Every year at this time, ReadWriteWeb picks out the best of the Web over the past calendar year. Our annual Best Of series will be even bigger and better than ever in 2011! We have no less than ten themed 'top 10' lists coming your way over the following four weeks before Christmas, each prepared by a different member of our writing team. We'll also survey the top trends of 2011, along with other regular features such as Best BigCo and LittleCo of the year. To kick things off, today we present our list of the 10 best social network and social media products of 2011.
Almost every Web product these days has some kind of social element. But to make this list, the product has to have social networking or community building as a core part of its offering. So without further ado, here are our top 10 Social Web products of 2011:
Are you one of those people that aren't satisfied with the number of your Facebook friends, even if you have more than the average number of 190 as I mentioned in this article earlier in the week.
Are you always checking your Facebook page to see what your friends are doing?
Do you get the feeling you are missing out on something big when you choose to stay home rather than get all dolled up for a night out on the town?
Several years ago, three location check-in based startups stormed the tech world. Since then, Foursquare has taken off to somewhere near 15 million users, Gowalla has essentially died and the third and always the little sister, SCVNGR, has quietly maintained. Now two million with two million users and some strong brand partnerships, SCVNGR is not going to fade away. Will it thrive though? That remains to be seen.
The head of SCVNGR, 22-year-old Seth Priebatsch, understands that SCVNGR plays in the sub-domain of a realm, inside a niche. By that he means that SCVNGR is a social game (not everyone's type of fun) with a location-based bent, the niche inside the realm. Inherently, that limits the area of growth for SCVNGR. Yet, teamed with the company's new LevelUp mobile payments strategy, the roadmap for SCVNGR becomes clear.
The President of the United States has just joined Google+. Well, sort of. This new page is actually a Google+ brand page for the Obama For America 2012 campaign. Republican presidential nominees Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul had already joined Google+, and while none of them are doing anything spectacular, they did join.
There is one politician that Obama could learn a few things from: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been using Google+ since July 14, 2011, and his presence is frank and personal. Viral videos of Bernie Sanders spread like wildfire across the Internet, especially in progressive politics circles.
The fact that Obama waited until just today to join Google+ and launched as a brand instead of a person is troubling, and further solidifies the idea that he is just that - a brand. So now that Barack's on Google+, will he actually hangout?
Boston-based health and fitness application RunKeeper made big news on Monday with $10 million in funding from a variety of venture capital companies. RunKeeper needs no introduction: it was one of the first health apps in the Apple App Store, has six million users and growing and has a CEO in Jason Jacobs that is full of energy and enthusiasm in building his company and a community of fitness geeks.
Fitness geeks may be the most appropriate term to use when describing RunKeeper and its staff. The startup is fundamentally a data driven company and service. It is also a grassroots community built upon users pushing each other to be healthier, happier people. RunKeeper may be the perfect example of how to build a lean startup through and app, grow it from the ground up and be successful.
Even though Black Friday might be happening on Thanksgiving Day after dinner, there is obviously still an offline component to the whole ordeal. Location-based check-in service Foursquare, released an infographic on its blog yesterday that includes tips for finding deals. Users who are looking for an additional option can try Poorsquare, an app that uses Foursquare data to surface nearby locations where you can score free stuff.
MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson used to be known as "MySpace Tom," because newly created Myspace accounts automatically included him as a default friend. Nowadays, he may as well be known as "Klout Tom," because of his usage of and influence on the leading social networks of this era: Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.
Klout is a tool that measures your influence online. It puts a number on your ability to influence other people using social media. Tom's Klout score is 77, which is relatively high. If your work in any way involves social media, it's good to be influential in whatever your niche is. But is Klout really a meaningful way to track your influence? Should you be using it to help you in your career or life?
In a blog post today, Klout announced that Google+ influence will become part of the Klout Score. Users were given the opportunity to connect their Google+ accounts to their Klout Scores back in September, and now that connection will pay off in the form of - you guessed it! - a higher Klout Score! What this really means is Klout wants you to connect all of your social networks to its service, and if you do the reward is a higher Klout Score. Like any rewards system, if you give a little more, you get a little more back. And Klout, like any other social media marketing tool, means business.
New research sponsored by Facebook out of a Milan computer science university shows that the old saw of there being six degrees of separation is no longer accurate. Call it 4.7 degrees instead. The researchers used a random sampling of half a million Facebook users who were active in May 2011 and mapped their social graphs.
Facebook's new frictionless sharing features are "ruining sharing," according to a thought provoking article by CNET's Molly Wood. In response, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick argued that Facebook's seamless sharing is badly implemented and flat out "wrong."
Both made great points, but ultimately I don't believe that frictionless sharing is a bad concept. What's more, I disagree that it has ruined sharing. What Facebook has done is re-define sharing. I think it was an ingenious move and I predict that soon Facebook's seamless sharing will be the norm.
