Posts Tagged ‘social networking’

Yahoo: One Giant Social Network?

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

Yahoo

If this bit of information is anything to go by, the social networking bubble is either bordering on the edge of being ridiculous, or Yahoo might be on to something.

Yahoo are looking a little stagnant, and a switch to social media might create the largest social network overnight. On the other hand, if implemented poorly, Yahoo will keep going down the drain. With 500 million active users compared to MySpace’s 110m and Facebook’s 60m, Yahoo will automatically get the largest userbase in no time at all.

This represents the first time a major force is switching to the social format rather than experimenting with smaller projects like Orkut or the now dysfunctional MyWallop. Open application development is also on offer, so this might as well become much bigger than Facebook or MySpace, if they do it right!

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Why Facebook might be worth more than you think!

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

A lot of people have cried out over Facebook’s $15 billion valuation. However, there are certain points that support such a ridiculously high value. Investor Paul Buchheit has written an interesting article about how Facebook has the benefit of knowing about your entire real-life social network, clouded only by a few random online friends here and there, and how they could leverage it.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Facebook | No Comments »

Optimizing Advertising for Social Networks

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

This comes from an interesting post by Jesse Farmer. There is no clear winner amongst ad networks for social applications on Facebook, MySpace, etc. The only real way to know is to find out for yourself.

Using PHP, you can randomly show ad codes from multiple ad networks with equal probability. Check the cash and find out which works best for you!

function get_random_ad_code() {
    $ad_codes = array(
        'lookery'     => 'Your Lookery ad code',
        'adblade'     => 'Your AdBlade ad code',
        'socialmedia' => 'Your SocialMedia ad code',
        'rockyou'     => 'Your RockYou ad code'
    );

    return $ad_codes[array_rand($ad_codes)];
}

echo get_random_ad_code();

If you want to take it to the next level, you can write more complex algorithms to weigh the ads in favor of the network that works best for you, but that’s outside the scope of this article (for now.)

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Facebook, OpenSocial, Social Media | 4 Comments »

Facebook Chat Launched

Saturday, April 12th, 2008

Facebook has launched its instant messaging product. However, my personal preference is to keep it disabled. I think integration with friends’ lists is important, as usually people add so many friends on facebook as it is impossible to communicate with all of them simeltanously. Most of my friends have disabled the feature. I think the lacking ingredient is prioritization.

Here’s the official announcement on the Facebook blog.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Facebook | No Comments »

An Indian explosion on Facebook? Its happening!

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

I, for one am betting on it, when I released my Indian Premier League application, I did so on Facebook, not on Orkut, India’s leading social network which has its application platform coming out soon, and the reasons were manifold:

Firstly, while Orkut remains the social networking of choice for India, people are gradually moving towards Facebook. A year ago, Orkut was in the news for some controversies (which I shall not be talking about here), and people jumped on to see what it was all about. Wannabe networks like iBiBo jumped in with active TV and Radio advertising, with “enchanced” features that were basically “inspired” by Facebook. Now that people are finding out what the world uses, they’re jumping ship to Facebook.

Perhaps most importantly, Facebook was easier to develop for, plain and simple. Facebook provides a host of features, and by far the simplest integration with their system and interface. Moreover, Orkut’s platform is to go public in April, but its having trouble. Considering that the IPL kicks off on April 18, I ran the risk of working hard and creating an app that might never see the light in time.

People already know about Facebook apps, it’ll take some time for people to realize the potential of the Orkut platform when it finally happens, that said, those first to the platform can make huge gains, but the risk was not worth it for me, considering my app has a two month peak window.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Development, Facebook | 1 Comment »