Online Media Cultist

I’m going to go slightly off-topic here this morning.

Last night, while listening to the Howard Stern show (you can listen to the show 24 hours a day now thanks to Sirius Satellite Radio, which is wonderful), I heard mention of someone referred to as an “A List celebrity.” You hear this all the time, of course. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson are A Listers, and so on.

But who gets to decide who is included on this exclusive list? And going on down the logical line, we never really talk about who is part of a theoretical B List or C List, right? Usually the lower tiers of the metaphorical “list” are reserved for has beens, wannabes, and former stars, which comedienne Kathy Griffin self-mockingly references in her reality show My Life on the D-List. What about Jason Alexander, who played the wildly popular George Costanza on Seinfeld. What is he these days, B List maybe?

So this is a long-winded way of saying that we have a vague collective sense of who our biggest superstars are, and we kind of know the lowest tiers of fame when we are provided with examples.

Now, let’s tack back to the online media realm.

The appetite for celebrity and gossip content online is voracious and unending. Gawker, Defamer, Perez Hilton, TMZ, and the like are merely the biggest fish in a vast ocean of websites and blogs keeping a panting public updated on the goings on in the celebrity universe. We also know that people interested in gossip tend to be young, so it’s not a huge stretch to say that many are on social networking websites like MySpace, Last.fm, imeem, and so on.

So here’s my idea, which I’ll throw out there for public consumption and discussion.

What if there was a social media platform that focused on allowing its community to decide who is an A List celebrity? Taking this further, why not let people decide who exactly is B List, C List, and all the way down the line? A ranking system could allow the community to vote celebrities (and barely celebrities) up-and-down in real time. A social news engine could bring the hottest (and coldest, I suppose) celebrities to the front page, Digg-style. People would be able to comment about their beliefs on the topic and argue out their opinions with others.

Breaking celebrity news stories would drive people to this website to give and take away “votes” within the ranking system. Britney Spears drove a school bus full of kids into a lake? She’s dropped from B to C for sure, some might argue.

Take Steve Guttenberg as another random example. He was a big star in the ’80s, with the Police Academy movies and a bunch of other high profile projects. He’s still around these days, but you don’t hear about him that much. Is he B List today? C List? And what about someone who got eliminated from Flavor of Love 2 after the third week, thus ending their 4.5 minutes of fame? Maybe they’re F List (for Flavor)?

If done right, this website could become something of an arbiter for who stands where in the celebrity landscape. It could encompass an elegant combination of commenting, profiling, voting, and content features. It would have an enduring ability to track the celebrity/gossip world and become a natural home for fans worldwide.

Maybe someone is doing this already, someplace. But maybe not.

The “lifestreaming” phenomenon streams onward and upward, or at least a few companies in the venture capital space hope so.

Ustream.tv is announcing that it is raising $11.1 million, which is on the heels of Qik’s $3 million round.

In late March I noted this about Ustream: It’s a potent and timely mix, video and social networking and a real-time communications experience. I’m curious to see where this will go.

In my view, Ustream is a lot stronger and healthier platform as compared to Qik, which centers around live video streaming from mobile phones. I think this space will be huge in a few years (and perhaps less, who knows?) but the quality of the video I’ve watched on Qik has been bad enough to make me shut it off. Whereas with Ustream it’s a lot easier to “get”: (watchable) live video broadcasting with a suite of easy-to-use social networking and chat features built around it. Great place to go if you want to set up your own video chat show. Host impromptu live meetings by making an announcement on Twitter or another real time communications application where you can reach a lot of people immediately. Get it, makes lots of sense.

I haven’t played with Qik a lot so don’t want to be totally unfair to it, but I sense that it has a ways to go before it can attract a huge audience. And perhaps it’s unfair to compare Ustream and Qik directly as they are not exactly the same. If Qik can improve video streaming quality (no easy task!) it could be a killer app. And for all I know it just might be anyway: people love using their mobile phones to do so, and if you can stream live video and create an audience around that, that will certainly catch on.

Other lifestreaming-type services include Kyte.tv and Justin.tv. I haven’t head a lot about Justin.tv of late, but it seems to be quietly streaking up the Alexa rankings at the least, clocking in under the 1000 mark yesterday.

So that might help us to understand why there’s a spurt of funding going on round the lifestreaming junction at the moment.

The UK has adopted a new policy in which registered sex offenders will be required to “provide their email addresses to police in a move to stop them using social networking Web sites.”

I totally get the intent here, which is of course to keep stalkers and pedophiles off of MySpace and other social networks, creating a safer online environment for kids. But will forcing e-mail registration with the government really prevent such people from striking again, beyond being a minor deterrent?

Does the UK government realize how easy it is to get a new, free e-mail address, or several thousand of them? That even though someone’s home computer IP can be tracked, they can go to a library or Internet café to carry on such activities?

The policy is backed up by “five years in prison if they fail to hand over the details or provide a false email.” However, if a registered sex offender is taking the risk to get on MySpace to lure youngsters into their nasty grasp, aren’t they already taking an enormous risk already? In essence an additional penalty for using a registered (or unregistered) e-mail address seems to be pretty small in comparison.

So it’s really more of a PR move to make it look like the government is doing something to police the interwebs. Understandable but not effective.

This brings up larger issues too about how you limit the rights of some citizens – sex offenders in this case – in a free society. But I would need a lot more coffee on this Friday morning to get into that one!

Update: The New York Times chimes in: “The proposal faces many hurdles, including the fact that anyone can instantly create a new e-mail address online and that Facebook, MySpace and most other popular social networking sites are based outside Britain.”

So rap star 50 Cent has launched a social networking site called ThisIs50.com.

Would you like to guess how much I think it’s worth?

I’m only partially joking, but I’ll begin with what I think is interesting here. Reuters notes that celebrities are launching their own social networks in increasing numbers, including Kylie Minogue, Ludacris, and the Pussycat Dolls.

We’re seeing an evolution take place. In the pre-MySpace era, when artists wanted to go online, they pretty much had to do it themselves, with the result usually being a crappy website that not many people knew about or went to.

MySpace in particular allowed artists to very easily, cheaply, and quickly create a space online to showcase themselves and their work, and allow fans to gather around that content, communicate with the artists and each other, and sample (and consequently buy) the artist’s work, get alerted to news and concerts, and so on.

Now artists such as 50 Cent, who already have a massive presence on MySpace, are branching out to create their own social networking websites.

And the result, if ThisIs50.com may be used as an example, is a shoddily crafted website that not many people will go to or even know about.

“The thing that separates Thisis50 from MySpace is we control the e-mail database,” Chris “Broadway” Romero, director for new media at G-Unit Records, said.

Sorry, that’s not the only thing, Chris. While grabbing your own platform allows you to collect an e-mail list for marketing purposes, you have to create a web experience that clears a number of bars: why would fans of 50 Cent need to sign up for yet another social networking site? They already have access to him in a sense via MySpace, iTunes, and any number of other online platforms.

Unfortunately for 50 and the G Unit crew, ThisIs50.com clears approximately no bars. You don’t know where you are when you arrive there, save the indication that “If It’s Hot, It’s Here.” You’re then treated to awkwardly sized content widgets and a running blog featuring images and videos with little or no preamble or explanation. A featured video area showcases a “funny video” of Hillary Clinton and a scene from the Borat movie. Huh?

And that’s to say nothing about the tastefulness of some of the images or about the music itself. I assume that 50 fans will be into this kind of thing, but I’ll admit that I’m not enough of a 50 Cent expert to judge this aspect.

Finally, click on a thumbnail picture to go to someone’s profile and you’re forced to register for the site in order to get there.

No thanks, I’ve seen enough.

In the midst and tumult of companies falling all over themselves to launch applications within Facebook’s wildly popular platform was a dirty little secret: that with about 20,000 Facebook apps to choose from, it’s now nearly impossible to stand out from the crowd to gain traction. At some point the scales will inevitably slide to the point where you have the same chance of breaking through with a standalone web presence as with the time and effort it might take to build and launch within Facebook.

Now Facebook is looking to create some hierarchy within its application dominion, creating a Preferred Application Program, according to TechCrunch. Except no one knows yet where the preferred part comes in. It might be by giving apps “in good standing” extra access to invites that other more run of the mill apps aren’t preferable enough to receive.

TechCrunch suggests other ways that preferred apps can be preferred, such as showing up higher in search results. This could easily lead to a pay-for-placement or within Facebook, though there’s no reason to suspect that they’re leaning this way. But you’d have to mention that Facebook folk would love to dream up ways for apps to pay their way into a Featured Apps or Suggested Apps or “You Like iLike? You’ll Love Slide!” sort of revenue-generating path.

I wonder if this program is a way for Facebook to angle its way toward a tighter and more lucrative partnership with upper tier apps? When I first saw the term Preferred Application Program, I assumed it was a way to continue to draw in new apps and create a way for existing apps to better position themselves amongst the rabble. I wonder though if instead it’s simply a way to throw a few bones to the very elite apps.

allfacebook is most concerned with how this might affect the development of a beer pong app.

It hit home for me this morning – not enormously revelatory of course to anyone paying attention – that we’re in the midst of a great and sweeping period of mergers and acquisitions right now in the tech and Internet space. We’re probably in something like the “latter web 2.0 days” of the Internet’s evolution, a time where big players are swallowing littler ones in an effort to grab market share, where the companies who produced the best ideas and services and were lucky enough to grab eyeballs and users and customers along the way are now setting themselves up for the long haul, and the sad shakeout of those companies who didn’t make it will continue to play out as spaces continue to become better defined.

Just taking a look at the news this morning, we see that Microsoft announced the acquisition of Rapt, a company involved with online advertising technology. Technology companies are now advertising companies, and Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and so on have been gobbling up companies and technology left-and-right for the last year or two now in an effort to gain an edge.

We also see Microsoft still trying to strategize its way toward a merger with Yahoo. The argument goes that Microsoft + Yahoo > Google. We’ll see how that goes.

Moving on, we see AOL making great strides to propel itself back into the elite tech companies pantheon. Just this week the acquisition of Bebo was announced, and now rumors say that the acquisition of “out of the box” social networking platform Kickapps could be next.

As the economy overall remains jittery, I think we’ll see this overall trend continue. Soon enough though new-fangled semantic web services will appear, social networking will evolve to its next phase, online video advertising models and companies will mature, website traffic metrics will improve, and overall Internet usage will shift.

And then we’ll be in a new place, and it’ll be fascinating to see how it all plays out then as well.

AOL is furiously trying to break the bounds of its decaying empire, and it just might succeed in doing that.

But the price, my friends, is high. AOL announced that it will acquire social networking site Bebo for $850 million. Bebo is one of those social networks usually placed in the “middle tier.” It’s no MySpace or Facebook, but is strong and global and is among the most popular social networking communities in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand. It also claims to be #3 in the U.S.

Rupert Murdoch, of course, was ridiculed several years ago for purchasing MySpace for $500 million, a seemingly outrageous sum at the time. But MySpace was and in fact still is the dominant player in the space so today the deal looks to be a relative bargain that will bring Murdoch and company great fortune.

AOL for its part will place its future in the hands of its AIM instant messenger, the dominant product in its space and, now, Bebo as well.

Interesting quotage:

TechCrunch: “AOL is clearly putting a massive effort into transforming the company from a dial up broadband provider into a company that has the competitive fire. The opening of AIM, mentioned above, is just one indication. The company has been releasing genuinely innovative new products and has also made a number of smaller strategic acquisitions over the last year or so.”

GigaOM: “AOL is talking some gobbledygook about marrying AIM, ICQ with a real social network. Whatever!”

Mashable: “As big as this news is by itself, the question that arises is: what does this mean for the Microsoft-Yahoo-Google-AOL love rectangle?”

paidContent: “VC firm Balderton Capital will reap about $140 million - nine times what it invested in Bebo less than two years ago - by selling its 15.7 stake in the social net to AOL.”

peHUB: “Bebo had been in the market for new funding to support acquisitions, particularly in the contextual and behavioral search markets. But that ended once acquisition offers began coming in. No comment on earlier reports that Yahoo was an interested suitor (which is now 0-for-2 on such efforts).”

It turns out that the hype about Facebook this year ain’t just hype. In the UK, Facebook has surpassed reigning global social networking champ MySpace for the first time, with a whopping 541% increase in audience since December 2006 (MySpace rose a relatively sedate 20% during the same period). Meanwhile, Bebo, a company you don’t hear about a lot in the US, moved to take a strong third in Britain.

And over on the other side of the planet, Friendster – a site often thought of as an also ran in webby American circles – is seeking to expand its presence in South and Southeast Asia. Friendster is launching its first non-English version in Chinese. According to TechCrunch, close to 90% of its monthly unique visitors already come from Asia, so it makes perfect sense that they would target their a new potential audience of teeming web savvy millions.

So while MySpace is still massively popular in the United States and other nations (but not so much in social networking-crazy Brazil, where Orkut is champ!) the social networking game is anything but static.

With hundreds of start-ups looking to grab audience, and a global marketplace that allows competitors to find regional footholds, MySpace may not be the ubiquitous name for social networking for that much longer stateside.

Facebook is certainly the social networking darling of 2007. Any thoughts on what 2008 may have in store?

There’s been some chitty-chatter through the weekend about alleged leaked reports that Google has plans to deploy a “Facebook-killer” social networking platform that will allow users and developers to tinker and manipulate a new web platform to their heart’s delights.

Tony Hung makes the great point that the real killer app is the ability to get lots and lots of people to congregate on a site, and then figure out ways to keep them around while getting new hordes to come by. That’s what Facebook is doing particularly well these days.

Technology is great, fantastic, amazing. But in terms of web platforms, everyone is playing with pretty much the same toolkit. A new social network based upon fancy technology – even with Google’s overwhelming presence on the web – will have a hard time breaking through if there’s not more “there” there than that.

And that’s that.

I predicted that 2007 would be an explosive year for social news sites, but it really hasn’t been. With the exception of Reddit getting gobbled up by Conde Nast, not a whole lot has happened to interfere with Digg.com’s absolute dominance of the space. Netscape, an experiment in social news coupled with editorial involvement that I find to be intriguing (though it has its problems), recently announced it is jettisoning its social news presence to Propeller.com, where it may or may not be left high and dry.

I also thought that this would be a big year for social news verticals (a social news/voting site for, say, sports stories or music stories) but that hasn’t yet turned out to be the case. Then there’s the spectacular failure of MySpace News’ launch, a dead horse I’ve already applied many a spectacular beating to.

So, if you’re interested in a large community that can submit news stories and vote the popular ones onto the front page, Digg is really the only game in town. And while there’s certainly still a focus on tech stories, founders Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose claim that non-tech stories now outnumber them, at least in terms of pure volume.

I really like how Digg has handled its product development. From a very simple start, it has layered in new tools and features to meet the needs of its community. For its web-savvy and tech-nutty base, you have things like Digg Spy, Swarm, and Stack.

Digg user profiles have always been relatively basic as well, particularly as compared to MySpace and other purely social networking websites. In an effort to appeal to its increasingly non-tech community, Digg is now planning to roll out more advanced profile features. (As of this writing the new features have as yet to be deployed, but they are said to be “MySpace-like.”)

What I like most about Digg’s strategy is that it’s feature adds don’t complicate or confuse the core experience – if you’re into browsing popular stories, or submitting your own and seeing how many “diggs” that they’re getting (complications and complexities in the voter-weighting model aside!) you can still do that. And for those active users who are interested in exploring Digg’s huge user base, making connections, sharing stories and media, and so on, Digg will now give its biggest fans a way to do that.

Pete Cashmore makes the point that Digg’s move into more pure social networking makes it something of a competitor to his own project, Pownce. Maybe Digg will one day create a Pownce-like offering for its own community?

And Read/Write Web notes that more social networking features means more targeted ads for new ad partner Microsoft. More page views too!