Social Networking

Last week was quite interesting, I happened to show up at Google IO developer Conference 2009. Committing to writing about the entire Google IO event in a single post is a tough job, so friends here is a succinct post covering the topics that seems most exciting to me.

1. Google wave:

As many may have read already, Google announced a new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform Google Wave in the second day's key note talk at Google IO. Google Wave seems to be an integrated communications platform that brings together email, chat, twitter, social networks, photo-sharing, and collaborative editing features. Google describes a 'wave' as "equal parts conversation and document" and the Wave team basically sees it as a replacement for email and other collaboration tools. Google's announcement of wave was the most exiting technical demonstration I ever been to, it was full of cheers, applause and whistling, evidence of the excitement about this new product which could revolutionize the world of emails, instant messaging, photo sharing, blogging, social networking and intranet communications.

I'm working on a site that will launch soon that features some social networking functionality, including friend lists. We are using the Buddylist2 module and while there are some default blocks for things like "My Buddies" that show a user their buddies, there was not a similar block that would show one user another user's buddies. We were able to create a custom view with the argument "Buddylist2: Nodes author is buddy of UID" that used the following custom argument handling code: <?php

A recent study on social networking came to my attention yesterday and it sparked a discussing with Bevan that we vowed to continue on the blog. The study which surveyed 13,000 adults between 18 and 65 in 17 developed nations found that 58% did not know what social networking is (30% in the US).

A few weeks ago someone pointed me toward this interesting writeup of 50 social sites, it is geared toward sites where businesses should try to build and maintain a presence, but I think that it is applicable for NPO and NGOs too. The article is split into 5 sections:

• Social-Media/Social-Bookmarking Sites
• Professional-Networking Sites
• Niche Social-Media Sites
• General Social-Media Sites
• Job Sites

Just before the holiday break, I spoke with Alyssa Royce, Editor of JUSTCAUSE about non profits, the internet and the social networking (full disclosure: they are one of our clients, and I worked with them on the site which launched at the end of the summer).  Alyssa was researching an article on nonprofits and social networking for the GuideStar newsletter.

In September we launched JustCauseIt.com (beta) a social networking website that acts as a companion to a forthcoming print magazine. When the folks at JUSTCAUSE came to us with their idea and told me their mission is (as they put it on the website):

From the people who brought you the enormously popular The Machine is Us/ing Us.

The rumor is that Google is planning to fight Facebook on the "social networking" front... If the story is true, Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data and will be an attempt to connect the currently closed communities of Tribe.net, Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn and more...

Guy Kawasaki, the poster child of dot-com boom and crazy Silicon Valley venture capitalism, has entered the next generation of the Web using all the "right" buzzwords. "By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09" is the title of his latest blog post. Learn how Guy spent only $4K on lawyers, $400 on a logo, bought 55 domain names, setup a Wordpress site and used Yahoo! as the hosting environment. Too bad, the site didn't survive the Digg effect. Someone should remind Guy that social media sites need to be _running_ to be useful. (As of writing this post, the site was still down.)

Check-out the top 20 largest social bookmarking sites by unique monthly visitor data and other traffic metrics.