The acronym "YASNS" is well-known in Web geek circles. It stands for Yet Another Social Networking Service. In 2011, perhaps the acronym should be "YAUSNS": Yet Another Useless Social Networking Service. Even large, otherwise successful tech companies aren't immune to YAUSNS. In September last year, Apple launched a music social network called Ping. It's basically 'Twitter for music,' however it's been a fizzer - despite being embedded right into iTunes. Another company at risk of what I'll now call The Ping Effect is Amazon, which released Kindle Profiles in March of this year. It's a social network for reading, but so far it hasn't set the world on fire. A commenter on my Google Plus profile called it "The Ping of Books."
Also in March, business social network LinkedIn launched a social news service called LinkedIn Today. Is this service needed, or is it simply duplicating Techmeme, Google News and similar social news sites? Let's find out...
During yesterday's earnings announcement, its first ever, LinkedIn employed two social Web technologies to help make the presentation more shareable, as well as to give the team peace of mind. Using a combination of free and premium services from SlideShare and StockTwits, the LinkedIn team was able to offer its slide deck as an embeddable window (which we used in our blog post) and live-tweet the earnings call without fear of losing SEC compliance.
Users of the social influence ranking service Klout can now see how their local checkins impact their overall social reach, thanks to an integration with Foursquare.
This marks the first time Klout has used explicitly location-focused data as a factor in its social influence scoring system. Previously, only data from your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts were used to calculate your Klout Score. With this update, users can get an idea of what their social media influence is in and around the places they frequent in the real world, rather than just on the social Web at large.
According to research from McKinsey that we looked at yesterday, young people are using online media significantly more than older generations. When it comes to online video consumption, the difference is particularly stark: 84% of "Digital-media junkies" (whose average age is 28) consume online video, compared to 18% of "Traditionalists" (average age 48).
With those statistics in mind, it's interesting to look at how the entertainment industry is utilizing online media channels more and more. A great example that we came across recently is a web video series called Ruby Skye P.I., aimed at the tweens age group. It's like a television series, only it's made specifically for the Web and utilizes "transmedia" channels for content delivery and viewer interaction.
We've written on auto-posting before and there still seems to be a debate as to whether or not it actually affects performance to post via bot. Anecdotally, I've found that manual posting shows significant increases in performance.
When I first started at ReadWriteWeb, the updates to Facebook were automatically posted via a Facebook application. It was an easy way to make sure our fans got to see our posts, but it didn't foster community discussions so after I got my bearings around here, I stopped the app (or at least I thought I did).
Wajam, a social search extension for the browser, has added Google Plus integration, alongside Facebook and Twitter, so that users can search their friends' posts across all three major social networks.
The plug-in displays personalized results, accompanied by faces and profiles from social networks, inside normal searches. The Wajam team says they recognizes Google Plus' appeal as "a viable alternative" to Facebook, but they also criticize it for its lack of deep search features.
Document hosting and sharing site Scribd is venturing into the mobile space in order to give its publishers an opportunity to attract more readers. With a new mobile reader application called Float, Scribd aggregates content from news sites, magazines, blogs, and Scribd.com as well as from your social networks like Facebook and Twitter. You can also save items you find online to read later in Float, with the use of a specialized browser bookmarklet.
But what's most unique about this app is the way it reformats the text for the small screen. The "floating text" reading experience, which gives the app its name, reflows text originally formatted for the Web for better reading on mobile devices.
The leader in social gaming is undoubtedly Zynga, but the chase is on to catch the king of the market. As such, game developers and publishers 6Waves and Lolapps are combing forces in a merger aimed to take down the Zynga empire.
6Waves is a Hong Kong-based game publisher while Lolapps are game developers, so the partnership makes a lot of sense for the two parties. The newly formed company - 6Waves Lolapps - will take on Zynga directly with internally developed social games but also Electronic Arts that publishes third-party games. It is a significant move in the social gaming ecosystem, but how will it affect users and developers?
One of the most interesting aspects of Web technology and social media nowadays is how it's being deployed by non-techies. Recently I had the chance to connect with the U.S. Army to find out how it is using the Web. Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, online video and more is currently in operation at U.S. Army HQ.
I spoke to Suzanne Nagel, Digital Chief, U.S. Army Accessions Command, who walked me through how the Web is being used for recruitment and community. We started off by discussing a blog called Army Strong Stories, which enables people to hear authentic stories from U.S. Army soldiers.
Zynga does games. That is the company's bread and butter. Zynga makes almost all of its money through Facebook. Facebook does not do privacy very well and often faces user backlash whenever privacy settings or options are changed. User backlash against Facebook is inherently bad for Zynga.
Zynga wants users to know that it cares about privacy despite what the Facebook mothership is doing. Hence, Zynga has released a new "game" designed to teach users all about how the social gaming company treats user information, where it is stored and how it is used. Say hello to PrivacyVille.
