Online Media Cultist

While overly simplistic, I’m starting to look at the current state of the web and its recent history as follows:

* Web 1.0 – Amassing great storehouses of content and letting people do interesting things with it within specified “silos” (I hate that word by the way, but it’s useful here!). Think Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Excite
* Web 2.0 – Web tools that have been around for a while are harnessed to allow for an amazing amount of content sharing, manipulation, and organization while communication and networking are greatly enhanced. Think: MySpace, Flickr, Twitter, iLike

We’re now in a phase that I like to think of as “post web 2.0.” It’s a little bit of an in between and undefined time as the economy shakes itself out, as the bad ideas of the web 2.0 era burn off, and as everyone is thinking, grinding, and scrambling to look for The Next Big Thing.

The great news is that there’s a flurry (whirlwind?) of activity going on in the social media space. And I’m becoming more convinced that this post web 2.0 period will be defined by those social media platforms that help to bring enhanced value and meaning to all of the massive storehouses of shared and organized and manipulated information and communication that is “out there.”

socialmedian, run by Jason Goldberg, is doing a good job of just this. When you hit socialmedian’s front page, it appears to be a social media site jammed to the rafters with features: you can submit stories, vote on them, comment on them, and interact with other people and the content on the site (gauging its “mood” for example) in all kinds of ways.

What really interests me though is what socialmedian is doing with widgets, embeddable code that the public can “take away” and publish on any webpage you like. Widgets are not hot news unto themselves, of course, they are also indeed a staple of era web 2.0.

But the fusion of widgets with targeted social media content is very intriguing, and a sign of where things are heading.

The “Obama Transition To Power” widget is a great example. Goldberg describes it on the socialmedian blog as “a live feed of news stories and user activities related to Obama’s transition to power.”

That specific slice of content – Barack Obama presidential transition news and related stories – tied to powerful social media tools and made “mobile” via embeddable widget could just be an indicator of where this post web 2.0 path is headed.

Almost everyone who has ever touched a computer has heard of MySpace. My suspicion is that Facebook, by all accounts now the second most popular social networking site on the planet, is somewhat lesser known.

But this may not be the case in a few years’ time. A Wall Street Journal piece profiles Facebook’s ambitious plans to grow into a portal of sorts by allowing companies to build their own “special pages” within Facebook’s platform.

The impetus behind this goal is to give Facebook users more reason to stick around the site while letting outside companies do the work of installing new in-site services. Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests calls this opening of “special services” pages “reverse-API.” Tony also asks if this move is “ballsiness or genius” and concludes that it’s a little bit of both.

It’s certainly a new direction in terms of the current state of the social networking-sphere. Right now the trend is with widgets, third-party applications that users can install into their profile pages. My guess is that the companies that build special services pages for Facebook will have to compete in the same crowded widget market that so many other players are competing in right now.

In other words, people use social networks – at least at present – to meet others, communicate, check out bands, and “trick out” their profile to their liking. The user experience runs through the profile pages. Therefore, the special pages people had better be pretty special, or Facebook users will not be compelled to leave their flirting and music listening to check them out.

Steve O’Hear writes: “If Facebook can find the right balance and truly embrace outside services in a way that profits all parties, then this could add significant value for its users through the addition of new and innovative services — and further position the social network as a very different proposition to MySpace.”

And Between the Lines notes that Facebook is adding 100,000 users each day, which is crazy-sick growth.

Over the weekend, it was announced that social networking site for bloggers MyBlogLog will be rebranded (to something Yahoo-ized, perhaps?), redesigned, and rolled out with a new “widget 2.0″ component in the near future.

I actually think that MyBlogLog’s widget – which allows bloggers to see who is visiting their site, click their profile picture to learn more about them, interact with them, and so on – is far and away its best feature. Getting more detailed statistics or rich information about site visitors would be exciting, so I’m intrigued to find out what the “2.0″ will be all about.

As far as the MyBlogLog site itself, the fact that it’s very stripped down and simple at present is something of a double-edged sword: easy-to-use, but not much to do there at present.

Mike Arrington says that with the upcoming changes, infrastructure upgrades to ensure performance (i.e. not dragging down the page load time of a site where the widget is embedded, the surest way of getting people to drop you like a hot rock) must come first. The Social Web notes that spam is another significant challenge to MBL’s future.

While I’ve heard people complain about performance problems and spam (particularly the latter), I have not personally encountered trouble with either.

I’m excited to see what changes lay ahead for MyBlogLog. I was a relatively early adopter and cheerleader for the site turned somewhat concerned skeptic, so I look forward to seeing what wrinkles that this powerful networking and communications tool may offer.

One interesting prospect: maybe MyBlogLog will aspire to become a LinkedIn for bloggers? Picture advancing features for adding, organizing, and keeping in touch with blogging contacts.

There’s lots of chatter and buzzy buzz about widgets these days, so it’s easy to forget that most regular folk have no earthly idea what they are. For our purposes, we’re actually talking about what Wikipedia terms as “web widgets,” defined as “a third party item that can be embedded in a web page.”

Because of the explosion of regular people publishing billions of pages in the form of blogs and other websites, and particularly the crazy growth of social networking profiles (which are really pre-created web pages that get filled in with information and media provided by the user) on sites like MySpace, the widget industry was born.

So widgets are “extra stuff” that get installed (via simple copy-and-pasting of code into a web page template) on web pages. The question I always think about when I see a widget is: who is the widget for? Is it for a public-facing audience i.e. people visiting that web page or MySpace profile, or is it predominantly there to serve information to the person who installed it?

As a web publisher, it’s important to recognize the difference and utilize a website’s limited real estate, as GigaOM alludes to in a piece entitled “Widget Mania run amok?”

Read/WriteWeb runs down a list of widget examples, and notes the new popularity of “widget commerce,” such as Auction Ads, which allows you to dynamically get updates on selected eBay auctions. I’d argue that this is a good example of a useful widget for the person who installs the widget, but very likely would only appear to be clutter to anyone else. Therefore, it’s a great idea to add this kind of widget to a Netvibes or My Yahoo page (i.e. web pages designed for personal consumption only), but not to a blog, with perhaps the rare exception of one that focuses on eBay auctions or e-commerce.

Personally, I think that with widgets, less is more. MyBlogLog is an ideal widget for blogs, I love to argue, because they serve multiple audiences well. The web publisher gets to see who is visiting his or her site, MyBlogLog members get to have their profile picture show up around the web (which fosters networking and connections), and community is promoted among bloggers and readers with similar interests.

And I also run FeedBurner’s widget, which shows how many RSS readers Online Media Cultist has on any particular day, mostly because I’m a stats junkie!

The blizzard of widgets that are storming onto your Interwebs these days are almost too much to fathom (luckily, Mashable makes sense of it all for us).

That said, I’m doubly impressed by SplashCast, which just introduced something wordily called MyPodcastNetwork. Basically, it’s a really efficient and elegant way to pipe audio and video podcasts into a widget, which can be displayed on a blog or social networking profile or any web publishing platform.

Beet.tv says: ” SplashCast has a cool new user tool to create a customized an embedible player where a selection of video feeds can be displayed. This is a fairly easy way to organize favorite videos through RSS feed on a nice interface.”

And Mashable notes that, “SplashCast will have about 200 shows to choose from in their podcast directory, including NPR News and Notes and MTV…. Interactive media widgets are on the rise, and will be interesting extensions of social networking components in the coming year.”

I wonder what the appetite will be overall for “interactive media widgets.” I could see this kind of application being very useful if it’s tied to the content of an existing community. For example, audio podcasts having to do with punk rock on a music community, or video podcasts of rallies, debates, and news analysis on a political blog.

MySpace rose to prominence for a bunch of reasons – many of them not replicable, to the chagrin of the many hundreds of social networking start-ups looking to get a zillionth of MySpace’s user base – but one of them was a freewheeling, laissez-faire spirit that basically let people do whatever they wanted with their profiles, including jamming every kind of third-party widget, add on, and crappy font creator that let kids feel as though they were really creating their own personalized home online.

But as MySpace ramps up the monetization of its massive audience, it is making choices that are altering the (lack of) ground rules that helped to make it the Kleenex of social networking websites. By forging lucrative alliances with companies like Snocap, it is at the same time moving to block music players, widgets, and other add-ons produced by companies who do not have such an agreement in place.

The latest news comes in the form of a professional yet pissed off-sounding post from the official Photobucket (a leader in the photo and media hosting space) blog: “Today MySpace made the decision to prevent Photobucket users from posting their videos and remixes to their MySpace pages.” It then goes on to accuse MySpace of subverting the rules in the age of the open platform – the social media platform that fueled the rise of MySpace and YouTube and Photobucket and Flickr, and on and on: “We believe that by limiting your ability to personalize your pages with content from any source, MySpace is contradicting the very belief of personal and social media.”

For a quick round-up of reaction around the blogosphere, check out The RSS Blog.

MySpace is within in its rights to act this way, of course. Just as companies are free to look to newer and more freewheeling platforms (like Twitter) to develop for.

And just as its audience is free to move on to one of the many hundreds of social networking start-ups, who will welcome them with open arms, and in most cases a freewheeling and laissez faire spirit.

I’ve written a lot about how much I dig “social networking site for bloggers” MyBlogLog, and speculated more recently that it may be losing its buzz.

The best part about MyBlogLog – far and away – is its widget, which allows you to see MyBlogLog members who have visited your site. You get to see their profile picture (or avatar, or whatever little colorful oddity they’ve chosen to represent themselves with) and their MBL username. Clicking on either takes you to their profile page on MBL, where you can read their bio, leave them a private or public message, and see what site or sites they author and visit them.

This core functionality is extraordinarily powerful. As a blogger it gives me tools to see what other bloggers who visit my site are up to, and contact them if I wish.

In terms of the MyBlogLog site itself, there are other features that are available, but I don’t personally find them all that useful. While I’ve praised MBL in the past for their stripped down and simple social networking model, I increasingly wish of late that I could do more with the on-site features that are available.

I’ll drop a caveat in here before I move on with my critique: there’s no doubt that MBL is still undergoing a major revamping because of its acquisition by Yahoo! (and in fact it was just announced that MBL co-founder Scott Rafer is moving on from the company). That said, here’s what I’d like to see happen:

* Friending: Right now, you can add friends, but there’s nothing to be done with them after you add them beyond having a stored collection of profiles. If I could organize them in ways that are of interest to me (sports bloggers, political bloggers, web 2.0 bloggers, that kind of thing) that would be more useful.

* Communities: This feature is about the most useless on MBL right now, but it has the potential to be great. You can add a website (which exist on MBL as a separate kind of “groups” profile) as a community, and again this simply exists as a way to see all the sites you’ve added as communities. You can post messages on the communities page, but that’s about it. Communities pages desperately need to be able to post a recent stories feed at the least, and then move on to adding features that empower its audience.

* RSS: The number one way to add value to MBL, in my view, is to add recent story feeds across the board, on both profile and community pages. Therefore every time I visit a new page on MBL, I can quickly get a sense of what the profile owner is interested in (which of course quickly tells you whether or not you want to invest more time in sticking around). Further, I’d love to be able to access the RSS feed right from the MBL page so that I can add sites that I’m interested in to my RSS reader.

* Direct communication: It’s nice that you can send people private messages, but it would be simply fantastic if MBL allowed you to create custom bulletin or newsletters. For example, there should be something like a “Get the latest news and information about Online Media Cultist, click here!” button on the OMC community page. Then, I could fire out news and notes about all OMC-related doings to the people on this list. Trust me, once people sign up for such a service, these “acquired customers” are extraordinarily valuable to bloggers.

* Add social bookmarking features: Bloggers who sign up for MBL are natural self-promoters. Along with recent story feeds, add the ability to submit and vote for stories on such places as Digg, Reddit, Netscape, Newsvine, or whatever people want.

* Metrics: MBL does provide stats on site traffic, but I don’t find it that useful. Site Meter works best for me because it tracks hourly, daily, and monthly traffic in real time. Perhaps if MBL provided much richer metrics features I would take interest, but this doesn’t seem to tie into the site’s core mission: allowing bloggers to self-promote and networking with one another.

I really do love MyBlogLog. I just wish there was more for me to do once I click over to the site from Online Media Cultist’s MBL widget.

Everyone knows Tom, right? He’s your friend, he’s everyone’s friend. He’s the first guy you see smiling back at you from an odd-trendy camera angle when you and 80 million other people sign up for a MySpace profile.

Now, like the beginning of a rich and wonderfully Byzantine novel, let me layer in the next part of the story. It’s amazing how wrong traditional media and professional journalists can be in reporting on the technology and media industries. I had some level of personal involvement in a story that got some major play last year. It had to do with potential gaming at a major social news site, and while there were wild allegations and a few bits and pieces of the truth thrown in, the actual story – while pretty much in the public eye for a careful journalist to uncover – went virtually uncovered.

Back to MySpace. It’s well known that MySpace is trying to figure out ways to block some third-party widgets and music/video players so that they can lock in exclusive deals for themselves or flat out force people to use their own products and tools. The trick of course is that one of the key reasons why MySpace became the superstar of the social networking space – and why they leapfrogged Friendster at a crucial juncture – is because they are largely hands off about what people do with their profile pages.

Developments in that storyline make for a good story, and The New York Times does a good job overall with today’s “MySpace Restrictions Upset Some Users.” It runs down MySpace’s new restrictions on a music e-commerce widget called the Hoooka, and how it personally affected musician Tila Tequila’s profile.

But it rankled me to read that “the Hoooka disappeared on Sunday after a MySpace founder, Tom Anderson, personally contacted Ms. Tequila to object, according to someone with direct knowledge of the dispute.”

I have no personal knowledge of this story and I don’t know Tom (although he’s my friend!), but I’d be amazed if Tom took the time to contact Ms. Tequila personally about her use of the Hoooka widget. MySpace has a boatload of customer service employees, and Tom’s busy being Tom. My assumption is that someone told NYT reporter Brad Stone that Tom was involved, and it sounded good, so it made the story. MySpace’s official reaction, which the piece also covers, makes much more sense: MySpace sent Tequila an e-mail demanding the removal of the widget for violating terms of service.

In any event, Mashable rightly points out that MySpace’s move against Hoooka is likely because it’s trying to better position the Snocap widget, which has a deal in place with MySpace. Snipperoo holds no punches, declaring that MySpace has turned into a Corporate Evil Monster.

Overall, I think trying to sell music directly through social networking sites is a short-sighted business. Like Internet content in general, there’s just too much free stuff out there. The old music industry in particular is dying, and selling mp3s for indie bands won’t save them. Advertising-supported free music is the future.