Socialsama

Today at the #140tc Twitter Conference in Seattle, Washington (which I keynoted this morning), HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes announced that its popular Twitter application will be integrating with both MySpace and Foursquare, starting this week at the South by Southwest Interactive conference.

HootSuite is one of the more popular Twitter applications, one specifically geared towards power users and businesses. It has been on a roll recently, launching integration with Wordpress and rolling out new updates to its iPhone and Android Apps.

…While the article covers a lot of familiar territory about Facebook’s past, there’s plenty of new information too. Of note, the article says that Facebook executives have “discussed how revenues for 2010 could hit between $1.2 to $2 billion” — figures that exceed even the $1.1 billion InsideFacebook’s Eric Eldon reported yesterday (clearly, the number is looking big). The article also asserts that Facebook is working on a tool for sharing your physical location with Facebook (something that we’ve been hearing about for quite a while, and that I believe will be key in the future).

There are also a handful of interesting anecdotes about Zuckerberg. According to the article, a Facebook engineer once wrote an internal memo called “Working With Zuck”, in which he warned other employees not to hope for much in the way of back-patting from their CEO, explaining they should not “expect acknowledgment for your role in moving the discussion forward; getting the product right should be its own reward.”

CoTweet, the Twitter CRM tool used by several massive brands including Best Buy and Ford, has been acquired by ExactTarget, an email marketing firm.

In a statement, ExactTarget CEO Scott Dorsey said,” By combining the power of ExactTarget and CoTweet, we can provide businesses a complete solution to tie together all formsof interactive communications and drive deeper customer engagement online.”

While perhaps not a widely known name in the social media space, ExactTarget is a major player in email marketing, generating $114 million in revenue for 2009. The company has also raised a massive $140 in venture capital, most recently securing $75 million this past December.

… The other reason Google needed to establish its own social stream pronto is that links passed through social sharing are beginning to rival search as a primary driver of traffic for many sites.  Part of Google’s prowess stems from the fact that it is the largest referrer of traffic to many other Websites. It doesn’t want to lose that status to social sharing streams such as Facebook or Twitter.  Already, Buzz is helping to boost sharing through Google Reader.  While Google doesn’t benefit directly from that traffic (yet), simply knowing what links people are sharing and clicking on is valuable data which can help it improve its search results.

 

Facebook will soon roll Facebook Credits out to even more application developers, so it has publicly announced that it will take 30% of the revenues earned for goods sold via Facebook Credits.

Facebook Credits make up Facebook’s virtual currency; the currency became available to some users last Spring. Those users could buy gifts with it. Facebook then made a deal that gave users the ability to purchase Facebook Credits with their PayPal accounts and offered Facebook Credits as a currency option to several application developers, including uber-huge game-makers Playfish and Zynga.

Facebook says it’s taking the 30% cut so it can invest “heavily in the ecosystem” by educating users and marketing to them about the currency, testing out incentives to get people to try the credits out, and seeding credits to get people comfortable with them.

Now if I could only find my way around facebook again…

Now, we need to take this idea to our businesses. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time. We need tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone’s hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet.

New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration. Now in beta, Salesforce Chatter takes the best of Facebook, Twitter, and other social leaders, for instance, and applies it to enterprise collaboration—making people more productive and businesses more competitive. I already see it working: I have an enterprise desktop where without any effort I can learn about what my team is focusing on, how my projects are progressing, and what deals are closing. It is fundamentally changing the way our organization collaborates on product development, customer acquisition, and content creation—making it all easier than ever before.

We are on the precipice of a major shift in our industry. It stems from a change we badly needed and the once-in-a-decade question we had to ask. And this time, we are all ready for the answers.

Can good old fashioned User-Generated Content help shift handsets? Sony Ericsson apparently thinks so.

The handset maker has announced a new web service called Creations, its “vision for the future of mobile entertainment”, based on something the company is calling ‘co-creation’.

Basically, it’s a content sharing site – sorry, a “movement” (I kid you not, this is their word) – in which users can upload, “remix” and publish content to and from their mobile phones and the desktop, all distributed under a Creative Commons license.

It’s an idea that might have seemed credible a few years ago but in 2010 it appears as if Sony Ericsson has got a little too drunk on the web 2.0 cool aid after just about everybody else has left the party. Either that or the company’s leadership have turned to the scriptures of Lawrence Lessig in the hope of clawing back marketshare.

Merging something designed for public broadcasting (Buzz) with something inherently private (Gmail) was just looking for trouble.

Google is -deservedly – getting a lot of heat for the fact that its latest social product has a number of privacy flaws baked into it by design.

They’ve since made some improvements to the product, but that’s not where the story ends.

Some people think the complaints are unwarranted and the issues not all that bad, while some think it’s mostly annoying and others don’t even know there are issues yet (or that Google launched something new at all). And then there those whose lives are already being impacted by the privacy loopholes in Google Buzz – and not all in a good way.

See for example this story of an anonymous woman who writes a (self-proclaimed) feminist blog, which she started after leaving an abusive marriage. (found on Hacker News)

Hint: the title is ‘Fuck you, Google’.

An excerpt:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

You can read the rest of the story in the blog post, but needless to say this woman is justifiably very angry with the Mountain View company.

Now, I’m sure some of our readers will have an answer ready. That she should have changed this setting or not have touched that one, but that would be beside the point. Which is that even with the improvements that were made to the Buzz product, Google is confusing the hell out of people here – and make some lives hell for them to boot.

Expect more stories like this.

I am guessing this type of thing will happen quite a bit.  Google also buried the ability to turn off buzz at the bottom of the Gmail page.  Perhaps people will get over it – and had Facebook done it, they probably would.  But can Google get awa with this invasion of privacy which at least seems greater than their regular invasions of your privacy?  I bet the furor dies down, but only after Google makes it much easier to opt out.

Owen Van Natta made waves when he became MySpace CEO in April 2009 after having previously served as a high-ranking exec at Facebook. But his effort to revitalize the once top social network has come to an end tonight after less than 10 months on the job, as Van Natta has resigned from MySpace, effective immediately.

Here’s the statement we just received from the company:

“News Corporation today announced that Owen Van Natta will step down from his position as MySpace CEO, effective immediately. Mr. Van Natta will be replaced by newly-elevated co-Presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who will each report to Jon Miller, Chairman and CEO of Digital Media for News Corporation. All three executives joined MySpace in April 2009, with Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn previously serving as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively.”

Well, MySpace, it was nice knowing you.  Actually, no it wasn’t.