Instead of trying to establish a new userbase from scratch, Spiffbox integrates with the social networks Facebook and Twitter. They even have their own Facebook application so you can interact with other Spiffbox members while logged into Facebook.

However, unlike those two popular social networks, which are designed to connect you with people you know or admire, Spiffbox wants to connect you with others who fall outside your social graph. That is, the site wants to help you make new friends.

Spiffbox is also different in the fact that it's not entirely meant to be just for socializing - it wants to help you promote your career as well as ask for and receive advice from other users.

How You Make Money

Of course what everyone wants to know is: how do you make money on Spiffbox? Basically, all that you need to do to start earning is participate. To earn points, users should create a profile, communicate with other members, respond to messages, and optionally complete surveys or take merchant offers. With each action, more points are earned and when you reach a certain threshold (min. 2,000 points/$20), Spiffbox puts a check in the mail. You may be surprised to learn that reaching that payout number is not as hard as it may sound. Accepting a chat invite earns you 28 points, accepting a friend request is 10 points, and so on. After spending some time really engaging on the site, you could easily start earning cash.

While we have to give Spiffbox credit for thinking outside the box on this one, the idea of paying you to socialize has us feeling a little sour. After all, remember how you used to rack up the "friends" on MySpace only to be left with a large network of random people you didn't know (or care to)? There wasn't actually any value in that. And besides, if everyone on the site is only participating to make money, socializing becomes more like a job than a fun activity. Can't you just see the chats now?

Them: Hi! Want to chat? I'm trying to earn points.

You: OK, me too.

Them: So how long do we have to do this to get credit?

You: I don't know, I think this is good.

Them: Great, thanks. Let's chat again later for more points!

You: Sounds good! Cya!

Oh, the horror. Frankly, most of us have better things to do with our time than trying to earn points for small payouts of cash. What Spiffbox needs to remember is that all the popular social networks caught on - without bribes, mind you - because they were offering something unique and interesting. Creating yet another social network without any truly new concepts behind it (except for the payola) isn't going to be enough in the long run to keep people involved.

However, that's just our opinion. Others feel differently. For example, CNET says that "once the site irons some of its kinks out and becomes a little more user friendly, then we could start to see some real widespread adoption" and "there could be a real future in this space."

What do you think? Does Spiffbox have a shot at becoming the next big thing? Or is bribery a bad choice? Let us know in the comments.

Update: We were informed by the company that the example chat in this post isn't exactly how Spiffbox works. It makes it look like both parties are earning money when really only one party would. The initiator of a message pays points and the receiver gets points, but only if they respond. Spiffbox itself doesn't pay you, members pay each other. However, we stand by our opinion that using financial incentives is not going to be a successful model for growing a social network, regardless of where the money originates.

Weebiz seems to be going full speed. In just a few months, companies around the world have registered and started to use Weebiz' business center as an easy way to improve their business relationships and promote themselves and their products.

As promised, Weebiz has announced that first-class company accounts will be available this October. All scores from free accounts are being recorded and will be transferred to upgraded accounts.

Why offer this kind of prize?

First, it's a good way to say thank you to our members. Secondly, because Weebiz is a business community, throwing in a little competition certainly doesn't hurt.

According to CEO João Santos, "The €1 million challenge is our way to recognize the importance of our members. We want to recognize their importance to us and show them that Weebiz is all about them."

Santos invites all companies to register on Weebiz, fill out the application, and take the challenge.

About Appolicious

According to Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, Appolicious is "a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo, with some Yelp sprinkled in..." but we think the new recommendation service is, as the name implies, closer to that of social bookmarking tool Delicious. As with Delicious, you have an account where you save your items - except here, instead of links, you're saving apps. Also like Delicious, you have the opportunity to "follow" other people whose items you enjoy. Similar to Delicious's "my network" feature, this will highlight people like you who save and share items that fit your interests. Again, we're talking apps not links.

The basic concept behind this idea is to mirror the real world of friend recommendations. You know, when your iPhone-carrying buddy says "hey, have you seen this cool new app?"

How it Works

Of course, in order for you to share your apps with others, you first have to import them into Appolicious. If you want to be more selective, you can manually type in the names of the apps you own, but the easiest way to get started is to do an app import.

The App Library Builder is a Java-based tool which scans your iTunes library for your owned applications. Getting to the tool is a bit harder than it should be we think, since it's not prominently featured on the main Appolicious homepage. However, from your "edit profile" page, clicking through on the link "view my full app library" from the blue box at the bottom of the page will get you going.

Once started, the app detects the location of your iTunes App folder then presents a list of all your apps. Checkboxes are provided so you can check and uncheck the apps you want to import. Unlike our experience with Appsfire, Appolicious accurately detected our applications...all of them (save for jailbreak apps). The apps are then added to your library.

Once imported, you have the opportunity to rate them or write a review, although these steps aren't really all that necessary. By simply owning an application and sharing it on the service, that in and of itself is a recommendation of sorts.

Finding Friends Needs Work

To get the best recommendations, you'll need to import some friends to Appolicious. Unfortunately, the service only allows you to import friends from Gmail or Yahoo! mail by logging into your account using your username and password. Despite featuring a Facebook Connect option for login to the site, there doesn't appear to be a Facebook friend import. Neither is there a way to import friends from other social services like Twitter, for example.

At the very least, you would think that when you land on a user's profile page there would be an option to add them as a friend, but even that isn't an option. Sadly, without better friend finding/following options, the entire service's concept could easily fail. We hope they'll address this issue in a future update.

Recommendations

For now, we can overlook the poor implementation of friending features because Appolicious itself serves up its own recommendations. Plus, by categorizing your "app personality" in your profile (I'm a "social networker" and "tech junkie"), you're offered recommendations from people like you - that is, those who have categorized themselves in the same way.

Conclusion: We'll Give it a Shot

Overall, though, we like the concept of a social network such as this. With a much better import process than Appsfire, it's already off to a good start. And the Delicious model is a great one to mimic for a recommendation service. As long as Appolicious can address the friending issues mentioned above, it could really be a contender for the best place to discover new apps from your friends. That is, unless Apple surprises us with an App Store update that perfects app sharing and recommendations in iTunes itself.

Update: Appsfire's latest version corrects the problems seen in the initial testing mentioned above.

Having an online presence today is far more than having a website. Social media is the order of the day, and everyone agrees that companies have to reach consumers through these innovative channels. What few people are talking about is how companies should be reaching each other using these same tools.

Some business fairs occur annually, some every other year, but none at the time of your choosing. Moreover, they are expensive and require complex PR and marketing to be minimally effective. Online directories, on the other hand, are usually free and work around the clock all year long. However, we are living not in the age of information but in the age of information overload. In directories, your company quickly gets lost, buried beneath a ton of competitors.

The ideal solution to drive business networking to the next level would have to be inexpensive and permanent, while allowing your company to stand out from the crowd, establish real connections, share industry and market information, promote your products and services, and discuss and execute business opportunities.

Of course, some may argue that companies can't really have "friends" in the traditional sense. So, why use the social networking concept for companies? Take Weebiz and ReadWriteWeb, for instance. Weebiz is one of ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, which means we have a relationship. So, while saying that we are friends may be an exaggeration, we are definitely connected in a relationship. These are the kinds of connections Weebiz leverages, along with many other kinds of business relationships, such as clients/suppliers and so on.

One other question that is asked is, Why would I need a network for companies if I already have a professional network. Well, for starters, people can change positions and move to other companies, and when they do, they take their networks with them. On Weebiz, the network, clients, partners, and suppliers remain with the company, independent of whoever manages the company's profile. A network nowadays is regarded as a valuable, even priceless, asset. The idea behind Weebiz is to put this asset in the hands of the organization as a whole, instead of an individual.

By connecting to clients, suppliers, and partners on Weebiz, companies indirectly connect to many other businesses and find many other potential relationships as well. The result is a vast network in which opportunity flows. Weebiz simply leverages your connections and brings the power of social networks to your business.

Visit us at www.weebiz.com or check out our lessons for business men in a public toilet and tell us what you think.

How does an Internet junkie, news organization, or political operative monitor rapidly evolving real-time events, from the crucial details to the bigger picture? More importantly, how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest?

Overview

The proliferation of real-time search engines and trend monitors (sometimes referred to as "listening platforms") has thus far done little to address problems of this scale and importance. This is because they fail to provide context -- i.e. show how a new piece of information is relevant to what we've seen before and where it fits in the space of possibilities and relationships.

For instance, if you are a programming director at CNN trying to discriminate between significant news and Internet memes, simply knowing that #iranelection is a trending topic doesn't tell you its relation to other topics or which communities are driving it -- both critical factors.

One promising area is data-oriented user interfaces: data and algorithmic analysis in the back-end and direct visualization and navigation in the front-end. This the next stage of social information, slicing and dicing, mixing and matching, interpreting and analyzing, completely on demand. In this new landscape, the data is the interface.

It's not just about sitting back and looking at pretty pictures. It is about setting aside stale UI metaphors and getting as bare-to-the-bone a human interface as possible for computation. The recently launched Wolfram-Alpha applies this principle to structured data. (Disclosure: I was a member of the core Wolfram-Alpha team and may continue to consult with Wolfram Research.)

Real-time data streaming offers similar possibilities and opportunities. In this vein, let's outline some basic ideas and methods for giving context to the streams.

The Computational History of #iranelection

At the most abstract level, history and computation are the same thing: the evolution of systems over time. Twitter has several remarkable properties that allow us to finally leverage this correspondence in tangible ways. The simplicity of its data, the openness of its system, and its extreme time resolution make it possible for us to detect atoms of history, those moments when something is triggered and society is reconfigured ever so slightly.

Look at the bandwidth plots below. They represent the relative volume of different Iran-related phrases on Twitter over time. Their most striking characteristic is how discrete and spikey they are: a tell-tale sign of an organic computational system.

The first pair of terms compares the bandwidth of "Ahmadinejad" and "Khamenei" mentions, respectively. The evolution of the uprising at the very highest level of social abstraction is shown with remarkable clarity: moving from a dispute over the election process involving Ahmadinejad (shown in pink) to a dispute over authority involving the supreme leader Khamenei (shown in red).

Not only do we get the gist of the evolution, we also see its details and relationships to other social sub-structures. For example, looking at the second plot, we see a co-relation between mentions of the Basij militia and the reports of deaths; and that initial uptick in Khamenei mentions corresponds to the uptick in Basij mentions, foreshadowing the later crackdown.

This idea of computational history applies to events that Twitter not only reported but shaped and hosted as well. A plot further down below compares the Twitter-centric discussion of #cnnfail to the distribution of Twitter proxy IPs that allowed information to continue to flow out of Iran. Is it a coincidence that these two terms merge smoothly together? And what about the big spike in mentions of proxy distribution coinciding with the first reports of violence?

Computing with Social Structures

Simply tracking the volume of various phrases gives us a sense of what is happening on the street, literally and figuratively. But that signal is but a shadow of a far more complex and intricate reality, an interwoven web of individuals and actions.

Twitter allows these social structures to become data structures by means of the "RT" convention. And this in turn allows us to perform extremely powerful computations on the social structures that underlie the flow of information.

Network layout algorithms are a familiar, powerful, and fascinating example. They self-organize in your computer to reveal self-organization in the real world. And that is exactly the kind of tool we need to test our hypothesis about #cnnfail.

The plot below shows the network of people who re-tweeted mentions of IP proxies, with those who had tweeted earlier about #cnnfail highlighted. We see not only significant overlap among the people involved but also a considerable structure in the relationships between them. We have captured a real community at the moment of its birth.

Remember this as you look at the next plot below. Here, we see the re-tweet network that formed around the top five Iranian tweets. Its structure shows a very different phenomenon, capturing the emergence not of a community but of an elite. Despite massive interest, or perhaps because of it, most people did not discover more than one of the top Iranians. The network simply grew faster than the information could naturally propagate. But a small inner circle did succeed in identifying core sources of information.

The final plot below shows yet another community structure, as well as a new algorithmic technique. This plot does not show the emergence of a new community but rather shows the appropriation of a new topic by mature political factions. This re-tweet network has formed around Iranian tweets that mention Obama. Using graph theory, we can computationally extract the sub-communities and then use that information to color the network. The large blue mass on the right is the conservative Twittersphere, while the other structures are a less-organized collection of mainstream or progressive news outlets.

Algorithms and Social Change

Will future Presidents express strategic goals in terms of Twitter graph theory? That is almost a certainty.

The purpose of these computations is two-fold: first, to contextualize information from across time and space in terms that are accessible to humans; and secondly, to distill abstract ideas into actionable form.

Twitter is a platform for achieving both of these purposes in human affairs: detecting networks of information propagation and erecting new networks to reshape emerging social computations. This is the core of Twitter's social and business value. If we were to play that age-old game of "Guess the business model," we'd look here first.

How to algorithmically discover and deploy novel social structures is perhaps the billion, or trillion, dollar question. With Twitter, the data and API are in place. And if the history of computation is any guide, once programming a system becomes possible, progressing from a hack to an application to a platform is only a matter of time.

Guest author: Kovas Boguta is a co-founder of Infoharmoni, a stealth startup building computable knowledge interfaces for real-time data sets. He just returned from last week's Personal Democracy Forum, where discussion about the Iranian uprising took center-stage.

These are glorious days for networking. The social Web is richer and wider than ever before, and it offers a myriad of services and platforms to help us connect with each other, share our likes and dislikes, etc. Some people even say that too many such services exist, that many of them will plunge in dot-com bubble-like style.

We envisioned for Weebiz a real network of companies, in which relationships between different businesses were visible and working to their advantage. For example, if company A is a supplier of company B, and company B is a strategic partner of company C, then Weebiz could make it easy for company A to realize that it should do business with company C. This is obvious, and social networks for professionals, like LinkedIn and Xing, have proven this to be very useful for people.

So, how come no one thought it would be just as useful for organizations as well? We'd like to think we are a bunch of incredibly original thinkers, but the reason is probably that to make such a network make sense is hard. People use computers, surf the Web, register for accounts on social networks, and so on. Companies, on the other hand, don't. The people who make up an organization do all of these things, and sometimes they do it in the name of the company they work for (take the many brands on Twitter, for instance), but the truth is, treating an organization like a user can get awkward.

We had a solid idea of what we wanted to do: create a social network and fill it with companies instead of people. You may wonder why, but for us it was obvious. No new product makes sense unless it satisfies someone else's needs. So, what needs did we want Weebiz to satisfy? Plenty of them, actually.

First, there is the obvious advantage of connecting thousands of companies, in what experts call "network externalities." Basically, this happens when the value of a good or service increases with each new consumer or user. Most communities benefit from this effect, as does the telephone system. Secondly, a network that behaves intelligently, by identifying what is and is not relevant (through tags, semantic technology, etc.), can be incredibly valuable in a time of information overload. The auto-suggest systems we have grown accustomed to with services such as Amazon and YouTube apply just as well to the needs of businesses. After all, spam becomes the least of your troubles when you have to navigate tons of information to get what you want. Instead, relevancy becomes critical. This is what we are chasing after: connecting companies through their business relations and establishing a smart network in which companies can promote themselves and their products and services, as well as find information relevant to them.

Promoting and discovering business opportunities was, then, the central purpose of Weebiz, and so we decided to kick-start our business center. To do so, it was clear that we should be the ones to offer the very first business opportunity. In deciding exactly what to do, we fell back on one of our core values: shared success. So, we created a challenge to discover the most influential of pioneers on Weebiz: the company with the most business relationships, profile followers, views, etc. Obviously, our business opportunity had to be attractive to companies; a free cell phone probably wouldn't cut it. €1 million seemed like a fairly attractive incentive, so we went with it. The question then was, how in the world would we come up with that kind of money? Because our objective was to "share" some of our own success, we decided that only paid accounts could enter the challenge, and that the winner would be chosen only after we reached the milestone of 5000 paid accounts. This way, the challenge would pay for itself, and we would simply be giving back part of our revenue (most of it, really).

Many of the challenges we faced early on might seem simple, but they weren't. For example, if a person is needed to manage the profile of a given company, who should have an account, the person or the company? And if a person can have an account, should they also have a profile? Giving both a company and its employees accounts seemed like the simplest solution at first, but that would turn Weebiz into a mixed network of people and companies, which would draw us away from our goal. We ended up deciding that accounts should be personal, but that no one person could have a profile, only a log-in name. We also decided that more than one person could manage a company's profile (although only with paid accounts).

This dilemma led us to a much more consequential challenge: credibility and trust. When you connect with strangers on the other side of the world, making sure they are who they say they are is essential. It's even more important if the people are connecting for business purposes, because money will probably get involved sooner or later. Weebiz is not meant to be an intermediary for business transactions of any sort. It is designed as a platform and service to help companies promote themselves and find what they need. Still, not having a trustworthy community would be the end of us.

With the help of a partner, Weebiz easily authenticates companies with paid accounts. The problem, though, is with free ones. The only feasible solution was to make the domain of the email address submitted during registration the name of the company's profile, unless the company upgraded its account (and thus authenticated). With this solution, some companies may appear with slightly different profile names on Weebiz, but we can now at least guarantee that whoever uses an account owns (or is authorized to use) the domain in their company's profile name (unless they use an email provider we don't know about). This decision may put off some companies, but we are far more concerned with making Weebiz a community that businesses can trust.

Finally, we faced the question of which features exactly to include in the service. Some were obvious: business proposals, for example. Others, like CRM tools, were not. Many online services struggle with this question; ideas about what to include can come pouring in and create confusion and distract focus. Our conclusion was that Weebiz should be a platform. We decided that providing an API for others to work with not only would provide users with a variety of tools but would ensure we did not lose focus on our main mission, which is to be a network for companies. (Weebiz is still under development and currently in an open beta, so many features, like the API, are still unavailable).

Put your company on the social Web by visiting Weebiz today.

Partners will be able to develop online communities that make their skills visible to other partners, connect with them on tech innovations, and develop and deliver products through interactive forums before beta testing. IBM is concurrently launching their Business Partner Development Series, an educational tool for partners who need insight on creating dynamic infrastructures, selling to the midmarket, and selling to the CFO.

In a recent online brainstorming session with 1,100 global partners, one of the leading ideas was a call for a more social-web approach to help the partners improve collaboration with each other and establish new relationships across global markets.

The new network will allow members to discover one another and collaborate through a project-oriented framework that will include blogs, forums, private teaming spaces, social bookmarking, and RSS feeds.

The new Business Partner Development Series will moreover give the company's partners 60 no-cost online classes and 25 global in-person education and networking events to help them build and sell better products for clients.

According to our source at IBM, the company's network of 100,000 partner entities is "critical to the success and growth of our company. Today, partners from across 158 countries drive about 30 percent of IBM's revenue each year. IBM invests in its partners' success because our success depends on it. At a time when our competitors are cutting back on resources for partners to the tune of $2.5 billion this year... this investment includes sales, marketing, and technical resources to help partners go to market faster, find new market opportunities, connect with other partners to create new ecosystems, and drive revenue."

While the network undoubtedly helps IBM keep business development and innovations - and revenue - "in the family," the value of the resources they provide is huge, both in geographical scale and in terms of the content itself.

With today's current crop of social networking applications like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, the decisions about who you "friend" are made consciously, based on a number of criteria unique to the individual. Often, these networks become crowded with people who you barely know, but find interesting. That's a social network, yes, but it's not one that reflects your real-life relationships. Even Facebook, the current social darling, has moved away from being about real-life friendships. With the ability to friend public figures and brands and the ability to sort friends into lists, the push is on to expand your network beyond close, personal connections.

Similar issues face the mobile social networks emerging now. Applications like Loopt and Brightkite still require you to add friends which leads to, again, networks that consist of acquaintances and other folks you only know marginally well.

How Friendlee is Different

Because there really isn't a network that taps into your real world relationships, the HP researchers decided to build one. In Friendlee, the social graph is automatically constructed with minimal input required from the user since the software tracks the call and messaging history to determine your connections.

In addition, Friendlee introduces a set of "ambient awareness" indicators that provide useful information about your friends' statuses. For example, indicators will include current location, time spent at that location, local time, weather, a status message, and even your friend's phone's status: busy, phone on hold, engaged, silent, or vibrate. Imagine how useful it would be to know if your friend's phone was busy or turned to silent before you even dialed it!

Friendlee isn't just a contacts-replacement application, though. It is a network. The app actually lets you see your immediate contacts, of course, but it lets you see your friends' contacts as well. These lists are sorted by the strength of the connections, something that's determined by the frequency and duration of the interactions.

Because not everyone would be comfortable sharing their contact information with a social network, intimate or not, Friendlee includes privacy controls that let you configure who gets to see what. That way, you could configure anyone in the "Family" category to see everything, but other groups would have access to less information.

Friendlee consists of three components: the phone-based client, a web interface where you can interact with the data, and a backend server that stores a copy of all the information in a database. The client would sync with the server several times per minute, updating the system with call history, location, time, and other information.

Still a Prototype Only (Boo!)

At the moment, Friendlee is in prototype form for both the Android and Windows Mobile operating systems, so you can only drool over it now. The prototypes will be put into field testing while improvements are made before it ever becomes publicly available.

We normally wouldn't post about an application which you can't even try out yet (we hate to tease!), but this one sounded downright revolutionary. We were just too excited not to share the news with you.

Note: we requested more information about Friendlee's public availability but have not heard back yet from HP.

No one could deny the hardware/software/services giant's place in tech history (their first plant is now almost 100 years old), but what does it have to do with the glassy, streamy, widgety world that tech had become? IBM staff on-site had many answers for that oft-repeated question, which was usually phrased, roughly, "What the hell are you guys doing here?"

So, what is IBM really doing in the social space?

Enter developerWorks, reportedly the largest online technical resource for software developers in the world. Today, half of the world's developers use it; that's around 8 million members.

And today, IBM is launching a social network just for them.

And before you rush to make comparisons, it's nothing like Facebook, LinkedIn, or any of the better known social nets we all know.

The functions of the site are remarkably task-focused. IBM's demo video sets a stage of goal-oriented techies seeking a specific knowledge or skill set and using My developerWorks' groups, discussion threads, and profiles to determine who has experience or expertise in a particular field. Warning: Demo video works better if you ignore the business stock photography. We know most dude developers don't really have frosted tips.

The most exciting prospect is the possibility for ongoing collaboration. All IBM needs now is to show profiles in other disciplines so that the biz dev, marketing, design, executive, and VC types can get in on the action and boom, you've got a never-ending Startup Weekend.

An IBM rep said via email Wednesday night, "IBM's goal with My developerWorks is to connect the global community of software developers and make it easier for them to create new technologies based on open standards such as Java, Linux and XML. With $4 trillion in global economic stimulus investments on the way for projects such as healthcare modernization, smart grids, and public infrastructure improvements - all of it technology-driven - IBM wants to give developers a seat at the table and help them build skills in hot technology areas including analytics, clean tech, and cloud computing."

And what does IBM stand to gain from a web of millions of registered software developers sharing information, compiling data, building teams, brainstorming ideas, critiquing and refining their work, and creating products on and through their proprietary network?

We didn't receive a comment on that point and have journalistic standards of objectivity to maintain; however, we're sure that the My developerWorks will profit both the individuals and the organizations involved.

Ning is also an active proponent of OpenSocial and hosts a vast directory of OpenSocial apps that its users can use on their profile pages and networks.

Ning raised $60 million last April, and if Dan Frommer's calculations are right, it currently has an annual revenue of about $10 million from paid accounts, premium features, and advertising.

Compared to Facebook and MySpace, Ning, of course, is only a niche product, but it has clearly found its place in the social networking space.

In addition to determining the value of an email contact, the researchers also found that those who had strong email ties with a manager enjoyed greater financial success than those who kept themselves more distant. In fact, those with strong links to a manager produced an average of $588 of revenue per month over the norm. (So maybe you should start emailing the boss more?)

Another value tied to greater financial success was network reach. A more diverse circle of correspondents - specifically, the number of people reachable in three steps - was also tied to higher performance. 

Some Negative Impacts

However, if there were too many managers involved, the old expression "too many cooks spoil the broth" proved to be true. Projects overly-managed tended to have less success.

As for those who typically emailed the same people over and over, the results were also found to be negative. This is perhaps due to repetitive and redundant information being exchanged, the researchers theorized.

The study also identified a particular type of email user dubbed a "gatekeeper." The gatekeeper was someone who insisted upon personally approving or enabling every request. The researchers determined that this person was a less valuable team member - monetarily that is. In other words, if you're constantly being asked to provide information or access to others, don't be flattered - you're just another node on a colleague's network and one that may very well be a bottleneck to the information flow.

What's better is to have a handful of "superstars" on a project who are well-connected and in the center of the information flow. This actually leads to better performance than if all team members were central to the communication pathways.

Finally, the researchers found that there were a handful of things that seemingly had no impact on performance. These included access to different divisions, access to different geographical locations, and gender distribution.

Conclusion

The results of this study can be extrapolated only so far since the researchers used consultants to determine the monetary value of connections and the success of projects. In other industries and companies, there may be different factors that determine a project's success or failure.

That said, there are still some over-arching truths to be found here - and these truths are relevant to the discussions we're having on the web today. For example, just recently, there was a lot of talk about how much value there was in your Twitter network. The question was raised after Jason Calacanis offered Twitter $250,000 for placement in the "Recommended Users" section of Twitter's site for a period of two years. His contention is that there's a definite value to the number of followers you have on the Twitter social network and he wanted Twitter to sell him those connections for a set price. But was he offering too little or too much? Without more research, it's hard to know.

As our social networks continue to figure more prominently in our interactions, both personal and professional, there's likely going to be more opportunities like this to study the value of those connections. What will a Facebook friend be worth, for example? What about a LinkedIn contact? Can any study ever really tell us for sure? All we do know now is that value doesn't come from the sheer number of connections alone, but in how you leverage those connections, how they're laid out in your network, and how they're interconnected, too.

For more information, you can refer to the slide deck (PPT) that summarizes this study's findings.

The integration of sensors with social networks will lead to real-time data and more useful web apps.

In recent posts we reviewed an MIT experiment called WikiCity, that gathered real-time location data from mobile phones in Rome and graphically mapped trends from it. We then looked at a more commercial product doing similar real-time location data analysis, called Citysense. That product aims to let users find the most popular night spots in San Francisco and the most efficient ways to get to them. The next stage of projects/products such as Wikicity and Citysense will be to enable users to social network, using data from sensors as one input.

Emerging Trend: Integrating Social Networks and Sensor Networks

Sensors have become much more prevelant in mobile devices over the past few years. This means that when we talk about sensors, we're not necessarily talking about the microchip embedded in your fridge door. Increasingly, sensors are attached to a human via their mobile phone. Both the Apple iPhone and the Nokia N95 contain GPS and accelerometer sensors. Sensor data is transmitted via GPS if available or via Wi-Fi positioning techniques.

In a recent W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, held in Barcelona in January, the trend of sensors mixing with social networks was discussed. An accompanying paper entitled Integrating Social Networks and Sensor Networks provides some useful information. Again, these are mostly research projects right now so not much has filtered into the commercial Web yet.

One application for sensors in social networks is to help people to meet others, using alerts based on their location at a particular time. These alerts could be triggered by either explicit opt-in by the user, or by implicit means. An example of the latter is a user receiving an alert on their mobile phone when someone that they exchange messages with on a blog is in the same room. There would need to be the appropriate permissions and privacy controls in place, of course - and this is one of the challenges that these applications are facing.

Sensors Aren't Just About The Socializing

Social networks are often still thought of as fun, consumer applications such as Facebook, MySpace or YouTube. However, the W3C paper notes that social networking + sensors can also be used in 'serious' markets such as healthcare. For example, the paper suggests that collaborative rehabilitation is possible using sensor-enabled portable devices:

"More and more portable devices are supporting sensor-based interactions, from peripherals (Nike+iPod) to integrated sensors (the original iPhone made good use of its accelerometer, while the latest iPhone 3G has added various proximity and light sensors). We can make use of the Social Web and Sensor Networks to create collaborative applications for portable devices to encourage exercise, à la the Wii. As an example of how this could be done, we could begin by finding contacts on the social network with similar interests or by GPS location (e.g. using FireEagle). This social network of friends can then be used to power collaborative applications (CAPTCHAs, the ESP game, quizzes) where progress can be made by the group when a certain level of exercise has been achieved. Then, as a final step, the resulting sensor data is sent to physicians for analysis."

The conclusion of the W3C paper is that "the integration of sensor networks with social networks leads to applications that can sense the context of a user in much better ways and thus provides more personalized and detailed solutions." The paper also outlines how the Semantic Web can be used to manage the interoperability between sensor networks and social networks.

Real-Time Data is Actually Useful Now

These kinds of sensor-enabled social networking applications are still far from being widespread. Citysense, after all, is limited to just one U.S. city right now (although a New York version is coming soon). But we can see how this could become the future of social networking, in a couple of ways. Firstly, for the younger generation, mobile phones will be the primary way they access and make use of their social networks. Just as kids today use Facebook and AIM and the like to organize their social activities, imagine being able to find out in an instant where all the "young and edgy" kids are hanging out in your local town on a particular Saturday afternoon by using a mobile app like Citysense or Brightkite (our pick last December for Most Promising App for 2009). Secondly, these apps hold equal promise for most other demographics, in areas such as healthcare and enterprise.

In the Web 2.0 era, real-time data has mostly been used to power fancy visualizations. It hasn't been used extensively yet to change peoples behavior or their environment. Indeed, a current criticism of Wikicity is that it doesn't do much more than provide nice looking charts; and hence, it's been labeled "info porn" by some. But with the next era of web apps, we will move beyond just data being 'visualized' and have it start to affect peoples decisions and actions. Hopefully, this will be in a positive way by improving peoples ability to connect with like-minded folks. There are still significant technical, social, and privacy challenges to overcome though, before apps like Citysense and Brightkite go mainstream.

The way that Nomee's CEO Kevin Mokarow describes his new Adobe AIR application is that it lets you follow "people, not web sites." This is accomplished through the creation and exchange of "Nomee cards." In your card, you enter in your contact information and your social networking profiles from sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and hundreds more - anything with an RSS feed is supported. By creating Nomee cards for select groups, you can specify who gets to see what information. For example, if you want to share your card by posting it to your blog, you may want to include your Twitter, FriendFeed, and MySpace information, but not your Facebook profile. For your close friends, however, you could share a separate Nomee card which contains your Facebook profile info, too.

Nomee also provides pre-built cards for certain high-profile persons including celebrities, sports players, and the occasional politician (yes, it's Barack Obama). Anyone can subscribe to these cards just as anyone can subscribe to yours - and you don't have to reciprocate by accepting their card in return. It's entirely a one way experience.

Within the Nomee application the cards can be organized into groups and clicking on any user's information will display the number of updates per service in a very iPhone-esque fashion. You can also view a stream of that person's most recent updates across all their networks.

Some Issues

Obviously, keeping track of all your friends and colleagues in Nomee could be very inefficient since you have to click on users one-by-one to see their respective streams. The only other option for seeing friends' updates is turning on the desktop alerts - a feature you'll either love or hate. If you only have a few contacts, it may be nice to get the occasional pop-up, but most of us would be overrun with alerts.

The company intended this application to be a way to stay tuned into what your friends and other contacts are up to, but outside of those pop-ups, its interface makes this relatively time-consuming and inefficient. However, in playing with the application ourselves, we saw the potential for it to become a social address book. Of course, transforming the app from a stream-based aggregator to an address book would require some additional work on the company's part.

Still, the idea is intriguing - an address book that's filled not only with traditional contact info, but also with the status updates and other social data produced by that contact across the social networking arena. That could actually be a useful desktop application. Add a mobile sync feature and there could really be something there.

In order for this to come to pass, though, Nomee would have to add a lot more features. For example, it would have to allow you to build contacts on your own and it should let you accept vCards from others which you could then customize by entering in things like their Twitter username, etc. Supporting a standard like vCard is important because you can't assume that everyone is going to be creating these "Nomee cards."

At the moment, Nomee is somewhere in between web-based aggregation portals like FriendFeed (or, these days, Facebook's stream) and desktop-based AIR apps like TweetDeck's Twitter-tracking tool. The company needs to decide how committed they are to being an aggregation tool versus a social contact organizer. If it's the former, the current iteration somewhat fails for anyone with a decent amount of contacts to follow because it's just inefficient to track updates with this app. But if it's the latter, after some work Nomee could become a useful way to pull up contact information while also seeing a person's latest social activity.

We suppose that, to a point, you can use Nomee in this way right now. However, you're restricted to those who already have Nomee cards - which includes very few "real" people at the moment. (All you have are celebrity "news makers.") And without real people to follow, there isn't much you can do with a social application.

About 75% of Super Rewards' income is currently derived from advertising offers, while the other 25% come from direct sales of in-game points that bypass the advertising solution. Super Rewards has about 40 million users worldwide, a majority of which can be found in English-speaking countries. Super Rewards currently features about 3,000 different offers in its database.

Developers can now implement the Super Rewards system relatively easily into their own games and apps. For relatively simple applications, this can be as easy as copying and pasting Super Rewards code into their own programs. While Bailey couldn't quite divulge all the details in the agreements that the company has signed with developers, he stressed that Super Rewards would take less than the 30% cut that Apple currently gets from apps sold in the App Store.

Walking a Fine Line

Overall, this looks like an interesting solution for developers to monetize their games and social network apps, though they will clearly have to walk a fine line between creating a compelling reason for users to engage with advertisers, and looking like they are exploiting their users and annoying them with ads and offers from Super Rewards. Some of the games are obviously also targeted at younger kids, which could potentially introduce a number of ethical problems for developers who want to implement Super Rewards in their apps.

Is Facebook after Grandma and Grandpa now that they have mom and dad? You bet.

You then have the option of inviting more members to join the group. In Step 2, there are boxes provided to enter in the names of your family members already on Facebook. If you need more boxes, just click the green plus sign below. Finally, and likely the reason why Facebook created these groups in the first place, there is an option to invite other people in your family to join Facebook.

You can type in email addresses by hand or import them from your email address book. (Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Apple Mail, and many others are supported.)

The group, once created, looks like any other Facebook group with a Member List, Discussion Board, Wall, Events Section, etc. However, there's a big difference between this group and others you'll find on Facebook. It's a completely private group, not visible to anyone else.

Facebook explains this in the "Group Type" box:

This is a secret group. It will not show up in your profile, and only admins can invite members.

In other words, you can post away in here without worries that your online friends will see your activity. The only exception to this, unfortunately, is with the events. When you go to create an event within the group, it's shared either with your local network (in my case that's Tampa Bay) or all of Facebook. The supposedly "secret" group is listed as the host of the event. So much for privacy. It would have been nice to use this feature to track family gatherings, but there's no need to broadcast every anniversary and family reunion to the entire social network that is Facebook.

Sadly, this Events section is yet another example of how Facebook forces public sharing on you even while pretending they're offering you a completely private venue.

Still, assuming you have enough family members willing to join Facebook - and based on these latest statistics, it's likely that you do - this new feature could end up being a great place to communicate and share content with your family. In fact, we expect that this single feature may even lead to an explosion of Facebook sign-ups from Grandmas and Grandpas everywhere. It might even attract some of the younger kids away from MySpace so they can hang out with the family on Facebook. On second thought, maybe not. it might just make Facebook look even more like that uncool place online where all those grownups hang out.

Thanks to AllFacebook for discovering this new feature!