Enter new media marketing for new media products! A rash of online promo videos for social products show how Internet and mobile entrepreneurs have taken lessons from traditional broadcast advertising as much as they have from YouTube.

Best of all, the videos have given great ROI (that's "return on investment" for you non-advertising types).

Regarding this promo video for MyNameIsE.com, founder and designer Renato Valdés Olmos said, "That video actually cost us rental money for the camera, some drinks, and pizzas!"

In 3 days, the video got "4,000 views and great responses" before Vimeo took it down; apparently, the site doesn't allow commercials. However, the E team got the video up on YouTube.

"Sign-ups spiked as soon as the video started being posted around," said Olmos, "and it also works great in pitches and presentations."

All this was acheived with no marketing budget and little support from major bloggers and Twitter influencers.

Another promo video making the rounds comes from iPhone app Birdhouse.

"There's no question that the adoption of Birdhouse benefitted hugely from the exposure that came from the promotional video we put together," said cofounder Adam Lisagor. "We knew from the beginning we'd be making a video people would enjoy despite any interest in the actual app. We heard over and over, 'I don't even know if I'll use Birdhouse, but the video made me buy it.'

"This is something that almost all software developers overlook: the power of entertainment to communicate why you built it and why you want others to enjoy it as much as you."

A third video we've seen is almost a straight-up live demo for LoveToGoOut.com, a new site that aims to organize pub crawls, club nights, and other nocturnal, boozy get-togethers.

"Originally, the video was created to promote the site at a local university event here in the UK," said advisor Barry Pace.

"[We] haven't promoted this too much online (if at all). Measurement of success is more about local awareness rather than attempting to monitor any buzz online."

Nevertheless, if current trends are any indication, site traffic will spike with proliferation of the video.

At the moment, Asurion's address book is available only on Android phones, and it takes advantage of the phone's open nature to access the address book details stored on the device. An iPhone version may or may not be in the works as the company seems more focused on selling their solution as something that could be integrated into handsets before time of purchase. Asurion already has relationships with several major carriers in the U.S. and Canada thanks to past software deals, so it's reasonable to assume they'll leverage those connections once again to sell their new application.

For the end user, the Asurion address book is more than just a fun way to see a contact's social information - it also lets you return a phone call via email, IM, or even a status update. Other updates like messages or photo sharing can be sent out to groups you create in the application. This makes it easy to share with multiple people at once - like sending a photo to all your friends or family.

The end user experience is entirely customizable since consumers can pick and choose which social elements, known as "mix-ins," are integrated. These mix-ins can include things like email, messaging, social networks, media sharing, mapping, interactive games, and anything else a developer can envision.

Another interesting element to the Asurion address book is the idea of a "Smart Contact." This is a contact that isn't representative of a person, but rather functions as a service. For example, a preferred airline Smart Contact delivers up-to-date travel information, provides access to reservations, frequent flyer miles, and more. That's only one example, but it's easy to imagine how brands could take advantage of this feature to further integrate themselves into customers' lives.

Perhaps the best thing about the Asurion application is that it provides a way to access the information which is most important to you without having to jump from application to application. You can now do more with the personal contacts you're the closest to - the ones who you care enough about to enter into your phone.

If you want to get in on the Asurion Mobile AddressBook beta, you can sign up here: asurionmobile.com/beta.

Now, it can be. Today, SlideShare is introducing the "SlideShare Ribbon" an add-in that makes the sharing and social features of SlideShare accessible without even leaving PowerPoint.

Using the SlideShare Ribbon, users gain the ability to share presentations from within PowerPoint, update existing presentations with new content, search existing SlideShare presentations for examples, download SlideShare content for remixing, and view presentations from contacts and groups. User can also check their SlideShare statistics from within PowerPoint.

In short, SlideShare makes PowerPoint social.

That's what makes this release so interesting. SlideShare has taken the opportunity to move beyond browser development - the traditional home of social features - to work on a different piece of desktop software. And in PowerPoint, SlideShare has chosen an app that, by and large, has not been seen as a venue for social behavior, at all.

The idea of using PowerPoint to access Web resources isn't earth shattering. Microsoft has provided the ability to dynamically download PowerPoint clip art for quite some time. But that has always been within the realm of delivering Microsoft content to the user. This is the first time that those types of Web-based interactions have taken on more of a social-networking context - by delivering and sharing content from a variety of users. And that suddenly casts all desktop software in a new light - no matter how "unsocial" a particular app may seem.

No doubt this is just the first of many such add-ins that will imbue our most used applications with social features. And that will make even the most tedious of applications increasingly valuable to us.

To install the SlideShare Ribbon, you'll need to PowerPoint 2007, Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

1. Me. Access books, music, movies, restaurants, wine etc. that you liked and commented on via the browser. All your favorites are always synched up and right there when you need them.

2. Friends. When you're looking for social recommendations on the go, you can tap into an intelligent, aggregate list of things your friends liked around the web.

3. Popular. This screen lets you expand your circle and stay connected to what is happening on Glue around the web. You'll find 100s of books, music, movies, restaurants, wines and more that are popular among the Glue users.

As you browse through the items, you can either display them in the standard view as shown above, or you can switch over to a more fun "cover flow" view that allows you to quickly flip through the different films, books, restaurants, etc. similar to the way you browse through your albums on your iPhone/iPod.

The iPhone app is definitely a must-have for Glue users as they will enjoy having access to their friends' recommendations even when they're away from their computers.

In March of this year, they launched an iTunes-esque music store. Now, according to the LA Times, LimeWire plans to add more social features to its service. Better late than never.

"Users will be able to create their own private file-sharing networks with friends and/or family members, with greater control over what gets shared with whom. In a recent interview, Kevin J. Bradshaw, Lime's chief operating officer, described it as the ability to create a 'personal publishing platform' that delivers photos to family members or homework assignments to students."

Clearly, the social features are less about being social and more about being anti-social. It doesn't take a huge intuitive leap to realize that this new feature set also offers the ability for users to step out of the larger sharing community and form trusted sharing networks with other users.

The question is: will these smaller networks truly protect users who are sharing the types of copyrighted content that draws the ire of the RIAA? Or will the desire to get the latest and greatest music and videos continue to expose these smaller networks to the same problems that have plagued the larger community?

Other P2P services have tried a variety of ways to avoid litigation. So far, at least as far as the "-sters" go - Napster, Grokster, and Aimster - none has met with a great deal of success.

With current economic conditions causing even the most successful companies to reduce expenditures, can LimeWire continue to fend off the legal eagles and make a success of its service? We'll just have to wait and see.

What's Glue?

Glue is a new browser plugin from Adaptive Blue. It uses semantic technology to connect you to your friends around things like books, music, movies, stars, artists, stocks, wine, restaurants, and more. The plugin places a bar - not a toolbar, just a bar - at the top of your browser window when you visit certain popular web sites like Amazon, Yahoo! Finance, Wine.com, IMDB, Wikipedia, Citysearch, Last.fm, and many others.

As you read about the album, movie, book, or whatever else it is that you're viewing at the time, you'll have a toolbar at the top of the page where you can see which of your friends had visited the same page, if they liked it, and if they left a comment.

Glue Is Not Co-browsing

Glue is not a co-browsing plugin like Me.dium nor does it try to socialize the entire web surfing experience like Socialbrowse (our coverage). Also, unlike Headup, another semantic browser plugin we covered recently, Glue doesn't bother you with pop-up messages as you surf. Glue simply provides a social element to web pages in context - there's no destination site to join and your social graph doesn't need to be re-created in order to use it.

How It Works

In order to tap into your network of friends, Glue uses APIs from popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed to import your friends. You can choose to import one or all of those friend lists into the plugin.

To participate in the Glue network, all you do is continue browsing the web normally. When you visit a supported site, the Glue friend bar appears. If you choose, you can view what your friends say about the item on the page, or you can ignore the bar and continue on your way. However, your visit is recorded and when one of your friends visits that same page, they can see that you've been there recently, though not the exact date or time your visit occurred. This information is only stored for the last 20 things you've visited on the web.

While surfing, if you want to share your thoughts about the item you're viewing, you can optionally use the Glue "like" button and/or the "2 cents" button which lets you add a quick thought about item. You can also click on the bar to see the profiles of your friends, other recent Glue users, and you can explore their interests even further by clicking into their profiles, which display in a pop-up box that appears when you click their avatar. You can also optionally click on "Actions" to explore the item you're viewing on other Glue-supported sites.

Making The Social Web Relevant

By providing this social experience in context, Glue can actually be more useful to you than simply joining isolated social networks surrounding your interests where your data and that of your friends is trapped inside the network's walls. It may also have some appeal over a lifestreaming service like FriendFeed, because you don't have to happen across the information - it's there when you're actively interested in something and have sought it out on the web.

In the official version coming soon, the company is also soon going to provide a method for any web publisher to "Glue-enable" their site by simply adding AB Meta to their sites, by inserting three lines of code in the header of a page.

Glue is the next generation of the Adaptive Blue plugin, a tool that currently has around 350,000 active users. Current Adaptive Blue users will find their plugin updated to Glue through the standard Firefox plugin update process. For everyone else, you can download the plugin here.

Although at the present time Glue is available as a Firefox plugin only, an IE version is in the works and an iPhone plugin will arrive in a few weeks.

Disclosure: AdaptiveBlue's CEO, Alex Iskold, is a feature writer for RWW.]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/put_the_social_web_in_context_with_glue.php Products Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:00:00 -0800 Sarah Perez The Social Media Classroom (SMC) is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more. The SMC is more than just a collection of new media tools repurposed for educational use, though. The end goal of the service is to move education away from being a unidirectional delivery of knowledge to become a more collaborative learning process.

The SMC is meant to supplement, not replace, the face-to-face interaction that occurs in the classroom. According to Howard, when he tried to introduce new media tools into his first Wi-Fi-equipped classroom, he was surprised by the blank looks on so many of the students' faces when he told them that he expected them to blog and edit the wiki. Since he was so familiar with the power of Web 2.0 tools and was surrounded by people who felt the same, he hadn't realized how many college students didn't actually have experience using these types of 21st century tools. This sparked an idea to build a new social media platform designed specifically for use in an educational setting. And thus, the Social Media Classroom was born.

What's Included

The SMC includes all the familiar social media tools from blogs to RSS to videos and wikis and even microblogging. All are integrated into one seamless environment where the different applications are available from navigational tabs at the top of the page just like any ordinary web site has. Everyone who is a member of a particular instance of the Social Media Classroom will initially see a personalized start page upon login that aggregates their own different posts to the various parts of the site.

The SMC will be available to educators both an installable version for self-hosting and as a hosted version (coming soon) for those less tech-savvy.

The Classroom and The Collaboratory

The project itself has two components called The Classroom and The Collaboratory. The The Collaboratory (or Colab) is simply the web service part of the project which is also made available to anyone, even non-educators. It includes both the downloadable install file and the soon-to-launch hosted service.

The Classroom, on the other hand, is the entire web site available at www.socialmediaclassroom.com which contains, among other things, the curriculum materials. In these materials you'll find all sorts of information about the different types of social media as well as links to various resources across the web.

21st Century Education

Social media and the participatory web have had a greater impact on our world beyond just how we connect and socialize with our friends online. The base concepts surrounding how these interactions take place has influenced a whole new generation of web users who now expect to participate in discussions and not be dictated to...whether online or offline. We've seen this influence occur in the workplace, where millennial employees demand to know "why" they're being asked to do something instead of just doing it. We've also seen it effect the business of marketing as social media users now feel strongly that brands (companies) should be listening and conversing with them in an open, transparent matter. So why not bring the social media revolution to the classroom, too? It only makes sense.

Those involved with this project believe that today's students need more than a class where a professor lectures for an hour - that has no hope of engaging their interest. Students need a classroom where learning is a more participatory experience and where the tools they use in their everyday lives - social networking, videos, chat, aren't checked at the door. The Social Media Classroom is an important project to make those types of tools available to educators who might not be as up to speed with the latest technology, while also simplifying the use of those tools through the introduction of a single platform that integrates the best of the Web 2.0 world.

Perhaps the project doesn't introduce anything new that hasn't already been available to the tech-savvy, but its ease-of-use and educational slant make its introduction an impressive and potentially game-changing move for the educational system as we know it.

When over 1,000 social media users were asked what companies' role in social media should be, their answers were somewhat surprising. For all the griping about intrusive internet ads, lame marketing campaigns, and lousy customer service, you would think that the last thing users would want is to have companies invading the platforms they use for communicating and socializing with their friends and colleagues. As it turns out, the opposite is true.

It seems that users are actually receptive to the idea of companies getting involved on social media platforms and interacting with them while there. Out of the 85% of users who want companies to have a presence in social media, 34% want companies to actively interact with them and 51% want companies to interact with them as needed or by request. 8% think companies should only be passively involved on social media and 7% think companies should not be involved at all.

This desire for business-to-consumer interaction goes beyond simply offering customer service via Twitter. Although 43% would like to see companies offering customer service through social media, 41% would like companies to solicit feedback and 37% would like companies to provide new ways to interact with the brand via social media. These numbers could not be more clear: these consumers are practically begging for businesses to get involved in social media.

Not So Shocking: Social Media Users Like To See Social Media Used

If these numbers seem a little skewed it's because the survey was only given to social media users. They're more likely to understand and appreciate how social media operates. Where traditional advertising and marketing campaigns broadcast messages one way (business to consumer), social media encourages conversations. And these open dialogues are exactly what today's social media users desire and participate in regularly. Give their active use of this medium for social communications, it's not a huge leap for them to say they want to use social media in new and different ways - such as for communicating with businesses.

Although it can be scary for businesses to take that initial plunge, once they get in and get involved, it will be worth their effort. The numbers from this study back that up, too: 56% of users say they feel better about companies when they can interact with them on social media and 57% say they feel better served.

We definitely agree with those numbers. Most people don't think to call customer service over minor complaints, feeling that it's just not worth the effort. But if you have a brand representative respond to one of your Twitter posts like this, the experience is so much better:

With the new SmartSpace service from GoDaddy, anyone can create a personal web site which aggregates your activity from across the social web, combine that with other sources of news and information, and then create a personalized start page containing everything of interest to them. The service can also be used as a blogging platform with social elements like chat already built in. The idea is that you can use the SmartSpace platform to create the kind of site that's right for you, whether that's a social network of sorts, a traditional web site with social elements, a place to host your podcasts, or whatever else you want.

SmartSpace is designed to be easy to use, even for non-technical users. With a click of a button, you can grab content from sites like flickr, YouTube, Google News, Facebook, MySpace, or any other web site that offers an RSS feed.

You can even customize this content to your own personal preferences. For example, if you only want to see Flickr photos of lolcats, you can just type in "lolcat" in the tag field provided. Alternatively, you could select the RSS feed of a particular person's photos.

In addition to this dynamic content form across the social web, GoDaddy also makes available various pre-selected news feeds which you can add if desired. This content is categorized by subject, and is similar to the types of selections that many of today's personalized homepages offer.

Chat & Email

The Chat application lets you have online text conversations right on the site. With the included administrative controls, you can launch a room, invite users, ban users, and participate in both public and private chat sessions. Again, there's nothing technical involved in adding this to your page - the app is already set up and ready to use. All you have to do is make a few choices about how it's displayed and whether it's loaded by default when you log in.

Also, because SocialSpace users have purchased a domain name via GoDaddy, there's an option to set up email addresses using that name. The interface for doing so is much easier to manage than GoDaddy's usual UI for creating email addresses (an ugly and geeky interface). Here, you're basically able to push a button and set up multiple email addresses associated with your domain. The inboxes for these can then be added as widgets to your homepage.

Photo Albums

If you don't keep your images online with a web service like Flickr, you also have the option to make your SmartSpace an online photo album using the SmartSpace photo application. With this, you can upload photos from your computer and then share those photos both publicly and privately in albums that are added to your page.

Web Site and Blogs

For text-based content, you can choose to either add a web site or blog to your homepage. With these options, you can select from a number of pre-built templates to configure the site. Although not as robust a platform as WordPress, the blog will probably work fine for casual users who want to take advantage of the other elements of the SmartSpace service.

Just Another Personalized Homepage Or A New Type Of Social Network?

SocialSpace could be linked to some patent filings the company filed earlier this year which describe a web portal that functions as a social network aggregator. According to those filings, the aggregation could be done using login systems like OpenID. Although there's no mention of OpenID integration in the SmartSpace support documents yet, we hope that integration is something they plan to add in the future.

Still, even without OpenID, what GoDaddy has launched today is a viable competitor to the other personalized homepages out there like iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, etc. But GoDaddy's SocialSpace goes beyond what those sites offer in a number of ways. Although widgetized content like photos and RSS feeds can be added to nearly any start page today, GoDaddy actually lets you own a domain name, set up a blog or website and then easily, instantly turn it into a personalized social network that aggregates content from the social web and includes chat functionality for instant interactions with your friends.

Will SocialSpace kill MySpace and Facebook? That's highly doubtful, but it could be a nice aggregator for those looking to establish a web presence with minimal work. And because it's from GoDaddy, a household name thanks to their high profile TV commercials and ad campaigns, this move also represents what may be the final leap where "social media" fully crosses over to the mainstream use and acceptance.

More Info

Prices for SmartSpace start at $4.99/month for 2 months. From there, the prices are as follows: 12 mo: $4.74/month, 24 mo: $4.49/month, or 36 mo: $4.24/month. You can watch a short introductory video here. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/godaddy_unveils_mainstream_social_web_aggregator.php Products Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:45:00 -0800 Sarah Perez According to the 2008 Cone Business in Social Media Study, 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers. Cone, a Boston-based consulting firm, also found that men are far more likely to interact with a company through social media than women are. 56% of consumers believe that a company is providing them with a better service by interacting with them on social media sites.

As Michael Chin points out on the KickApps blog, social media first changed how we interacted with friends, family, and customers. Now, as consumers are getting more familiar with these tools, they also expect them to be a way to interact with companies - and based on this data from Cone, they want this to be a two-way conversation.

Here are some other interesting data points from the study:

• 60% of Americans regularly interact with companies on a social media site
• 43% of consumers say that companies should use social networks to solve the consumers' problems
• 41% believe that companies should use social media tools to solicit feedback on products and services
• Men are more likely to use social media tools to interact with a company than women (33% vs. 17%)
• 33% of younger consumers (18-34) and those with household incomes over $75,000 believe that companies should try to market to them through social networks

It would be nice to see Cone break these numbers down a bit more. What types of social media sites, for example, do users prefer? Are there any specific categories of companies and brands that they want to see on these sites? How exactly do they want to be marketed to? What do they think about implications for their privacy?

What is clear, however, is that social media is quickly becoming an important means for companies to reach consumers - and that consumer are also quickly changing their expectations about how, when, and where they want to be marketed to. As more users are embracing social media (and often to the detriment of traditional media), companies have no choice but to follow them.

In the latest release of Socialmedian, you now have the ability to share content from other sites including Google Reader, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn, Flickr, and the RSS feed for your own blog. In a way, this is similar to the popular lifestreaming service FriendFeed, which brings in everything you do from across the social web. But where FriendFeed forces those that subscribe to you to hide and filter the items they don't find interesting or relevant, Socialmedian puts you in control of what is or is not shared and your followers on the service will only see those items that are relevant to them.

To determine what constitutes something being relevant, newsworthy content, Socialmedian matches the streamed content from the people you follow on the service with the topical keywords in the news networks you're a member of. Only those updates that match up will be displayed to you unless you configure the service otherwise.

The one exception to this rule is Twitter. Because that service tends to be noisy, only tweets deemed popular by the community are shared by default. If you want to see more tweets, a "noise volume" slider is provided which you can use to increase the number of tweets that appear.

Other Upgrades

In addition to the news streaming, Socialmedian is now also offering bloggers a way to promote their site on service. Their new "reverse blog widget" is a widget that promotes your blog on their site (instead of the reverse - a widget that promotes their site on your blog). When anyone is reading or commenting on your blog on the site, the widget displays.

The upgrade also includes improved ways to find popular discussions and stories. They've added a "Stories" option to the site's top navigation that will let you quickly access the stories in the following categories: Popular Today, Popular Week, Popular Month, Rising Fast, and Hot Discussions.

Is News Streaming Better Than FriendFeed?

Out of all the upgrades today, the most interesting addition is this idea of news streaming. Like a less noisy FriendFeed - and one that's pre-filtered for you based on your interests (as determined by the communities you join) - there is some appeal. But for those who are already heavily using FriendFeed, there is no chance that any new service can possibly replace their activities there. In that case, where does that leave a site like Socialmedian?

Perhaps then Socialmedian can appeal to those that want to locate and read interesting news, but don't want to spend half their day in Google Reader browsing through feeds. This puts Socialmedian in competition with sites like ReadBurner and RSSMemeinstead. But difference is that those other two sites only feature Google Reader shares. Socialmedian lets you share more of the social web with friends, and they see only the parts they find valuable; that could make Socialmedian a more relevant and useful service than the others.

What do you think of the new version of Socialmedian? Share your thoughts in the comments.

New York based technology and consulting firm Arc90 introduced its first publicly available product today: Kindling. Arc90 describes Kindling as an "idea management and collaboration tool for small groups and companies." A more straightforward way to describe it would be as a version of Digg or reddit for small groups. Unlike those sites, however, Kindling focuses purely on voting on original ideas, not news stories.

Kindling puts an interesting twists on its voting scheme. Users only get 10 votes to give away at any given time and they can distribute those freely among different ideas.

Kindling is split into three main sections: voting, submitting ideas, and 'making it happen.'

The voting and commenting on new ideas is about as simple as it can get, with the exception of the 10 vote constraint. Arc90 says the limited amount of votes is meant to make users more picky about what to vote for, ultimately making every vote more meaningful. While users can always take votes away from a project themselves, once an idea is approved or rejected, all votes are returned to the user to replenish their supply.

The 'make it happen' section of the site displays the status of all the different ideas that have been submitted, but it also allows users to take charge of an idea by assigning it to themselves.

Kindling's user interface is simple and elegant. The minimalist design philosophy of the voting process extends to the rest of the application. The submission form, for example, is about as stripped down as possible.

Democracy at Work

Kindling is taking an interesting approach to small group collaboration. While it is not trying to be a complete project management application like Zoho Projects or Basecamp, and far less complex in its execution than its direct competitor IdeaScale (we wrote about them here), I could see it work very well in a small organization or even an informal group. For the voting system to work well, Arc90 recommends to have at least six members in a group - but there doesn't seem to be an upper limit.

Beta Invites

During the beta period, Kindling is going to be free, after that, beta testers will get reduced pricing for a year once the paid version launches.

Update: We have now given out all of our invites. If you would still like to get one, you can sign up for one on the Kindling homepage.

We have 50 invites for Kindling to give away. Just leave a comment below and we will get back to you ASAP. Note: if you use OpenID to comment, we can not see your email address.

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?

You may have heard about BlogRize's launch earlier this month, when they kicked off their private beta with pre-built communities for a handful of top sites, including ReadWriteWeb.

The way BlogRize works is by allowing members to join the community of their favorite blog or blogs. Within that community, the popular news stories are the ones recommended by the other readers of that blog. These stories will be a mix of not only that particular blog's articles, but any articles the community thinks are interesting. 

Our BlogRize Community

By focusing only on the news that a reader of ReadWriteWeb finds interesting, for example, you wouldn't have to sift through loads of posts you don't care about to find the best news. Instead, the content you find is relevant to your interests.

Determining Relevance

BlogRize is different than aggregators like RSSMeme and ReadBurner, as those sites only focus on one thing to build a popular page - number of shares. But to become "popular" on BlogRize, an article is rated using a more sophisticated algorithm.

Without giving too much away about that process, we can say that the algorithm uses more than one factor. Instead, it looks at factors which include the article's popularity, relevance to readers, and attention data, among other things. What this means is that an article from another technology-focused blog would have a good shot at becoming popular on ReadWriteWeb, but it would take a lot more for an article from, say, TreeHugger.com, to achieve that same level of popularity.

BlogRize's Voting Process

The first thing you'll notice about BlogRize is that the voting system for articles is a bit different than what you'll see on other social news sites like Digg or Mixx. Instead of just voting for a story, the news item is classified as "interesting," "funny," "insightful," "lame," "disagree," or "facts wrong." This system was created by BlogRize's creator, Jesse Spaulding, as somewhat of an experiment to see if he could get people to vote in a way that has more meaning and offers an opinion.

The system could use a little work, since terms like "interesting" and "insightful" are somewhat similar in meaning and because stories can, obviously, be both. Also, voting for things as "lame" seems a bit juvenile. However, for now, the system remains, although Jesse hints that he may be working on a slight modification of this interface in the future.

BlogRize Voting Buttons

Join Our Exclusive BlogRize Community!

Although BlogRize is still a private beta, they're now opening their doors to fans of ReadWriteWeb, and are offering us 1000 invites to distribute to our readers. To get access, just click this URL: http://www.blogrize.com/join/readwriteweb.com?code=readwriteweb. You can then began sharing and voting for the stories that interest you in a community filled with other blog readers like yourself.

Probably the most helpful piece of data Feedflix gives you, is how long you keep your rentals on average before sending them back to Netflix. The data is presented in an easy to grasp pie chart and could certainly help people determine if they are getting the most out of their Netflix plan. Incidentally, Feedflix also keeps charts on their community as a whole -- so they have data based on a small sample of which are the most popular Netflix plans, how long people keep movies, etc.

What Feedflix also does is create a public profile page for every user (example) and can suggest other Netflix users who are waiting for the same type of movies as you. That adds something of a social element to the service, although they haven't yet built any real social interaction features around it. That would be smart though. FeedFlix could theoretically build out a Flixter-like movie social network around Netflix.