NeighborGoods is currently in alpha testing and accepting users by invitation until October 7th, when it launches publicly. But it is already gaining traction on Twitter (where Krimmel has over 12,000 followers) with people who have early access to the website, like @typefiend, who shared this note:

"Set up my first #Neighborgoods transaction. Someone's borrowing the Bissell Carpet Cleaner for some pet cleanup. http://bit.ly/lh6gR"

Krimmel said she's reaching out to church groups, school groups, green organizations, and mommy groups to get them active on the site and to help identify what goods and services NeighborGoods should target. The site will also launch a Facebook Connect feature.

"We think people will share with people they know at first," says Krimmel. "We want to get people over that hurdle and start telling the story of things: power tools, ladders, camping gear, bicycles. Those are the things we all have in the garage that don't get used very often. I'm hoping that the groups feature will have people sharing all kinds of crazy stuff."

NeighborGoods is fairly intuitive to use, but its success will depend on the quality and usefulness of items offered by the community. A quick look this morning found items ranging from an old analog TV to a wireless router to someone's dog (condition "beat up"). The policing of what's made available and whether the site monitors users will be key to its development. Users are rated, similar to how sellers are ranked on eBay, but what's not clear is what recourse someone has if they don't get a favorite book back or a neighbor breaks their lawnmower.

The service is one of several new barter-type platforms to emerge in the past few months. Where Couchsurfing left off with the post-college hostel crowd, Caravan is picking up, providing access to house-swap listings and rentals for creative professionals. And hungry Angelenos are using Fallen Fruit to find in-season treats from trees around L.A.

All of these projects seem to have a two-fold purpose: getting resources that you need or want, and making new friends in the process. Is using NeighborGoods easier or more productive than just ringing the doorbell? That remains to be seen.

Guest author: Laura Hertzfeld is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles. In addition to writing for ReadWriteWeb, she is managing editor of EconomyStory.org, a Public Radio Exchange (PRX) project aggregating public media coverage of the economy.

If you're not clear on what exactly that means, don't feel bad... but don't write them off either. Instead, think of Dorthy.com as a new take on the old 43Things, the site which encourages users to list goals, share progress, and cheer each other on. Dorthy does the same but gets you there by making interesting use of Web 3.0 technologies like AI and natural language search.

According to Jim Anderson, the About.com co-founder who was hired as Dorthy's CTO earlier this year, the site's search engine doesn't use keyword-based search but rather has the user enter a fully formed question, statement, or phrase like "run a marathon in 4 hours." Not only does the search engine parse the semantics of your input using its proprietary algorithms, it also learns from you, incrementally enhancing your results upon every visit.

As an example, Anderson describes how a fictional user named Jennifer might search for information about a trip to Paris. Because Jennifer had previously shared other background information like the fact that she's an avid marathon runner, fluent in French, wants to learn to cook French food, and hates cruises, Dorthy.com will retrieve specific information related to those interests. The results would be filtered to highlight info on cooking schools, shopping, and popular running routes in Paris - things that would be interesting to Jennifer specifically.

This example doesn't even necessarily count as a "dream," it seems - you could plan an actual trip to Paris using Dorthy's technology, too. However, the overall point of the service is to provide you with information about a particular goal or aspiration and then connect you with others who feel the same.

Using Dorthy

When performing searches on Dorthy, you'll have the option to create your own page on a specific topic or view the topic pages others have already created. These pages feature popular articles, videos, photos, and blog entries from the web and are constantly being updated with new content. When you find content you like, even if it's on someone else's page, you can easily copy it over to a page of your own.

After this initial "discovery" process is complete, you can use Dorthy's "Connect" feature to meet others also interested in your topic so you can share your progress and encourage each other, much like how the above-mentioned 43Things operates.

In the future, Dorthy hopes to expand their offering to go beyond simply being a consumer-targeted Web-based service to one that could benefit the enterprise (think "I want to go to a virtualization conference in Las Vegas"), or so reported eWeek earlier this year. They also plan on moving to mobile at some point, too.

At the moment, Dorthy.com is in private alpha, but you can sign up to join here.

As "volunteering" is defined as "working on behalf of others without being motivated by financial or material gain," this seems like a strange use of the word. In the case of employees deferring pay, this seems more like an unfortunate burden rather than an act of volunteerism. If you're an experienced professional looking to stay sharp and you've got the freedom to contribute to actual volunteer-driven efforts or you'd like to try working for a cause-based organization, below are some great resources:

2. Care 2: Care 2 claims to be the world's largest listing of jobs with socially responsible companies. The site offers a list of environmental and renewable-energy related jobs including positions for design and construction specialists with LEED certifications.

3. Idealist: Idealist is a project of Action Without Borders and lists a number of job and volunteer opportunities for those looking to become change agents. The site focuses specifically on addressing social and environmental problems and volunteers can do everything from building a shelter in Ghana to becoming a board member with a North American environmental agency.

4. Volunteer Match: San Francisco-based Volunteer Match helps almost 70,000 nonprofit organizations provide direct services and advocacy to our communities. Whether you're interested in driving a Meals on Wheels van or trekking to Nepal to rebuild structures of historical significance, Volunteer Match offers a variety of options.

5.Nonprofit Technology Network: NTEN is an extremely well-known group in the nonprofit world. Their annual conference draws some of the industry's best cause-tech experts including my personal favorite, Beth Kanter. The job site lists IT support, development and media director positions with great organizations across the country.

6. Opportunity Knocks: Opportunity Knocks is a great place to find jobs in the non-profit sector. The site allows users to narrow search results down by salary, city and cause-related interest. There's also a resume tool where users can upload multiple CVs and apply to jobs within the system.

7. Treehugger: Treehugger is one of the leading green networks and was acquired in 2007 by Discovery to help power their Planet Green channel. The site has always offered a variety of tips and articles on sustainable living, environmental justice and holistic health. The jobs site offers volunteer and paid positions for companies and organizations who've made a real commitment to sustainability.

8. NetSquared: While not specifically a volunteer or job site, NetSquared offers cause-tech innovators the opportunity to contribute to global solutions. The site issues challenges to tech-savvy innovators, and volunteers answer the challenges with mobile SMS aid solutions, social action map mash ups and Twitter fundraising tools.

9. YouTube's Video Volunteer Program: As a project of All For Good, the YouTube Video Volunteer Program matches budding filmmakers with NGO's that require promotional or educational video material. Some of the current project applicants include Alaska's Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired, Heart of America's Warriors and Earth.org's Open Travel Guide.

If you've got additional volunteer matching resources, feel free to add them in the comments below.

But instead of continually pointing out the problem, maybe it's time for the innovators in our community to start thinking up solutions. Here's one we just thought up...let us know what you think.

The pseudo-anonymity of the internet - or at the very least, the ability to write something cruel without having to face the person eye-to-eye - often leads people to express themselves in ways that are far from how they would behave in real life. In the past, this typically led people to hide behind pseudonyms and screen names so they could post whatever they wanted without fear of repercussions.

That's why I recently proposed that some communities put an end to online anonymity, thinking that if you removed the masks from people's identities, they would start behaving properly. Of course, this led to a lot of debate in the comments. Obviously, I never meant that anonymity needed to be banned from the internet entirely - the world isn't ready for that! - but there are some places where it doesn't serve much of a purpose. (Tech blogs, for instance.)

People still hated the idea.

As a blogger who writes every day using my real name, it's hard to sympathize with the need to post tech blog comments anonymously. Everything a blogger writes, we're held accountable for. Why shouldn't other community contributors be treated the same?

But as it turns out, there was a huge flaw in my reasoning in that post. I focused on whether or not someone should use their real name when posting, but that's not the issue at all. It's not really anonymity that's to blame for the troll-like behavior we're seeing in online communities, it's the lack of accountability.

That's why (some) people seem comfortable posting mean-spirited comments on sites like FriendFeed using their real name and their real identities to do so. You see, when you post on FriendFeed, your comment quickly disappears into the site's "real-time flow" of information. Someone watching the stream sees it only momentarily, before it's replaced with others. Even within the "angry mob" threads themselves, a single comment easily gets lost among hundreds of others.

So although the comment is attached to a real name, it's a single needle in a haystack of opinion. There's no way to see, at-a-glance, what that person's commenting history was like. Were they usually nice and this angry post was an exception? Or did they make a habit of trolling? There's simply no way to know.

What's the Solution?

We don't have any answers yet, just ideas. But maybe it's time that we started focusing on solutions instead of pointing the finger at the web services...as if somehow FriendFeed itself (or Digg or YouTube for that matter) are to blame for this shameful aspect of human behavior.

Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica proposes that FriendFeed implement threaded comments with the ability to rate comments up or down. While I agree that would be a good first step in helping the community moderate the vitriol, it certainly doesn't stop hateful comments from occurring in the first place (just look at Digg!).

Perhaps what we need is a rating system for the personalities of community participants. Think of it like eBay's "star" ratings, but instead of grading a seller on how quickly an order was shipped, etc., you'd rate each others' contributions to a community.

Imagine how this could work on FriendFeed, for example. People could rate others' comments and the aggregation of the communities' ratings would give overall insight to that person's personality. Was the comment insightful? Kind? Spammy? Mean? Were you helping a newbie feel included? Were you answering a question or participating in a poll? Do you tend to leave positive comments about X company while being negative about Y? The list could go on and on.

The system should also show not just how a single comment was rated, but what that person's overall rating is along with a history of their contributions.

If participants knew that their every action, whether "anonymous" or not, was adding up to paint an overall picture of who they really were, would this be enough of an equivalent to the kind of accountability we have in real life? The sort of accountability where people are judged on their behavior over time, and not for a single uttered statement?

Rating systems are hardly a new idea - many online communities use badges and other methods for rewarding helpful participation. But rating systems that extend beyond simply rewarding good behavior to publicizing the bad, too, don't really exist today...at least when it comes to comments and communities.

It's hard to imagine exactly what a system like this would look like, but that's where UI designers would need to flex their muscles and create something that didn't take away from the overall experience while also encouraging people to rate comments both positive and negative, not just the ones they hated.

Is this a terrible idea? If so, we know you'll set us straight. That is, after all, what the comments are for. But if you think it's awful, at least be so kind as to suggest a better alternative.

Image credit: flickr user takingthemoney

Earlier, Borders Australia and Random House held a contest to find twenty-eight writers who would be able to write the bulk of the book. The chapters they produce will need to be less than 750 words so, obviously, this book will be a little lighter than Patterson's other novels.

Once complete, Airborne will be released electronically, one chapter at a time, starting on March 20th. Later, a print edition will be published, but only as a prize of sorts for the participants in the competition - it will not be mass produced.

Collaborative Writing is So Very Web 2.0

The roots of the collaborative writing movement can be found in many web startups, including those like Novlet, Potrayl, Ficlets, Unblokt, Protagonize, and others we profiled here. A popular activity for creative writers, these communities offer various takes on how a co-written story should be developed, some focused more on "choose your own adventure"-style stories while others focus more on linear narratives.

Although the James Patterson novel is more of a marketing campaign than anything else - and, in this case, the "crowd" is actually a hand-picked selection of aspiring writers - it's still interesting to see such a widely-read writer embracing the co-writing trend. While those passionate about the subject may say this particular effort doesn't qualify since it isn't truly written by "the crowd," it's events like this that take the general idea behind the trend and cross it over to where it can make a mark on the minds of the mainstream.

What remains to be seen at this point is whether a crowdsourced, co-written novel can actually be any good.

Those interested in following the progress of AirBorne can do so on Facebook, Twitter, and via RSS.

But social media today is a pure mess: it has become a collection of countless features, tools, and applications fighting for a piece of the pie.

Users, marketers, and companies face an incredible amount of noise, too. For every new application that relies on a network, another crops up that helps users manage it. While "eyeballs" used to be the coveted metric, both ad publishers and investors now realize that having smaller well-targeted niches can lead to much better returns than marketing to one large undifferentiated mass of users.

Meaning and connection -- two key anchors of all things social media -- are corroding by the day as people's ability to organize their experiences and find the relevance of their networks declines. Social media, in essence, is bumping up against its own ceiling, no longer able to serve the needs of those living within its walls; and for these reasons, social media as we know it is changing course.

Social Media is Evolving

Social media is morphing into a holistic experience that speaks to people's social needs in new ways. If you are a CEO of a startup who is focusing on the next generation of social media, here are 10 areas you'll need to take into consideration in the coming year:

1. It's About People

We're moving away from "users," "customers," and "shoppers": social media is bringing back the human element to all digital interaction. People now deliberately seek meaningful connection, self-expression, and a relevant and receptive community. Forrester's Social Technographic research and Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff's Groundswell represent a huge step towards a new kind of behavior-driven segmentation, but companies that want to succeed will need to take it further and tap into people's evolving needs, using the social media context as the new baseline.

2. Creating Meaning and Value

Social media will no longer be about features and applications. These have become a dime a dozen. People will be looking to get tangible and relevant value out of their social experience; they'll be looking for meaning and for order. "Social media online is no different from social media offline," said Brent Csutoras at a recent Social Media Club event. People will be looking for ways to keep their networks going regardless of device or platform. They will connect around meaningful topics and have live and simultaneous conversations within parameters they themselves define, which will bring relevance back to their interaction with others.

3. Enabling Convergence

FriendFeed -- now both a destination and an API -- is growing rapidly, despite a miserable wiki-like interface and interactive experience. That's because people are at a loss when it comes to pulling their conversations together from various sources and assigning meaning to them. Companies that deliver beautifully designed, easy-to-use, searchable, flexible, aggregating platforms will become more important than any social media tool by itself. Deb Schultz, a San Francisco-based web strategist, compares social media to an art exhibit and says people will "curate their live presence through the web ecosystem as needed." Noovo and Zannel are examples of early attempts to enable this.

4. Building a Truly Cross-Platform Experience

The iPhone experience has changed the playing field for users, companies, and developers. In Q1 of 2009 alone, Apple sold 4.4 million iPhones, and Google's Android and the new Palm continue to build on the cross-platform, application- and service-driven model. In the new landscape of social media, people are seeking solutions that seamlessly cut across mobile, web, and live interaction, hopping on and off them like double-decker buses, all with the same pass.

5. Creating Relevant Social Networks

People will create, join, and seek social networks that enable them to have meaningful and relevant experiences with each other. They will measure their return on investment (time spent, level of disclosure, etc.) in replies, comments, their ability to influence, and the value of their learning. Rachel Masters, VP of Strategic Relationships at Ning -- a social network that grew a massive 388% in 2008 -- says, "the Internet is confusing because it can be used to replicate almost any previous medium. Ning addresses this by delivering social networks that allow people to connect around the things they love."

6. Innovating in the Advertising Space

Ad publishers and the attached ecosystem will continue to lose revenue until they realign their understanding of what appeals to people who are conversing, connecting, and expressing. The next phase of social media is a gold mine of targeted niche demographics. Nuconomy, an Israeli startup, experiments in creating and delivering highly targeted, dynamic display advertising. Shahar Nechmad, Nuconomy's co-founder and CEO, says that, on average, Nucomony customers see six to nine times higher click-through rates on targeted ads than on non-targeted ones. "People do click on ads and buy things in the same session," says Nechmad. Ad agencies and publishers that are able to quickly realign their thinking and create an innovative and relevant product discovery experience will gain significant competitive advantage.

7. Helping People Organize Their "Old" Social Media Ecosystem

As aggregating platforms enter the field, people will seek to bring order to the endless bits of information available to them. Video tagging, conversation archiving, taking cloud computing to the next stage, and making search more relevant are some of the new baseline requirements. These represent a significant opportunity for companies willing to undertake this massive endeavor.

8. Connecting with the Rest of the US and the World

With some exceptions, today's active social media users are early adopters. In the next one to two years, the benefits of social media will cross the chasm and reach the mainstream, not only in the US but around the world -- especially in community-driven regions like Southeast Asia and countries like Brazil, Russia, and Germany. Companies will need to understand the explicit and implicit differences between adoption patterns in different countries and adjust their products to meet these different needs.

9. Preparing for New Social Media Jobs

It has been a harsh year for marketing firms. Companies are looking to divert marketing dollars to more targeted social media destinations. And this is just the beginning. David Spark, founder of Spark Media Solutions, says that businesses will need to go beyond paying people to Tweet or put up a Facebook page. Social media's new job descriptions will call on subject-matter experts who can plan for relevant interaction within networks and aggregating platforms and bring together products, services, and people.

10. Making Money

The next phase of social media will bring plenty of lucrative opportunities. With the rise of aggregating platforms, social networks, and new mobile and location-based features, we're bound to see an increase in targeted and personalized ads, "freemium" packaging, revenue sharing between strategic partners, and a flow from the offline world to online social engagement (such as when real goods complement virtual ones).

Social media has forever changed the way people use technology to interact with others, but it can no longer satisfy people's needs in its current form and must change course.

The new form of social media will be about creating "whole products" and complete experiences, all in real time, across the web, mobile, and live. Each user will be able to create his or her own experience using tools, features, and apps that magically coalesce. People will be able to move seamlessly through information that is available to them anywhere, anytime, sharing rich content with a rich set of groups and networks that they themselves define. Innovative companies that are able to listen to these needs and deliver products based on them will not only survive but thrive in the coming months and years as people eagerly advance on the inviting waters of the new social alchemy.

The MySpace team worked with Meebo to assist with its integration. The Facebook integration relies on Facebook Chat for Pidgin, an open source IM project.

With the addition of these massive user bases, Meebo becomes - arguably - the premiere service for managing all of your IM conversations in one place. That's impressive in and of itself. But it also hints at something even more interesting for the future with Meebo's Community IM initiative.

What's Community IM? It's a Meebo project that will introduce Web-based IM features to a number of community oriented sites over the coming months, allowing users of those sites to engage in IM conversations when visiting their favorite Web sites.

What's more, it's a concept that's strikingly similar to Facebook's chat implementation. And that's where adding Facebook access gets really interesting.

With Community IM, Facebook users - who are already familiar with concept of logging into a Web site and chatting with friends - will now have access to their Facebook friends through Meebo when visiting any number of sites on the Web. Same goes for MySpace. That means sharing something with Facebook or MySpace contacts becomes as easy as firing off an IM message through Meebo. No more bookmarklets or cutting, logging in, and pasting. Now, it's as simple as sending an IM.

So, without much fanfare - and much in the same way Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, and the Open Stack are extending the reach of the social graph - it looks like Meebo just moved the Web-based IM conversations of millions of users and their contacts beyond the walled gardens of social networks to the Web at large. And that's pretty exciting.

To try the new Meebo Facebook and MySpace access, log into your Meebo account and add the new accounts to your profile. Or visit Meebo and log into your Facebook and MySpace accounts from there.

These appear to be buttons you can click on, but they are only there for displaying the information. In order to access the commenting and feedback features, you have to actually click the headline to read the article. That's a very minor complaint, though, as it's the commenting feature that really makes the News Mixer site shine.

Facebook Connect Makes the News Personal

Because of the site's integration with Facebook Connect, News Mixer is able to highlight the comments left by your Facebook friends. This brings their thoughts to your attention which in turn delivers a more personalized news experience. (Unfortunately, I couldn't test that aspect of the commenting feature since I don't know anyone in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.)

If you choose to participate, you can select from a drop-down box of responses which will preface your comment. By default, the site suggested "Sarah Thinks." (Obviously, your name would display in place of "Sarah.") Other options include "feels," "wonders," "agrees," "disagrees," "hates," and "loves." These choices are very similar to the options presented to you at the microblogging site Plurk, a Twitter-like site for sharing status updates with friends. On Plurk, you are also given various color-coded prompts to choose from when posting a note, the same as News Mixer.

Another plus to News Mixer's commenting feature is its transparent nature. Instead of allowing for the creation of fake names or internet handles for use on the site, Facebook authentication means that people's real identities are being displayed. No more comments left by internet trolls hiding behind their mask of anonymity!

Today's commenting systems are largely broken, as social media pundit Robert Scoble noted today on his blog. The main reason for his post was to share ideas about the state of commenting and interaction systems on the web. He wanted there to be a way that he, as the writer, could call attention to some comments as being more important than others. He had also said that he wished there was a way to see the social networks of the people commenting. As it turns out, News Mixer has introduced a great example of how that second request of his could work.

Newspapers: Steal These Ideas!

Although at the moment the News Mixer site appears somewhat plain and clunky, you can see the potential is in its framework, if not its design. In fact, the press release even notes that the New York Times interactive news technologies editor Aron Pilhofer encouraged media industry members to look at News Mixer, adding that there were "bits and pieces of it I'd like to steal right now."

We would encourage others in the industry to borrow some of News Mixer's ideas as well. It's not too late to save the daily paper - it just takes some fresh ideas. Like Rupert Murdoch recently said, the time for doom and gloom is over - the internet is really just a huge new market ready to be tapped. We agree. Now is the time for innovation because...well, it's either innovate or die. Hopefully most will choose the former.

Meebo, the leading "IM in the browser" play, realizes this. And with Community IM, they're hoping to capitalize on it, by incorporating XMPP/Jabber IM into any Web-based community. If early numbers are any indication, they're going to be wildly successful.

So how many users could that long-tail of communities garner for Meebo? Based on comScore Media Metrix, Meebo estimates the potential size of the partner network to have an unduplicated global reach of 72.9 million with more than 26 million of those users in the US.

Slated to launch this fall, the movie site Flixster will be the first out of the gates on the platform.

And that's just the beginning. With the types of communities Meebo is targeting, there's a great deal more room to grow once the service is launched to the public:

"If you have an online community with over 20K daily users, Meebo can add IM to your website. Users will be able to chat with other community members as well as buddies outside your network, directly from your site."

Perhaps even more impressive is Meebo's foresight to build its solution on an open foundation. Running on a XMPP/Jabber backbone, Meebo Community IM will be able to connect directly with other popular IM networks. AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and Yahoo! will all be available options. What's more, XMPP will enable them to federate relationships across the various partners, so that a user from one community will be able to communicate with users on another community.

Needless to say, the combination of the extensible technology and the sheer volume of online communities that could choose to adopt this solution translate into a great deal of potential for Meebo.

It's no wonder Meebo's valuation sits north of $200 million.

All in all, Meebo is projecting huge numbers, already. And the estimates of the potential could get astronomical. But, it's also evident that a yet-to-be-launched solution can be met with any amount of skepticism. So where does that put us?

Rest assured, this isn't the first time Meebo has been saddled with "it can't be done." After more than three years of proving their detractors wrong, we remain convinced that Meebo is going to succeed.

Before delving into the company's business model designed to pay artists for their work, it's important to note that MixMatchMusic is also working to solve another problem musicians face: finding others to collaborate with. On the site, musicians can upload either whole songs or just stems. Other artists can search through those uploaded items to find the pieces of music that they need to complete their work.

Browsing for Music

At first, this sounds a lot like what sites like Rifflet and Kompoz both offer, but there is something that MixMatchMusic has that those sites don't: the MixMaker. The MixMaker is an online sequencer built right into the site, sort of like GarageBand in the cloud. Instead of having to download items and work with them in software-based mixing tools like GarageBand or ProTools, musicians can mix and remix the different tracks while still online. This makes it easier, faster, and more rewarding to experiment with the music the site contains.

The MixMaker

Getting Paid

Of course, the most notable difference between MixMatchMusic and other sites is that here, there's a big focus on artists getting paid for their work, whether it's an entire song or just a stem...or even a ringtone! When a musician utilizes another's music to make their own creation, that transaction is completely transparent. Musicians are able to monitor when their work is downloaded, in progress, or sold. And when a sale occurs, contributing musicians share $0.85 on every dollar that the site makes on sales.

Marketing Tools

Like both Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have done in the past, musicians can also invite their fans to remix their work. This is done by using something called the Remix Wizard, a completely customizable widget that can reside on either a musician's homepage or MySpace page.With the ReMix wizard, an artist can upload pieces of music like a guitar riff, drums, or vocals into the MixMatchMusic web site and the widget will allow fans to click on the widget to remix their own creations. The fans can then make their creations available for download on MixMatchMusic, too.

ReMix Wizard

Conclusion

MixMatchMusic stood out because it's taking the concept of an online community for musicians to a whole new level. The site's MixMaker tool is rather robust for a cloud-based app and the widgets they provide will also help draw more people to their site. However, it's their model for paying artists that deserves the most attention. Will people be willing to pay for downloading music? Well, that seems to work for iTunes. But for those who are truly immersed in the music community, iTunes alone with their commercially available selections of music can't satisfy their need to discover underground, indie tunes own their own.

Still, the concept of putting songs/stems online is not new, so we'll have to see if musicians explore deep enough into MixMatchMusic to see how it's different than the other sites they're already using today.

Twitter users are very familiar with the iconic image of the Fail Whale. This social object has been latched onto by Twitter fans not just as a representation of Twitter's downtime, but also as a representation of the community's love for the service and their hope for its triumph over their many struggles. Despite Twitter's troubles, most of its users stayed true, watching and waiting as the team began the long process of recoding the application in order for it to scale up. As Twitter succumbed to the strain of running their under-provisioned service, the Fail Whale "over capacity" image would appear. And this image began to take on a life of its own. This is the story of the Fail Whale.

You probably thought that Twitter was using designs they paid for, right? Well, apparently that was not the case. The designer behind the Fail Whale, Yiying Lu, had posted the image to the stock photo web site, iStockPhoto. (She has now removed the original link). Although the image of the Fail Whale was widely known, the designer herself was not. Tom Limongello decided to change that.

Tom had once made himself a Fail Whale t-shirt from a screenshot which he wore at a Mashable party. Of course, the shirt was a huge hit. But Tom couldn't really post the shirts for sale because he didn't have rights to the design. Yet, here was an entire community of Fail Whale fans - many of which who had gathered at failwhale.com - who wanted a shirt of their own.

But then Tom met the designer Yiying Lu when her iStockPhoto link was tweeted to the @FailWhale Twitter user from Twitterer @emmastory. The Fail Whale project (@FailWhale, failwhale.com) is a community effort created by Sean O'Steen, (@seanostee) whose mission was to create a brand from the Fail Whale phenomenon. Sean is responsible for the Fail Whale web site and the Twitter profile, but the name "Fail Whale" itself was coined by Nick Quaranto.

Setting Up The Fail Whale Store

Despite the popularity of the Fail Whale, creator Yiying Lu wasn't really profiting from her iconic work. Twitter.com did not link to her and she didn't have an online store for Twitter fans. So Tom took it upon himself to give her a call. He told Yiying, who lives in Australia, but is originally from Shanghai, about the project, the community's desire for merchandise, and the Fail Whale's potential, and asked her to create a Zazzle store so everyone could enjoy her work.

And thus the Fail Whale online store was born. On zazzle.com/failwhale, fans can now customize their own shirt with their own handle and slogan. Now, not only could Fail Whale fans buy the shirt, they were also helping to support the artist, too.

FailWhale Zazzle Shop

Spreading the News: Fail Whale Has Arrived!

The next question the Fail Whale community wanted to address was getting the word out about the Zazzle shop. Tom had originally wanted to send shirts to the team at Twitter as gesture of community support, and he now also realized that the gesture could also be a way to promote the artist herself and her new shop.

So, the Fail Whale fan club rallied together to round up the $361.17 needed to purchase 20 shirts and have them shipped to Twitter's offices. Also included with the shirts was a note from Tom and the gang which offered a message of support to the Twitter team and also a request to tweet a thank you to Yiying which included the link to the Zazzle store.

Twitter's Evan Williams did end up tweeting about the shirts shortly after their arrival. Though he wasn't sure how to react (tweeted: "mixed feelings"), he did include the link to the online store. Tom equates this tweet to a media buy...at a $25.06 CPM. Of course when you take into account the re-tweets and the other subsequent Twitter messages linking to the online store, the effective CPM goes down quite a bit.

Ev's Tweet

Fail Whale Fan Club

The Fail Whale fan club at failwhale.com now actively promotes the Zazzle store as well as the additional shop that Yiying Lu opened up for t-shirts and accessories at failwhaleshop.com. The Zazzle shop has made around $4200.00 from the 12,000+ visits they've received since June 25th. The fan club also runs a Facebook group that currently has 3154 fans.

But the number of sales made is only one aspect to this story - what's more compelling is the torrent of social media cooperation that Ev's tweet set off. Since then, Tom, Sean, and Yiying have continued to manage the Fail Whale community across the numerous social sites, making new friends, starring their favorite fan photos, and interacting with those who post to the Facebook fan page wall. Sean even extended the Fail Whale concept to TUAW recently which showed the Apple iPhone similarly being carried by Yiying Lu's birds during the low point of iPhone 3g activation issues last Friday night.

Fail iPhone

The Birth of a Social Media Object

It's also notable that this social media effort has gone the opposite route as what has been seen with another iconic brand: Hello Kitty. The fans of that brand have literally stolen the image to make fan art, claiming that Hello Kitty is now part of our pop culture. Normally, the internet encourages this type of piracy, but in the case of the Fail Whale, by promoting the artist, the designer's identity and official link have floated to the top.

The Fail Whale story is one that shows the value of open content. By making the art available, Yiying is now going to profit in more ways than if she had simply made the art available for purchase. She will be earning profits from merchandise at both shops and from the sale of her prints and she will certainly win some future design work from this as well. Of course, her successes come from more than just the work itself, but also from the power of the community who embraced it. The marriage of the two breathed life into the art and created a modern-day social object which emanates the hope of the community and the love they have for the brand.

You can see more of Yiyang's work on her personal site, yiyinglu.com.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we pride ourselves on being able to provide you with fresh content! While there's no escaping the "echo chamber", being able to provide a fresh perspective on the news goes a long way to helping out with social media. Every thought and opinion is unique even if all parties agree.

You can also venture out of your comfort zone and into unknown territory for better insights for providing fresh content. It's no easy task, but it can be done.This not only helps break away from the "echo chamber" effect, but allows you to experiment, discover, and learn about variety of subjects you might not have previously considered. In doing so, you'll expand not only your audience, but social media.

Spread The Link Love

Once upon a time, linking to others was a rare thing. It used to be a common fear to abstain from linking to others in an effort to keep your audience. Building a "walled garden" around content is counter-productive to social media. Spreading the link love is actually one of the best things you can do for social media. Not only does it help with networking, but for social media this is a great way for users to find great content. This is also another way to spread ideas that others might have never. Not only will others appreciate the love, but so will your audience.

You can spread the content of others by using Google Reader's Shared Items feature to share your own link blog of great content that you've read. "Retweeting" great links on Twitter or "liking" things in Friendfeed are other great ways to share and promote ideas in an effort to contribute to social media.

Roll Your Own

While there's plenty of ways for users to contribute to social media, developers can also play a large part. What's revolutionary about social media content is that it can be based on standards like RSS and XML. To quote Phil Glockner of Scribkin, "this lends a lot of re-interpretation of the data available for the taking." Some of the most popular Twitter apps are an example of this.

Mashup platforms are getting easier to develop for. Developers no longer need to know C# when you have platforms like Google App Engine, Django, and Yahoo! Pipes to play with. In an effort to contribute to social media, why not "roll" your own mashups. Developers can take advantage of these platforms to extend the functionality of social media tools such as Twitter and Friendfeed. RSSmeme developer Benjamin Golub did it today with Tweet 2 Tweet by utilizing Django and Google App Engine (reviewed on SheGeeks).

Share Your Findings

A new application pops up everyday. While we all want to be the first to talk about a new app, sometimes we hold out on these findings.Directories such as FreshAIRApps, which we reviewed earlier, aim to help users discover these new applications. Share these findings with your audience by reviewing it on your blog, stumbling it on StumbleUpon, or even with a "tweet" on Twitter.

This helps the social media community to advance in many ways. Your findings could be exactly what someone has been searching for high and low for weeks. Since applications can serve a multitude of purposes for users, your reasons for using one app could be used for entirely different reasons by someone else. However, the discovery of these purposes can't happen unless you continue to share.

Stay Active

Of all our picks, staying active is the most important contribution you can make to social media. Social media requires active participation within the community. It's an act of both give and take. While it's perfectly fine to be a lurker, if something strikes your interest, don't be afraid to voice your opinions and share your knowledge of the subject. Want to learn more about something? Ask a question. With social media, the community is there in an effort to help you benefit from not only the web, but life.

Sharing Really is Caring

These are just a handful of great ways to contribute to social media. Keep in mind that contributions to social media are also beneficial for other niches and the web community overall. So if you haven't started your link blog or have been hesitant to tweet that new app you discovered, now is the perfect time to start.

Although perhaps an extreme example, there is something to be said about the dichotomy between a person's public persona used online and who they "really" are. Many people's online self is only a fraction of who they are when they log off. For example, online you could be a social media addict, blog reader/writer, and an activity community participant whose never shy to be vocal about your opinions, but offline, you could be a relatively private person who is more comfortable with a small group of close friends than you are with a big crowd, and who would rather curl up with a good book than attend a large party.

That's not to say that everyone "fakes it" online, but the very nature of the internet can highlight specific aspects of your personality. By getting heavily involved in one community, you can get "stuck" there, consuming and contributing to this one niche at the expense of your other interests. There are only so many hours in the day, so if your favorite subject is, oh...say, technology, you may dwell in the tech communities 75% of your time and only focus on your other interests 25% of your time when online. But in the offline world, your friends may know of all your interests, not just tech, and so, in a sense, they know you better.

How you're perceived online may not even be entirely in your control. As Jim Smoot notes in his article "You Are Who People Perceive You Are,": if someone perceives you as something, right or wrong, that’s what you are in their eyes. If the community wants to peg you as a thought leader in their niche, then you become a thought leader in their niche.

So perhaps Dvorak has a point. However, to call out online communities, such as Twitter, as "pretend" communities is a mistake. Whether it's Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, bebo, FriendFeed, or anywhere else you spend your time, these communities are places you can find others who share your interests and where real connections can, in fact, be made. And when the next big thing arrives, you can re-join your friends over there.

In addition, as CNet and Ryan Stewart's blog spread the story, more people chimed in with suggestions. And of course, the Hacker News guys had some more ideas themselves.

So what did everyone come up with? A lot of data sources are already freely available on the net, as it turns out, if you just know where to look. Here's a summary, do you have anything to add?

CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network)

The CKAN site is a registry of open knowledge packages and projects. Here, you can find open knowledge resources or register one of your own. What kind of stuff can you find at CKAN? They mention a set of Shakespeare's works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents as some examples, but they also point you to some useful URLs, like flickr's Creative Commons page, where photos can be searched by license type.

CKAN

Infochimps.org

This project is attempting to assemble and interconnect the world's best repository for raw data - like a giant, free, open almanac. The best way to describe it comes from MetaFilter, where the project was spotted recently: "Just as Wikipedia will help you find out something about everything, infochimps.org will help you find out everything about something." What can you find there? Every wikipedia infobox, each infobox type in its own table, 50 years of global hourly weather data, all the tables from the US Census Statistical Abstract, oh and 100,000 official crossword words, too.

Infochimps.org

OpenStreetMap

Not a data set in the traditional sense, but definitely a useful tool, OpenStreetMap is a free, editable map of the world where you can view, edit, and use your own geographical data. The project was started because most maps actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use.

OpenStreetMap

MusicBrainz

Musicbrainz

Jigsaw

Dismissed by the blogosphere as a bad idea, if not downright evil, Jigsaw, the marketplace that pays you to give up other people's contact info now boasts 7 million complete contacts for the taking.

DBpedia

This site is a community effort to extract structured info from Wikipedia and make that data publicly available on the web, essentially turning Wikipedia into a database you can query. Is this the beginnings of a semantic web? Check out their downloads section for the datasets and then scroll to the bottom for even more links to data sources on the web.

DBpedia

flickr wrappr

Where DBpedia takes Wikipedia and makes it semantic, flickr wrappr extends DBpedia with RDF links to photos posted on flickr. Here's an example. Here's another. This is pure geek hotness.

Freebase

Freebase, an open, shared database of the world's knowledge, received a lot of mentions in the comments, so this must be a good one. Community built and maintained, it pulls from open data sources like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives to create structured information on many topics, including more popular ones like movies, music, people, and locations. The site, unlike some of the others in this list, is also easy to navigate and well-designed, which makes it that much better to use.

Freebase

Opentick

Perhaps one of the less interesting items due to its dry subject matter - financial data - it's certainly worth a mention because a free database of real-time and historical market data for trading systems and platforms is the kind of thing that really floats some people's boats.

ThingISBN

Thanks to LibraryThing, ThingISBN is the site's first API, and even though its competitor became a paid service, ThingISBN is still free for non-commercial use. The API doesn't just return the usual book data, but also something called "edition disambiguation," meaning it also returns a list of "related" ISBNs—other editions, other media, and translations.

Numbrary

Like the title suggests, Numbrary is a library for numbers. This free service helps you find, use, and share numbers from public record data sets, like census data or the CIA World Factbook.

Numbrary

theinfo.org

This site isn't just a place to build or collect data sets, of which they have quite a nice list, but a place where you can interact with other number-lovin' folks like yourself.

theinfo.org

The Data Wrangling blog

This blog post lists a bunch, and I mean a bunch, of open datasets on the web, which just goes to show how much of a cursory list my post really is.

Recently, HiveLive announced a new partnership with Responsys, a marketing firm whose client list includes some big-name brands like Apple and Salesforce.com. Enterprise 2.0 is sure to follow.

What Responsys offers their customers are on-demand email and marketing solutions that can be anything from web sites to email to mobile. With the new partnership with HiveLive, they can expand that offering to include enterprise social networks.

The partnership between these two companies is another step forward for the combination of social tools and big business. Companies are beginning to realize that the way that they should be communicating with their customers today is not through traditional marketing messages which try to convince customers of the company's value, but by allowing customers themselves to be a part of the process. Online communities, like those that will be provided by HiveLive, will offer opportunities for companies and their employees to connect with their customers in a more collaborative, cooperative way.

HiveLive Application Building (image courtesy of VentureBeat)

This "Enterprise 2.0" trend fits nicely alongside the move many companies are making towards becoming more transparent. A year ago, Clive Thompson wrote an article for Wired entitled "The See-Through CEO," about the shift in corporate values - Secrecy is dead, being "liked" is important, and customers are becoming working partners," the article states. "The new breed of naked executives also discover that once people are interested in you, they're interested in helping you out - by offering ideas, critiques, and extra brain cycles," writes Thompson.

Jeffrey Clayton, VP of Strategic Alliances at Responsys agrees, acknowledging that these new methods "dramatically boost customer engagement and sales," and by partnering with HiveLive they will give their clients "another way to reach their customers that builds on the power of community."

HiveLive claims to be "the first community platform to seamlessly integrate social networks with information networks," but in truth they compete with other similar offerings like Jive's ClearSpace, Drupal, and Ning.

ClearSpace, a roll-your-own platform, may offer HiveLive some good competition as it's based on Java, a technology that tends to be easier to integrate into enterprise IT, whereas HiveLive is based on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), like much of Web 2.0. HiveLive should have an advantage over Drupal and Ning, though since Drupal requires coding and Ning doesn't offer the permission levels and granular control that HiveLive does.