have several placements on the first page.

Here are the top 5 ways you can improve the placement of your name on Google:

1. Vanity Domain – Although a bit egotistical, having a vanity domain is the best first step you can take. Google ranks sites with the search times directly in them very well and this domain should be the focus of your SEO efforts. The biggest advantage of this being that you’ll have full control over the content of this site and optimization. For aesthetics and to simplify things try and register your first and last name with no dashes, in my case www.seanpercival.com. If this is not available try adding a middle initial and if you must a combination of dashes or alternative spellings.

Optimize the crap out of your web site using good META and ALT information in your code. Create an XML site map and submit it to Google. The web site should include general information about yourself, skills and accomplishments.

2. Incoming Links - Just as with standard SEO work you want tons of incoming high quality links that use the text "Your Name" (Sean Percival) in the link code. This takes some time and effort but is well worth it. First create a text link with name on any web property you own and want to associate with your name. Next hit up some of the best blog’s here and add comments to articles that allow you to include a link. Don’t blatantly comment spam, instead add something in reference to the article and use your full name. Lastly give Payperpost a chance and create some buzz about a recent project or yourself. Buy about 20 postings using their "Direct" linking option and for the link text use "Your Name".

3. Negative Information - Having negative information about you online is like having bad debt on your credit report. You don’t want it there and its very difficult to remove sometimes. Start with sending a professional email to the owner of the site to see if you can get the information removed. If that doesn’t work or there is no response you want to do whatever it takes to get that page offline. Discrediting that page or domain with Google is good place to start, submit it to them 1000′s of times and link it with "bad neighborhoods".

4. Using Myspace and Linked In – First give your Myspace profile a serious look through and get rid of any pictures of you shirtless standing in front of a mirror or any comments from half naked women on your pictures. Employers are very savvy to Myspace now (only took then a few years to catch up) and they will try to locate your profile for a more intimate look at you. Hey we all think that video of the monkey drinking his own piss is HI-LAR-IOUS but is that something you want to represent yourself with by posting it on your profile? Your profile should either be private or contain tasteful images and other content just in case. To increase the presence of your profile on search engines create your custom URL and include your name within it. This is something you can only do once, so you may need to create a new profile if you already have chosen a custom URL.

There sure is a lot of buzz about Linked In these days, when I first signed up I could only find about 5 former colleagues but now that number has increased 10 fold. If you don’t already have a profile there I recommend creating one and use your full name as much as possible in your profile. Both Myspace and Linked in profiles are well ranked on Google so after a few weeks you are bound to see it pop up in the first few pages.

5. Go CPC Yourself! – Cant get yourself to page one or just impatient like a squirrel on speed? Setup a Google Adwords campaign and purchase variations of your name as a keyword. Link these campaigns to your personal web site, Myspace or Linked in profiles. You’ll find that just about any name (unless you share a name with Paris Hilton) can be purchased very cheaply and get first placement in the ad order.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• SEO Value
• Self Richesness
• Social Networking

Is it possible to get a story to the Digg homepage by paying your way to the top? Although this defeats the very purpose of Digg I thought it would be interesting to try. Today we saw the emergence of www.usersubmitter.com which allows visitors to get paid for their Diggs from publishers who pay $20 plus $1 for each digg.

According to seoblackhat.com one way to guarantee front page placement is to submit an article about Digg itself. It certainly worked for them so for the experiment I’ll use this Digg related post. Just like the great page rank tango webmasters go through with Google I anticipate more and more interest in this marketing tactic. Similar sites are bound to start popping up, sites like www.friendlyvote.com which appears to offer the same service.. Honestly I don’t think it will work, for now Digg’s user base is too strong and will fight off such manipulation. As always content is king, if your web site is "digg worthy" it will naturally rise to the top.

Updates to follow…

The Ham:

• Rumor has it that 51 diggs in a 24 period will get you to the homepage. I’ll pay for just 25 diggs, a total cost of $45.
• Just in case it actually works I’ve installed the wp-cache plugin. Since Digg can send 30-50K visitors in a days time this will help avoid crashing the server.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• Black Hat’n
• Social Engineering
• Viral Functions

** Update 5pm 10/03/06 – Well the system certainly does work, I received my 25 Diggs within a few hours. However they were not received fast enough to get front page placement. I was really wondering if you could "seed" a story then let it receive enough natural diggs to get the placement (if the story was interesting enough of course). I emailed usersubmitter.com and asked if we could add $20 or 20 more diggs, they quickly replied and allowed us to.

However I can now say that it is possible to pay your way to the homepage. Right now there is a web site that used usersubmitter.com to purchase an undisclosed amount of diggs displayed on the homepage. That story has over 400 diggs and growing…

** Update 8pm 10/03/06 – Reached 51 diggs in 24 hours but did not get placement

** Update 10pm 10/03/06 – Almost 24 hours later and it appears this story was never promoted. We learned that its not easy to manipulate the Digg system but it is possible. On a side note I was contacted by an anonymous Russian man who let me preview his "digg rigging" system and I must say it was pretty well done. I didn’t actually use it because he would only take payment through www.wmtransfer.com which I am not familiar with.

** Final Update!!!! The next day this story was minus 25 diggs, so I guess there was an audit done at some point or this story was brought to the attention of digg.com.

It seems the popular but sometimes controversial Web 2.0 blog dead20.com is dead, or at least crippled for the moment. For the last few days the site has been down due to exceeding its allowed bandwidth for the month. Recently the anonymous author was ousted here, since then we haven’t heard much from him. Most likely the site received too much traffic from the recent press and is on a shared hosting account somewhere.

You would think that with all that traffic coming in you would keep the site up. Maybe it will never return and if it does I’m sure it will not be the same. They say any press is good press but when you’re the VP of a Web 2.0 company this is probably not the attention you want. For now the name of that company is secret, shared by a select few over drinks somewhere in the valley. I’m curious to know, if you want to share email me.

Lastly, Skeptic if you need web hosting let me know. Hell we will even host it for free..

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• Internet Lore
• Gossip
• h4xoring

Specs:

Name: Digg Web Site: Digg.com Owner: Kevin Rose Online Since: November 2006 Members: 500K+ Wikipedia: Link

About:
One of the most fun sites from the "Web 2.0" world is all about sharing interesting news articles or links. Users submit links and fellow members can then "Digg" them, the more Diggs the higher the chance of it appearing in the featured stories. These stories become so popular that at some point the term "Digg Effect" was coined to describe when a server is crashed due to too much traffic from Digg.com.

Product Placement:
Last Friday morning I wasn’t exactly in a working mood so I jumped on Digg.com and went through some of the popular diggs of the day. I came across this posting, and clicked through to the featured story here. A micro radio controlled helicopter! What a great way further avoid doing any work on this a sunny Friday afternoon. I went down to my local Radio Shack and paid $70 and had fun for the next few hours playing around with my new toy.

Nice story, what’s the point (besides that you are slacker sometimes)?

Well right there you see the potential value of having a product featured on Digg beyond the increased web site traffic it brings.

Gotcha, what should I know?

The Ham :

• The above story was submitted by user p9s50W5k4GUD2c6 one of the top Digg users. The web site uses a system similar to Google’s page rank for its users. Those who have Dugg the most stories, and received the most Diggs are more likely to have their stories appear on the homepage. Build your profile with both interesting links and not just ones from your own web site
• Visitors are very tech savvy, if your product does not appeal to this demographic you wont get very far. Two of the top 5 stories are for computer related products.
• Diggs to product review web sites do very well. If your product is not featured on one of these sites change that. Get product samples into the hands of the top gear web sites They love free stuff just as much as we do.
• The user base is very active and have the ability to "Bury" bad stories or comments. Don’t SPAM the system, in addition to decreasing the value of Digg your stories will not make it far.
• Add a Digg button to your blog or web site. Create Digg worthy content and let your web site visitors increase your Digg counts for you.
• Links are allowed in the comments, just include http:// with your domain. Once again users can bury comments so don’t bother unless its relevant to the subject.

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• Social Networking
• SEO Benefits
• Viral Functions

Interesting story posted on TechCrunch today about a possible 1 billion dollar buy out of Facebook.com from Yahoo. We’ve heard the rumor before but now we have some juicy new details from the rumor mill:

During one series of talks with Microsoft, Facebook executives told their Microsoft peers they couldn’t’t do an 8 a.m. conference call because the company’s 22-year-old founder and chief executive, Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn’t’t be awake, says a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft executives were incredulous.

and

At one point in the Yahoo negotiations, the talks extended into the weekend, says a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Zuckerberg, this account continues, said he couldn’t’t take part because his girlfriend was in town. Others pointed out they were closing in on a billion-dollar deal. Mr. Zuckerberg said it didn’t’t matter: his cell phone would be off, this person says.

Who is to say if this is the PR machine at Facebook.com at work or if these statements are true. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg is hitting a breaking point and just cant deal with the pressure. I do however whole heartily support not waking up early for a conference call, especially when you are holding all the cards. Someone who can develop such an innovative web site deserves to have everything on his terms. Don’t miss the boat though, most people seem to say sell, take the money and run…

:: cues up "The Gambler" by Kenny Rogers on iTunes ::

Last week I had the great pleasure of attending "The Future of Web Apps" conference put on by Carson Workshops. I have to say this was one of the best and most rewarding conferences I have ever been to. Sure that’s not saying much because most "Geek" conferences can be a real snore fest but that was certainly not the case here. The conference embodied what’s great about "Web 2.0", that being the fact that this stuff is social, fun, and engaging. Here are some of my highlights:

Getting There:
I live in Orange County, CA which is about 6 hours away for San Francisco so I drove up the night before. Along the way I drove next to (and through) the huge California wildfire that was burning along interstate 5. After some great views, lots of ass fault and traffic I was into city. San Francisco is an interesting city, just like Manhattan they are squeezing way too many people into such a small space. Driving from point A to point B is never easy, I ended up driving the wrong way on one way streets and doing many "city left turns" to get to my destination. Road lagged and tired I retired for the night…

The Conference:
Since my exit from the 9-5 corporate world I’ve had trouble waking up before 9am let alone being somewhere at this time. Hey what can I say, life is too short not to sleep in sometimes. Never the less i dragged myself out of bed and made my way to the Palace of Fine Arts, one of my favorite spots to see in San Fran. I was pleased to see that the crowd was young and dare I say hip? It was nice not being the only one in designer jeans, converse and with a long shaggy haircut.

The Speakers:

Kevin Carson
Kevin and his wife Gillian are the directors of the show and Carson Systems. Kevin’s company is responsible for Drop Send which is a service similar to YourSendIt and allows you to email large files. He helped to open the show and introduce the speakers. He also spoke at the end of conference but I unfortunately had to miss this for another meeting.

Kevin Rose
Honestly the main reason I attended this conference was to see Kevin speak. Being a huge fan of TechTV and Digg I had to see what the future held for his online adventures. Even though he was under the weather he delivered a great presentation but at times it felt like he was reading and not talking. Here are some interesting facts that he shared:

• Digg was started with $2,000 and $99 per month server cost
• Kevin used elance for the initial programming and paid the coder $10 per hour
• Built using open source PHP and mySQL
• Digg now has 500K registered users, 10 million daily page views, 90+ servers

Download the Audio MP3 of Kevin’s Presentation Here

Michael Arrington
Number 2 on my "must see list" was Michael Arrington, the man behind Techcruch. For months now I have visited his web site daily to get the latest Web 2.0 news so I was eager to see what he had to say. As excepted his presentation ranked as my favorite, the insight that was shared was invaluable and ahead of its time. Center networks has a great review of Michael’s presentation including audio here.

During his Q&A session I decided to get up and ask him about a recent blurb on Techcruch that quickly mentioned Michael getting a "slap on the wrist" at the recent Apple event. He seemed to appreciate the question and told a great story sparing no details (listen to the audio for his complete response). Thanks Michael for your candor and inspiration.

More coverage to follow, being gone a week has put me too far behind in my work to write more at the moment…

I was reading Oreilly Radar the other day and come across a post on a upcoming conference called "The Future of Web Apps". As luck would have it I’ll already be in the San Francisco area during the 2 days of the conference so I registered. I am most looking forward to the presentations by Digg founder Kevin Rose and Techcrunch owner Mike Arrington but there are many other great minds and companies represented.

I recommend checking it out, and let me know if you will be attending so I can say hello. Update coverage will be posted here on Social Ham after the conference.

The Ham:

• Discover how the web’s most successful sites and applications were built, plus get expert practical advice from the best in the business on creating your own web app. Whether you’re a developer, business owner or entrepreneur, join us for this exclusive two-day audience with the biggest names in web development.
• Cost is $295
• Dates are September 13th and 14th
• Location is the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre
• Sponsors include Google, Yahoo, Mediatemple, Sitepen, AOL, Feedburner, Socialtext, Dropsend, Amigo, O’Reilly
  

Name: Windows Live Expo Web site: expo.live.com Owner: Microsoft Online Since: February 2006

About:
Craigslist killer? Probably not, but you must give some credit to Microsoft for trying. You’ve probably started to see more about Windows Live here and there as you visit Microsoft sites or use their IM service. However many people have yet to hear about Windows Live Expo yet which is Microsoft’s free listing web site.

Similar to craigslist, anyone can post a product our service for sale or search for items to purchase. In addition to the basic services you find at craigslist, Expo also offers image galleries, ratings, and comments.

The Ham:

• Registration and listings are free
• HTML is not allowed in listings
• Links are allowed but they use a JS script to launch external links
• Photo galleries allow you to post several pictures of your product or service
• Our first listing received 100 views after 2 days

Ratings: (on a scale of 1-5 hams)

• Social Networking
• SEO Benefits
• Viral Functions

Looking for more info, visit their Myspace profile

http://www.myspace.com/crasherboyz

Here is the YouTube:

read more | digg story

I noticed something interesting the other day while visiting my local Fox news stationâ??s web site. Well lookie there, seems like the local Fox affiliates have been re branded as “MyFox” and even include part of the Myspace logo. We all knew Fox Interactive would extend its Myspace brand where ever possible and it appears we are just seeing the being of it here.

So the question is will “myWEBSITE.com” be the new “iWEBSITE.com?”

When Apple released the iMAC in 1998 it caused a wave of companies and web sites who adopted the “i” prefix. I like to call companies that take a approach like this “Branding Dingle Berries”. Thankfully many didn’t last or eventually re branded itself with something better as the “i” luster began to wear off. Lets hope the same thing doesn’t happen again in the Web 2.0 era and the “my” prefix.

Naturally the domain squatters have already caught on, in fact one registered http://www.myfox.com/ already…

Every major Social Network has some type of Invite feature. This allows you to upload your address book and send an email to the user inviting them to join your network. The user receives an email from the Social Network with a link to your profile and allows them to signup.

This feature has been under utilized for marketing and branding purposes. Give it a try, to start get a copy of your customer list in Excel format if possible. Different sites handle the data formatting differently so you may have some trial and error before you get it right. Still having trouble? Open a Gmail account and import your addresses with their tools which are more robust (Please note that Gmail limits your address book to 3000 entries). Once uploaded most websites will allow you to download your address book direct from Gmal, Yahoo and other providers. 

Some of your customers might already be members of the site, while others will be new Social Networking. Including your customers in your Social Network not only helps with branding but allows you to continually market to them via bulletins and blog postings.

Do not use this tool to send invites to your bulk email lists, youâ??ll confuse and annoy a lot of people. Keep it clean and focused, the way Social Network marketing should beâ?¦

 

MySpace Inc v. Anthony Lineberry 

Anthony used to run http://myfriendbot.com/ but since recieving the lawsuit has shut the website down. When we last talked with Anthony he was looking to the EFF for help. Updates to follow…

View the docket here.

I guess you could say I have extensive experience with Myspace friend adder robots. Iâ??ve bought and used just about everyone that is out there. Enough experience that Forbes magazine featured some of my success a few months ago in their magazine. In an effort to legitimize the service I even went as far as to talk with the Myspace empire directly only to receive (Cue Star Wars Death Star Music)  â??Enjoy it while it lastsâ?¦â? in response.

Ironically Myspace could severely cripple this software by simply improving its CAPTCHA system. Right now it is easily reset by sending a message to yourself, a hole that all major software applications have taken advantage of. Well it seems there have been some advancement in this area in the last 2 weeks.
Myspace has been steadily enhancing its Spam flagging system which is similar to what is used at craigslist. Too many users flagging a message as Spam will cause the Myspace Profile to lose messaging ability. Incoming Myspace messages still work, however any sent messages never make it the recipient. This helped to slow down the amount of robots sending messages however robot generated friend adding was still viable. However lately even accounts only sending friend requests have also had their outgoing mail disabled, which in addition renders the CAPTCHA reset unusable. Since there is no way to flag a friend request as spam the common theory that it is now based on additional factors such as:

1. the amount of requests sent during a specific time period (IE more than 50 per minute)
2. the ratio of accepts to denys
3. the amount of pending requests on the profile
4. the amount of emails to yourself from yourself (For CAPTCHA resetting)

With option 1 being the most likely cause Silent Products and Friend Fetch were the first to add a CAPTCHA cool down period.
So far it has been working and allows the cat and mouse game of Social Network robots to continueâ?¦

The lawsuit claims that the Web site does not require users to verify their age and calls the security measures aimed at preventing strangers from contacting users younger than 16 â??utterly ineffective.â?

â??MySpace is more concerned about making money than protecting children online,â? said Adam Loewy, who is representing the girl and her mother in the lawsuit against MySpace, parent company News Corp. and Pete Solis, the 19-year-old accused of sexually assaulting the girl.

Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer for MySpace.com, said in a written statement: â??We take aggressive measures to protect our members. We encourage everyone on the Internet to engage in smart web practices and have open family dialogue about how to apply offline lessons in the online world.â?

Founded in 2003, MySpace has more than 80 million registered users worldwide and is the worldâ??s third most-viewed Web site, according to the lawsuit.

Loewy said the lawsuit is the first of its kind in the nation against MySpace.

Solis contacted the girl through her MySpace Web site in April, telling her that he was a high school senior who played on the football team, according to the lawsuit.

In May, after a series of e-mails and phone calls, he picked her up at school, took her out to eat and to a movie, then drove her to an apartment complex parking lot in South Austin, where he sexually assaulted her, police said. He was arrested May 19.

The lawsuit includes news reports of other assault cases in which girls were contacted through MySpace. They include a 22-year-old Wisconsin man charged with six counts of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a 27-year-old Connecticut man accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl.

MySpace says on a â??Tips for Parentsâ? page that users must be 14 or older. The Web site does nothing to verify the age of the user, such as requiring a driverâ??s license or credit card number, Loewy saidâ?¦

How TagWorld and other next-generation social networks could feed your business–and maybe even change the world.

By: Anya Kamenetz T he spring of 2006 will go down as a curious moment in the annals of buzz. The mainstream-media steamroller caught up with a bona fide cultural phenomenon, then flattened it into a cliché before the average person knew what all the fuss was about. That’s ironic, because the fuss was about the average person–that is, his or her participation in what’s known variously as “social media,” “social networking,” “user-generated content,” the “live Web” or the dreaded “Web 2.0.” But don’t worry, this isn’t yet another story getting all up in MySpace or metaprofiling Friendster profiles. This is about how those sites, and their successors, are growing up–and about their impact on how business gets done. Companies, whether they sell software, movies, or dog food, are changing the way they communicate, make decisions, and develop and market products, all because of the exponential rise of new tools that allow people to express themselves more easily online–and on the streets.

Two major examples of the networks’ real-world power broke barely a week apart. On Monday, March 27, about 40,000 mainly Latino high schoolers in Los Angeles played hooky to protest the Senate’s proposed bill to crack down on illegal immigration. It was believed to be the largest such demonstration in L.A.’s history, double the size of the historic Chicano walkouts of 1968. Through the week, thousands more walked out in California, Texas, and Florida. Then, on Tuesday, April 4, 24-year-old Sandi Thom signed a £1 million, five-album deal with RCA/Sony BMG out of her basement in London, live via Webcast. She had just finished 21 straight nights of live performances–also Webcast from her basement. By the end, Thom was pulling in a nightly audience of 100,000 listeners. In both cases, the “audience,” whether of pissed-off students or besotted roots-rock fans, was drawn together, at least in part, by word of mouth on social-networking sites such as MySpace, the two-and-a-half-year-old company with an unbelievable 72 million members.

“In the beginning, there was sociability,” proclaims Danah Boyd, the 28-year-old savant of social networks. But in the first-generation Web, technical barriers meant that the pleasures of group communication online were limited to the geek subculture. Blogs, then social networks, changed all that. A PhD student at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, Boyd is helping invent the field of Internet anthropology. The occasionally boa-clad Burning Man attendee has studied online social behavior from Usenet (the early-1980s bulletin board for groups such as alt.rec.camping) to Craigslist; Friendster; Tribe.net; Blogger; and now, armed with a research grant from the MacArthur Foundation, MySpace. Separately, she looks at social media for Yahoo Research Berkeley, a major initiative by the company to work closely with academics in the hope of figuring out where the Web is going next.

Boyd’s point is that while first-generation Web sites were all about human-computer interaction, culture now drives the Web and its design. “What you’re seeing now is people interacting not justâ?¦ with ‘the computer’ or with ‘information’ but with other people,” she says. “You have to bring out the sociology and anthropology.” Personal connections–forged through words, pictures, video, and audio posted just for the hell of it–are the life of the new Web, bringing together the estimated 60 million bloggers, those 72 million MySpace users, and millions more on single-use social networks where people share one category of stuff, like Flickr (photos), Del.icio.us (links), Digg (news stories), Wikipedia (encyclopedia articles), and YouTube (video).

This hive of activity has already generated a lot of noise, but what most observers have yet to realize is just how productive the hive really is and how powerful it can be when it swarms in a particular direction. In fact, it’s hard to overstate the coming impact of these new network technologies on business: They hatch trends and build immense waves of interest in specific products. They serve giant, targeted audiences to advertisers. They edge out old media with the loving labor of amateurs. They effortlessly provide hyperdetailed data to marketers. If your customers are satisfied, networks can help build fanatical loyalty; if not, they’ll amplify every complaint until you do something about it. They are fund-raising platforms. They unify activists of every stripe, transforming an atomized mass of individuals with few resources into an international movement able to put multinational corporations and governments on the defensive. (Those immigration protests played no small part in stymieing Senate action over immigration.) They provide an authentic, peer-to-peer channel of communication that is far more credible than any corporate flackery. And all this after only four years or so in development. On the day you read this, a quarter of a million more people will jump onto MySpace, each with her own particular purpose in mind.

Medium = Message

New ideas generated on social networks may be worth a hell of a lot more than advertising. As in the first Internet boom, many social-media companies started out as hobbies for their founders. Jonathan Abrams, the guy who started Friendster in 2002, one of the early examples of its kind, just wanted a better dating service. But the difference on today’s Net can be found in one thing: adwords. Those pay-per-clicks remain the most obvious way of monetizing the Web–and the reason venture capitalists and big companies are interested in growing these networking sites in the first place. Yet the productive quality of social networks only starts with directing eyeballs to banner ads, a fact that has eluded most business-world observers. Take one limited (and well-traveled) example: Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition last summer of MySpace for $580 million. The deal was covered mainly as a giant real-estate transaction, the buying of the right to serve ads to a place where millions of teens hang out. And it was certainly that. But News Corp. clearly sees a bigger upside: Social networking, after all, is a new channel for media, Murdoch’s core business. Not only will the site generate simple ad revenue, but it’s also a gold mine of new ideas and tastes, a buzz-building machine for brands, and a vast pool of new talent and content for outlets such as the newly formed MySpace Records or even, says News Corp., TV. Over the years, those opportunities might be worth a hell of a lot more than ads. Similarly, Yahoo has bought Flickr and Del.icio.us, and it’s sharing metrics on its half-billion users with researchers such as Boyd, simply to learn more about how and why people interact on the Web and to give them more reasons to do so.

“Social networking isn’t a product or, God forbid, a company, but a feature that lives in service of some other mission,” says Bradley Horowitz, head of technology development for Yahoo. “The spirit of social computing is the concept of leaving value in your wake.” That value starts with expression. Users of social-networking sites are producing and freely sharing a whole universe of content for others to consume. Some of it approaches journalism in quality, some approaches art, or advertising, and a great deal of it is more fun and appealing to the 18-to-34 target demographic than whatever is on TV. Why watch fake “reality” shows when you can connect with actual reality? In Boyd’s analysis, networks such as MySpace and Flickr are amplifying and speeding up what the hippest kids on the street always did: incubate trends, nurture subcultures, and remix styles. For media and Web-portal companies, then (and really, what’s the difference these days?), the new social gadgets can look like a magic money machine. Rather than exhaust yourself producing what you think the kids might want, you sit back and let them show off for one another. “Our core asset is the audience and community that exist on our site,” Horowitz says.

How that community can feed–or destroy–an existing business is fast becoming the most important analytical challenge in the marketplace. Rock stars, long expert at connecting intimately with crowds of thousands, have been the prototypical new-Web marketing geniuses. Musical Cinderella stories such as Sandi Thom, emo kids Fall Out Boy, and Britain’s Arctic Monkeys–all pop-culture phenoms made online–are only a few examples of how the network can manifest itself in the nonvirtual world. So is the movie Snakes on a Plane , starring Samuel L. Jackson. The absurdist title alone made the thriller a cult hit online, though it won’t be released until August. New Line Cinema and director David Ellis heeded the first tenet of life online–respond to what people are saying–by reshooting for five days, cranking the film up from a PG-13 rating to a solid R. Then New Line teamed up with TagWorld, a next-generation social network, to offer a songwriting contest: People submitted their tunes, TagWorld members picked the finalists, the filmmakers are choosing the winner, and that song is slated for the movie’s soundtrack.

How much bigger could this stuff get? Well, one out of three South Koreans already has a “minihompy” (mini homepage) on Cyworld, a social-networking site coming to America later this year. But it is TagWorld, a startup based in Santa Monica, California, that represents the most ambitious vision yet of what online communities could be. Bloggers are calling TagWorld the “MySpace killer” for its deep menu of services, which integrates features from seemingly every successful network out there: blogging, of course, plus a multipage site; a gigabyte of storage; a music player that serves up your own tunes (as well as those pulled down via a Music Discovery Engine); classifieds; and photo-, video-, and bookmark-sharing. As the name indicates, all of these bits of data can be tagged with short, descriptive names (“Dave’s party,” say) for easy search and retrieval by other users.

Evan Rifkin and Fred Krueger, TagWorld’s cofounders, are serial entrepreneurs who funded it from their successes in the dotcom days. The community added 1.4 million members between November 2005 and April 2006, healthy growth for a site still in beta, but Rifkin is confident that he’ll have 100 million members within a few years. “This is the beginning of social networking,” he says, walking me through his personal TagWorld site over the phone. “User-generated content on the Internet will dramatically increaseâ?¦. We don’t think this is a coolness issue. We believe people want to live their lives online.”

My (Smarter) Space

TagWorld’s advantage isn’t its jukebox or some widget, it’s the information the site gathers. TagWorld’s real competitive advantage, however, isn’t its jukebox or some other widget. It’s the real-time information the site gathers. Musicians who post their music and videos online will be rewarded with demographics on exactly who is listening and where, bloggers will see exactly which other members are reading them, and advertisers, once there are some, will be able to find out similar information (within privacy guidelines, of course). That kind of supermuscular data and easy, automatic feedback makes TagWorld’s platform even more potentially valuable to businesses than the current generation of social networks. “It’s really the way business will be conducted going forward,” says Rifkin. “Businesses can have a lot of data without putting the work into it. Let’s say you are sitting on your computer listening to Bloc Party and automatically that info is posted on your Web site. You’ve generated content by the act of doing something for yourself. That information will automatically get pushed to me, as a marketer, and I get a list at the end of every day.” In other words, when you press play on your music player, that choice could become a bit of autogenerated content, and a piece of easily aggregated and invaluable marketing information (e.g., the number of urban 19-year-old girls who downloaded the song yesterday).

The key here, however, is that networked consumers are not passive participants in the consumption process. It’s easier than ever for them to ferret out unbiased, independent information about companies, products, or brands–and to post in turn their own highly biased opinions about the same. The wattage of social networking means those personal opinions can be set to music, Flash-animated, and propagated around the Web; the more interesting or entertaining or useful they are, the further they travel. The emergent power of those collective judgments shows up in a 2006 survey of “opinion leaders” by Edelman, the huge international PR firm, which found that 68% of respondents rated “a person like yourself or your peer” as the most credible spokesperson about a company. That number has tripled since 2003. What’s more, 36% of respondents said that if they don’t like a company, they go online to say so. And a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey released in January found that 60 million Americans consulted the Internet for help with major life decisions, including big-ticket purchases. When it comes to information, the balance of power has truly shifted to the consumer.

Vision Critical, a Vancouver-based market-research company, was built on the premise that online feedback can make or break companies. Vision Critical constructs custom online communities for large companies to get far more detailed data and better response rates than traditional market research delivers. The idea is to build relationships with “panels” of thousands of users who are folded into the decision-making process and given feedback on their feedback. One major retailer, for example, offered teenagers the chance to help choose its new spring line online. “It’s only in the past year and a half that we’ve had companies start to embrace this,” says Jason Smith, the company’s senior VP of sales and marketing. “There are some statistics saying that almost 50% of market research is being done online.” Vision Critical built another unbranded site, called Pet Talk, for a major company in the pet industry. “Pet owners can upload photos of pets and share stories,” says Smith. “Keeping connected that way builds trust. We’re connecting in a way that’s not just marketing to them.” When the company sends a Pet Talk survey to these thousands of members, response rates are much higher and the data much deeper, because respondents feel like a part of a community. (We’ll see how long it takes Pet Talk members to find out who’s behind their “community”–and how they feel about it.)

Social media is far from being all cupcakes for business, however. In expressing and funneling the ever-changing will of the people, it remains a fiercely independent and mutating beast. Chevrolet’s foray into user-generated marketing backfired in March because it misread its audience and lost control over its own campaign. Chevy offered up a Web contest to create an ad for the Tahoe, but the entries that got passed around, blogged about, and eventually covered in the mainstream media were all about the SUV’s abysmal gas mileage and melting polar ice caps.

The average person’s opinion becomes even scarier to companies (and governments) when someone starts aggregating those opinions and targeting them for maximum impact. It was no accident that a political protest was one of the first real-world demonstrations of social networks’ power. Activists adopted these new technologies early on because the tools mesh perfectly with the goal of connecting and empowering individuals. “Those of us in online activism have been thinking about these issues for years,” says Alexandra Samuel, head of Vancouver, British Columbia-based startup Social Signal. “Suddenly the tech world and the business world are interested in collaborating and building communities.” Samuel wrote her 2004 poli-sci dissertation at Harvard on “hactivists” who use legal and illegal means online to do things such as protest international trade agreements; her startup builds and grows customized online communities. And while her first clients were all nonprofits and government agencies, now she’s getting approached by businesses, including Canada’s largest credit union. “The name of the game now is to engage the user in creating value,” she says.

“We’re honestly at the very very beginning of this,” says Vision Critical’s Smith, of the use of social networks. “This community concept is just going to grow and expand.” That expansion will be driven not just by the technology but also by the various causes of the people who use it. The new Web, after all, lets us create value just by doing what comes naturally: speaking up.

Anya Kamenetz is the author of Generation Debt (Riverhead, 2006). She lives in New York.

Copyright © 2006 Mansueto Ventures LLC. All rights reserved.
Fast Company, 375 Lexington Avenue.,New York , NY 10017

Which is to say that selling your product or service on MySpace is more like trying to win a high school popularity contest than any traditional campaigning. In MySpace land, friends are the most valuable currency imaginable. Win them, interact with them, support them, display them, and trade them. An esteemed member of the MySpace community is one that has hundreds of thousands of friends, and businesses are indeed held to the same standard.

Session 1: Get Cool

How does one go about making so many friends, you ask? Just think back to those early days of school, when you decided to shed your nerdy image and become one of the cool kids. Remember? It wasn’t all smile-flashing and handshaking. The really popular kids on the block were the ones who cheated and cut corners to get what they wanted. 

Enter the MySpace friend bots. Over the past year, clever programmers have developed and streamlined tools to automate the site’s tedious friend-making process. Software applications from sites such as Friend Fetch, MyFriendRobot, Silent Productions, Friend Adder Pro, FriendBot, and MySpace Man enable advertisers to send mass friend requests, comment broadcasts, and event invites to highly targeted users in the MySpace network. While their legality remains a question tentatively being pursued by MySpace itself, the utilities have proved an immensely successful means of delivering messages to the right audience, getting users to â??befriendâ? business profiles, and supplying click-throughs to corporate home pages.

The first key to utilizing these tools is to make certain your message will resonate within a niche community in the site. Music and entertainment advertisers work well with MySpace because they bring in relevant content for users to digest and discuss. Clothing/fashion, food, and cars are also likely topics of viral discussion, provided you hit upon the right users.

â??I cannot exactly fit what sort of product goes over best with Myspace, because it really seems to be all dependent on the marketer,â? Justin Lavoie, CEO of a leading suite of MySpace bot applications, Silent Productions , tells ADOTAS. â??A clever marketer has shown to be able to sell just about anything through Myspace, evident by one client who has been getting sales on cars. I would say that the product should still match the demographic to some degreeâ?¦ I couldn’t imagine retirement insurance as being a big hoot on Myspace.â?

 

Session 2: Target, target, target

Once you purchase and download a bot, running anywhere between $20 and $300, you’ll be presented with a targeting interface that allows you select MySpacers by personal preferences, interest groups, and various other affiliations. You can then begin sending out friend requests by the droves to pump up awareness of your profile presence. MySpace has imposed a cap of 500 invitations a day, so make each one count!

You might expect consumers in such a user-driven, community-oriented site to take particular disdain to the imposition of advertising messages, especially when they masquerade as â??friends.â? According to the bot software operators, this response can be avoided with effective targeting.

â??When my products are used as they are designed to be used the friend requests are not shotgunned nor random,â? Lavoie advises. â??A general rule of thumb is 40% of the requests sent out will be accepted, on a low estimate. Because they are fitting to people who would have a good potential interest in what is being marketed, the friend requests and marketing are relevant and are accepted much more.â?

Once you have built a healthy base of a few thousand users, you can take several steps to foster the viral transmission of your message through the social network. Silent Productions as well as most other MySpace bots offer â??Friend Auto-Accept,â? which ensures that a user will get your full attention (or at least think they are) when they take an interest in your profile.

When they add you to their friends list, the bot will also leave a personalized message of thanks on their blog. Getting your name and link on a comment blog is a cunning tactic, because in addition to the profile host, the thousands of other users who view that profile will be exposed to it as well.

Final Exam: Is it legal?

Since the MySpace’s initial launch, the site itself has failed to take full advantage of the commercial opportunities inherent in the space, opening the door to smaller advertisers who use auto-friend-making software. However, the many bot applications on the market have proved so effective in cultivating sales that they’ve awoken and alarmed the sleeping giants that operate MySpace. Seeking to lay claim over the markets developed behind their back, MySpace has issued cease-and-desist letters most bot developers and suppliers. They point to their Terms of Service, which can be interpreted in a number of ways:

â??Collecting usernames and/or email addresses of Members by electronic or other means for the purpose of sending unsolicited email or unauthorized framing of or linking to the Website is prohibited.â?

The offending â??piratesâ? have for the most part refused to desist, and no major legal dispute has resulted thus far.

â??All the software does is automate what a user would normally do to build their profile,â? Sean Percival, CEO of FriendFetch, contends to ADOTAS. Friendfetch has stood by this reasoning even after receiving numerous cease and desist letters from MySpace.

One popular software package that has managed to avoid harassment by site operators is Friend Adder Pro . â??I have never received any cease and desist letters from MySpace and I don’t ever expect to because it is difficult for them to track Friend Adder Pro,â? Friend Adder Pro’s CEO tells ADOTAS. â??Friend Adder Pro acts as a real person would in sending the friend requests, sending messages, and posting comments.â?

MySpace has attempted to install security measures to filter out bot activity on their site, such as the CAPTCHA system last October, but the applications have consistently countered with their own advancements. â??This (security) image contains a combination of letters and numbers and asks the user to enter it in text box before the friend request/message/comment can be sent,â? he says. â??However, we are constantly developing new ways to bypass this feature.â?

While this technological chess match continues indefinitely, it is unclear whether MySpace will ultimately put its full energy toward legally eliminating mass marketing from its site.

The situation is certainly beginning to echo the evolution of the email marketing channel, where many spammers who were once considered intrusive and unlawful struck deals which legitimated their business. MySpace may have something to learn from companies such as AOL, whose new Certified Email program has helped them turn a profit from and put a leash on the mass marketers that flooded their space.

â??They want to protect themselves, which is understandable,â? Friendfetch’s Percival says of MySpace. â??However, the site’s founder has mentioned that the site was made for people to network, so hopefully there is middle ground somewhere there.â?
 

MySpace has to fend off more than online Lotharios. A bunch of young programmers are trying to–gasp!–commercialize the networking site.

Sean Percival, who sells customized European license plates, earlier this year hit upon a hot place to expand his marketing: MySpace, the popular networking Web site. He bought software that allowed him to automate MySpace’s process of inviting other members to be “friends.” Percival, 26, says the program, which he calls adder software, helped him make 4,200 car owners into “friends” on a MySpace profile, where he writes about his company in his blog. Business shot up from $2,500 per month to $13,000, as more MySpacers stumbled onto his profile and found their way to his retail Web site. Impressed, Percival went into business with the programmers who created the adder and now sells it himself.

MySpace and its 80 million members are a juicy target for marketers like Percival. So a bunch of small-time programmers with Web sites like Eek Records and Helpumarket have sprung up to sell these adders, costing $25 to $85, to instantly invite a web of contacts. Customers are mostly fledgling bands but also include comedians and the animal-activist group Peta. The technology speeds the process of making friends on MySpace, so that sending invites to, say, 350 people–which, done manually, could take as long as two hours–instead might take as little as five minutes.

Which is just one reason MySpace is furious about this. Rather than connect people through real-life friendships or shared interests, “It becomes more about making a buck off them,” says E-marketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson. The software also interferes with MySpace’s plans to prove it is worth the $580 million News Corp. paid for it last year. MySpace must figure out how to make money itself without commercializing the site so much it sparks a mass exodus. For instance, MySpace charges upwards of $50,000 per month for companies to build and promote profiles. Wendy’s has one for a cartoon character and Toyota for its new car, Yaris. “If there’s a system to be gamed, [News Corp.] wants to control it,” says Jupiter Research analyst David Card.

MySpace has decreed that the automated programs upset the company’s “ecosystem” and “principles.” It set up a technical hurdle called a captcha, which requires a code to be manually entered for batch entries to MySpace profiles. (Several adder sites claim they can bypass this.) It has also been sending cease-and-desist letters to vendors of adder software. “Such programs slow down the MySpace servers and interfere with the ability of the Web site to function,” says a Mar. 31 letter addressed to FriendFetch.com. MySpace filed a federal lawsuit in California alleging trademark infringement against Anthony Lineberry, who sells adders on his site Myfriendbot.com with the slogan “Need fans? Or just want to be popular on MySpace?” Lineberry, 21, says he is not aware of the suit: “That kind of freaks me out, honestly. I’m just a kid.”

Still, MySpace may have a tough time stamping this out. Percival, the license plate salesman, says he was contacted by none other than a News Corp. employee in March looking for adder software to market Fox on MySpace. He says Fox didn’t pursue it further.