Feel guilty whiling away hours on Facebook? Now you can tell yourself it’s worth something–to Facebook.

If Facebook counted 3 million users instead of 300 million, it wouldn’t have its stratospheric valuation. The truth is, users have value. But how much is each person worth to Facebook?

It’s a question worth asking, because viral companies like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter derive their value from their users. That’s because unlike conventional audience members, users of social networks tend to be committed participants and contributors.

Read the rest of this post at the original site

If the ongoing social networking revolution has you scratching your head and asking, “Why do people spend time on this?” and “How can my company benefit from the social network revolution?” you’ve got a lot in common with Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski.

Only difference: Piskorski has spent years studying users of online social networks (SN) and has developed surprising findings about the needs that they fulfill, how men and women use these services differently, and how Twitter–the newest kid on the block–is sharply different from forerunners such as Facebook and MySpace.

Read the rest of this post at the original site

“Controlling the stream” is not just one of the major life-challenges facing elderly gentlemen; it is the center of industrial competition on the realtime social network that we once termed “Web 2.0.” Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, gave a speech yesterday before a group of advertising executives in New York in which she argued, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that “banner and text ads are old news.”

Read the rest of this post

In the golden age of the record album, friends would gather around the hi-fi system to share the latest music, most of them not paying a cent. Today, music fans do pretty much the same thing–online, in social networks. But now, just about none of them pay.

Read the rest of this post

Relationships are so much more than the mere act of following or friending someone on Twitter or any social network for that matter. It’s the balladry of transcending online connections into real world relationships. It’s the cadence of interaction and the poetry of conversations that empower the human network and the escalation of the Social Economy.

On Social Networks we’re bound by context and not necessarily by the relationships that link us in the real world.

We listen to relevant keywords to learn from others who share our interests and passions.

We’re followed or friended by people prior to understanding who they are and how we’re potentially affected through an alignment.

We’re complex and multi-dimensional individuals, more so online, who distinctly connect with varying contacts tethered to transforming frames of reference.

Read the rest of this post

The buying and selling of virtual goods is an extremely nascent market that seems to be heating up dramatically. Almost daily there are announcements pronouncing large virtual good revenues on the horizon and new forms of payments and rewards for the intrepid user.

Just today social network Hi5 introduced multicultural holiday gifts along with a new payment system. Virtual world Habbo also introduced a new type of currency and reward program for loyal users.

With all of this interest and efforts toward monetization, is this a bubble waiting to burst?

So far, my answer is no.

Read the rest of this post

The idea for a virtual world focused on the Islamic lifestyle began five years ago, when CEO Mohamed El-Fatatry moved from Dubai to Finland in order to attend university. Raised in Dubai, El-Fatatry wanted wider horizons and a chance to see more of life. American universities were generally expensive, so El-Fatatry sat down at his computer, Googled for “media technology studies in Europe,” and found a Finnish university as his third hit. Finland offers free higher education, even for foreigners, so El-Fatatry applied, enrolled, and only then headed to his new country for the first time.

With €300 and an uncertain future, he took a job delivering newspapers to make some extra cash as he studied. The entire journey was a trip into the unknown for El-Fatatry, but after doing it, he found that he now had the “guts” to take more risks. By 2006, he had created the Internet start-up Muxlim, a social-networking and community site for Western Muslims.

Read the rest of this post

De-friending has always been awkward. Social networks offer one click “remove a friend” options, but it still doesn’t make the decision any easier.

What follows is a collection of stories about de-friending. In summary, what I discovered is that everyone approaches their social network differently and it’s impossible to communicate all those nuances when you choose to de-friend.

Read the rest of this post

In February 2007, a friend called Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a board member of Facebook, and asked if he wanted to meet with a man with an idea that sounded preposterous on its face. Always game for something new, Mr. Andreessen headed to the San Francisco airport late one night to hear the guy out. A junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin, but impressive, résumé, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.

Read the rest of this post

I blame David Hasselhoff.

Everything was going fine for the Web–the financial world had been unwinding its overleveraged excesses for nearly a year with nary a ripple into Silicon Valley–until the launch of HoffSpace, a social network revolving around the oogachaka-ing, burger-wagging actor.

Some bloggers called it a bizarre nightmare. Others decried it as the end of social networks. They were probably joking. But they were right.

Hoffspace showed once and for all what the Web sector had fought so hard to admit: These social networks had finally expanded a niche too far. No longer was it possible to argue that one day social-networking sites would be anywhere near as good at making money as they were at expanding, fractal-like, into a gray goo of trivial matter.

Read the rest of this post

Ivy Bean is a great-grandmother with a difference. At 102 years old she has joined the social-networking revolution and become the oldest person on Facebook.

The former mill worker, who was born in Bradford in 1905, showed an interest in the Web site after hearing care workers at her home talk about the phenomenon.

Although Mrs. Bean currently only has nine Facebook friends, she said she “loves being online” and is hoping for many more.

Read the rest of this post

The best thing with which to mock a company that shouldn’t exist is a company that doesn’t actually exist. And San Francisco’s Internet hipsters won’t just snicker about your start-up behind your back; they’ll do it where your vanity Google Blog Alerts will find it. Plurk is only the latest target–a start-up that lets users post short updates to the Web, as Twitter does, but adds a timeline. Plurk’s faux nemesis: Pheltup, “the first social network that not only tells you WHO is doing WHAT; but also WHY.” When some Twitter “thought leaders”–Pheltup’s target market–fell for the rumor that it had acquired the freshly hatched Plurk, it just showed how easily pranked the neophile cool kids of the Web are. What upped the ante is that Plurk’s real executives are now actually responding to the (fake) buzz about their “crude and unwholesome” would-be owners.

Read the rest of this post

There are plenty of folks waiting for concrete evidence that Facebook fatigue has set in. So each new data point offers up a new opportunity to prove that college kids, or grown-ups, or core users, or casual users, or whoever, have gotten bored with the social network. This year we’ve already seen drops in the site’s traffic from December through February, a move we chalked up to seasonal affective disorder.

Read the rest of this post

The House is set for hearings on one of the hottest–and most contentious–topics in Pentagon research today.

Every arm of the Pentagon’s vast research complex is scrambling to figure out how to turn social and cultural networks into military advantage. Social scientists are being embedded in combat brigades, to explore Iraq and Afghanistan’s “human terrain.” Computer labs back at home are trying to model foreign cultures like the weather and predict the next epicenter of unrest. But all of these projects are loaded with controversy. One of the biggest academic groups in social science has condemned the Human Terrain System program as unethical; prominent researchers and officers think the prediction project is pie-in-the-sky, at best.

Read the rest of this post

Search is dead. Or at least that’s the opinion of one tuned-in venture capitalist I’ve been getting to know this year. We were recently discussing the drawn-out Microsoft-Yahoo-Google showdown and its larger implications when my fellow futurist issued his bold statement as a sort of summary dismissal of the whole multibillion-dollar battle. In his opinion, Silicon Valley’s Big Three are fighting over the scraps of the last decade of innovation while there’s a sea change taking place in the way people use the Internet–one that may leave the Web’s biggest players holding all the cards to a game nobody wants to buy into anymore.

Read the rest of this post