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The new digerati: connected for a reason

Steve Rubel wonders if "the Interruption Economy sacks prosperity:" "Conventional wisdom says that technology -- and nowadays the Internet -- will always continue to advance and bring with it productivity gains and prosperity. That's certainly been the case for years. However, historically there are pauses. After the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were fully realized it took awhile for the next big era to begin. I wonder if we're about to enter a similar lull now that the Information Age is arguably almost 30 years old." Rubel demands "we need new tools for … Read more

Bye bye World Wide Web, welcome Giant Global Graph

It's the graph, stupid! Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, has published a much discussed post about the future "Internet of things." Yet he doesn't mean "things" in the real world, tagged and connected by the World Wide Web. He is talking about online objects (things and people) that are reminiscent of Bruce Sterling's "spimes." In line with the goals of the Social Network Portability community, Berners-Lee argues that individuals and objects as well as the connections between them are the key items on the web, rather than … Read more

The Zimbra opportunity: A true social network

One of the primary problems with sites like Facebook and MySpace is that they provide a somewhat specious view of one's "social graph" (dumb but popular way of saying "true network of relationships"). I have ~2,400 people in my address book, but only a fraction of those are true "friends" in the sense that normal people use the term. My email system (as well as my phone records and IM history) knows exactly who are my real friends (as Tim O'Reilly frequently notes). Friendship without communication is...not really friendship.

Now the New York Times is reporting that Google and Yahoo are merging social networking into the place where most true networks converge: email.

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph - the connections between people.… Read more

How to make money on Facebook: No one knows

On Monday at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, I moderated a panel about making money from Facebook apps, with Giles Goodwin of Widgetbox, Hooman Radfar of Clearspring, and Jeff Nolan of Newsgator. It's a complicated question, especially for companies that have existing Web-based businesses. When do you start work on a Facebook app? Will a Facebook product cannibalize your other Web products? Can an online business survive on Facebook exclusively?

The panel agreed on just about nothing, which is indicative of a market in a very early stage of development. My favorite issue came from an audience question. John Furrier … Read more

New ad networks leverage Facebook's long tail

Let's say you've got a great new Facebook app or widget. Good for you! Too bad no one is going to see it.

Narendra Rocherolle (and a few other entrepreneurs) are trying to rescue your app. Rocherolle launched fbExchange a few months ago with the goal of making the "long tail" of apps work for developers. The idea is that you put a little ad banner on your page, which other apps are pitched on. In exchange, your app gets advertised on other Facebook apps.

You can buy clicks if you have no traffic to feed … Read more

Facebook advice from zombies

Lance Tokuda is the CEO of RockYou, a social network app building company. RockYou makes music and photo sharing apps on Facebook, as well as a very popular "wall" replacement, SuperWall. The app I'm most familiar with, though is Zombies, which I've heard derided as the "multi-level marketing social app" (although, really, isn't that the point?). I tried it for a while but recently uninstalled it since I couldn't get my wife to stop biting my zombie. And not in a good way.

What is the secret of Zombie's success? Lance … Read more

Your own personal Richter scale

If you live in Kansas, the Japanese obsession with earthquake-detection devices might seem a bit insane. But we can guarantee they'll be of interest to anyone from California or other parts of the world where fault lines run free.

Usually, the gadgets we've seen claim to give some kind of early warning--and are therefore of dubious value. The unpronounceable "GraGraph," however, seems more realistic: It supposedly indicates the Richter-scale strength of a temblor as it's occurring in real time, according to SCI FI Tech. That's something people might actually buy, as evidenced by … Read more

Best4c does quick and slick charts

Best4c says it's the "best online diagram tool on earth." A pretty lofty claim, considering how many other chart utilities are out there that have similar feature sets (see Gliffy, mxGraph, Ajax13, Floor Planner, etc.) Best4c offers up a simple drag and drop editor, with a four-pane interface that mimics a other desktop drawing apps. You can pick from a fairly large selection of items to drag into your virtual space, including items for floor planning like desks, couches, and houseplants, all the way to flow chart tools to use as a virtual whiteboarding space. There's … Read more