Crowdsourcing translations is a natural fit for a social network. At the same time, though, it does come with some pitfalls, including a higher chance of inconsistencies and sub-par translations.

For a site like hi5, which has seen most of its growth outside of the U.S., being able to provide its users with a localized version is simply a smart business move. Facebook, after all, lost a lot of its potential market share to clones in some countries because it did not offer localized versions of its service.

With the top social networks having 183 million users, 70% of them being 15-34 year olds, Bizzlr realized there was a real need to provide tools to businesses that wouldn't otherwise have the ability to reach their customers on these platforms.

To aid these businesses in expanding their reach, Bizzlr has just launched their turnkey solution, which comes  in the form of an social network application and is currently available on Facebook, MySpace, and Hi5. Support for Bebo, LinkedIn, and Ning is said to be coming soon. The application supports both the Facebook API and the OpenSocial API, so it will work on most of the major social networks.

With Bizzlr, companies, even small ones that don't have their own web site, can connect with their customers quickly and easily on the social networks where their customers spend their time. The fee for doing so is an affordable $19.95/month (or $199/year), so it's not out of the reach of any mom-and-pop shop.

How It Works

Bizzlr uses proprietary algorithms to target customers based on their tastes and preferences. These customers can then easily share the business with their friends, via a modern-day word-of-mouth referral.

For the company using Bizzlr, the app can be a promotional tool used post specials and coupons for their customers to enjoy, as well as a way to maintain a profile page listing their information, phone number, and other news about their company.

Bizzlr in Action

For customers, there's no need to worry about unwanted spam or tracking from these Bizzlr or the companies using it - you have the choice to install the Bizzlr app or not, just like you do with anything else on a social network.

The New Word-of-Mouth

At the moment, Bizzlr focuses on the food and restaurant industry, but will soon be expanding into healthcare, childcare, nightlife, and more.

When trying the tool today, I actually found that it could be pretty useful. I added it on Facebook and entered in my city in the Location box. I could then search for restaurants and add them to "My Restaurants." When adding a new restaurant, you're prompted to tag it, but suggested tags are displayed and pre-checked for you. (Nice!)

On the next screen that appears, you can then see the restaurant's current popularity (both on Bizzlr and with your friends), see it on the map, read news & find coupons (if available), follow the restaurant's activity on Bizzlr, rate the restaurant, add your own comments, and discover similar restaurants. As a final, and optional, step, you can choose to tell a friend about the restaurant. Heck, this is a whole Web 2.0 app built within a social network!

Of course, like so many things, the value in Bizzlr will be directly related to how many people start using it, but if the company can break through that barrier and get enough customers and businesses on board, this could certainly take off.

You were sick of throwing sheep at each other on Facebook anyway, weren't you?

"Integrating with Frengo was a breeze and we really appreciate their experience and expertise in mobile. With Frengo we can extend our social experiences to people on mobile phones around the world," said Jia Shen, CTO of RockYou, a launch partner with Frengo on the toolkit. RockYou's "Horoscopes" application is available to mobile users via the Frengo toolkit. Other customers of Frengo include Slide, I Can Has Cheezburger?, Serious Business, and Frozen Bear.

Lance Takuda of RockYou recently confirmed to us that there are slight differences in the Open Social deployments on MySpace and Hi5, and the Facebook platform deployments on Faceook and Bebo. He told us there's about a "20% overhead in supporting" the different deployments of each platform (though going platform-to-platform basically requires a rewrite). It seems likely that because of these differences, the Frengo toolkit includes slightly different bits of code for working with each social network.

It is, of course, not out of the realm of possibility that social networks could build mobile functionality directly into their platforms. Both Facebook and MySpace have been pushing their mobile versions hard recently -- MySpace just partnered with Sprint and Verizon and RIM just announced a million Facebook users on Blackberry -- and it is plausible that they could push developers to the mobile space themselves. Facebook especially has some serious mobile chops with Joe Hewitt on staff, whose iUI is already one of the most popular iPhone frameworks.

The only apps mentioned on the company blog so far look pretty silly. OpenSocial doesn't seem to be working out like at least tech-centric users were hoping.

• The company will turn on limited "viral messaging" from the start - up to 100 friends can be notified of an action. That's been what spread apps around Facebook but no other OpenSocial container has turned this option on yet.
• Hi5 has a a large audience almost entirely outside of the MySpace/Facebook crowd. Adam Ostrow cites the following stats from the company: "despite having a reported 80 million users, hi5 claims that it has only 25% active user overlap with any other top social networks."

• Hi5's strong presence in Latin America has been evident throughout the preparation of the platform. In addition to free translation of the first 100 approved apps, the company also provided dual locations for its last hackathon event. While 200 developers met and worked together one afternoon this month in Mountain View, CA - another 80 did the same in Mexico City. That's great. The Web 2.0 community pays far too little attention to Latin America, other than scoffing about Orkut's popularity in Brazil - the 5th most populous country in the world! Here at RWW we have substantial international readership, our site was founded in New Zealand and we can't wait for more substantive international integration of innovators.

Most Platform Apps Still Suck

Unfortunately, these platforms are not delivering the important innovation they've promised. When Mark Zuckerberg launched the Facebook Platform he said it was going to be like a new Operating System. That's only true if you use your other Operating Systems for nothing but casual games. Even Zuckerberg says his favorite thing to do on the Facebook Platform is to play Scrabulous with his grandparents.

Maybe it's that these aren't serious environments. Just to remind readers, though, there are a world of other apps on the web at large that offer remarkable utility in a really cool way. Remember Sarah Perez's review of Toluu last week? How about the first time you saw FriendFeed or Meebo? Those are strikingly useful apps and they are fun to use. In all our excitement about platforms, be it on Facebook or OpenSocial, too little attention has been paid to the fact that there's very, very little of substance coming from these development environments.

A representative of MySpace, of all places, assured us last week that the really good apps are coming soon. Is all of this technology democratizing publishing and content, so we get more than just lowest common denominator hyper-commercial crap - or is it just going to be more of the same trash that so dominates the culture industries the web claims to be challenging?

For the record, my favorite social networking app so far is Idiomag on Facebook. What's yours? We'd love to have a list here of ones that aren't dumb.

The Tech Is Going in the Wrong Direction

In that same phone call we also learned that already in these early days of OpenSocial it's taking hours to port from one container to another. Hours instead of weeks is good, but how long will true interoperability across multiple social networks take for developers once OpenSocial is widely deployed?

Most importantly, while developers are pumping out silly little apps and ad networks are throwing up ads on them - many of us are still waiting for cross-site app portability to be joined by true cross-site user data portability.

There are some brilliant people working at every stage in the OpenSocial process. Let's hope they can succeed in facilitating a meaningful user experience with the apps of the future.

Further, even though Microsoft keeps talking about data portability, this announcement is not about their participation in DataPortability.org. Today's announcement is strictly about contact data, and it is strictly about Microsoft and these five sites. So while it is technically about making some data more open and portable, the old silos still exist -- there are just a few new paths cut between a handful of them. (To be fair, Microsoft's end of the contact data is open to everyone via their Contacts API, which has been around since last April. DataPortability.org, though, is about using existing, open standards to share all user data.)

Microsoft did mention their involvement in DataPortability.org in their announcement of today's news, however, saying that this and it are natural steps in their "pursuit of data portability to put users at the center of their online experience, while at the same time being thoughtful about balancing user security and privacy with the experience." Here's hoping everyone continues to open up.