WediaBuzz

I’m sitting in my first workshop, Building an App for Social Platforms. There are probably just under 100 people here, in a room made to hold 10x’s that number. This is a (as advertised) nuts and bolts type workshop - it’s more about how you write the code, how you can get your app to play nice in the social network world, what kind of tracking is available, etc. There was little talk about big picture success in the social network world.

I’ve heard people from MySpace, Google’s Open Social, RockYou! and Hi5speak about the different things that their platforms have to offer, and specifically about the applications you can build to interface with their platforms. If you’re a myspace or facebook user, you’ve seen these applications in life. They’re funny little tiles of content that allow you to find out which ‘Sex and and City’ character you are or buy your friend a virtual drink. One of the most popular on MySpace (per their rep) is “own your friends” where you can “purchase” your friends and brag to them about your ownership of them. They’re mostly silly, goofy and most importantly, social. The X factor is finding out how these technologies can be used for slightly different purposes… such as for mass media.

Filtering through the heavy code (aka over my head) talk, I’ve come to a few conclusions:

• There are a lot of things we can be doing (right now!) with applications on these social networks.
• I need to build a few simple web application to learn more about how it works, for FB, MS and iGoogle Sandbox (Open Social), at least
• How does media use these tools? iGoogle seems like a pretty easy fit. Google has recently announced that they’re trying to push iGoogle into the social world - the details are still iffy. But keeping in mind that 20% of google pageviews in the US are via iGoogle, there’s some serious potential here. (you can expect that number to go up if they do the social thing well). They compared iGoogle to  watching a concert vs. the more social platforms that are more like hanging out with your friends and singing karaoke. That’s an important distinction to make - as our traditional media is more like watching a concert as well.
• How can we make money on these tools? Advertising is supported on all of these platforms. Seems like a lot of AdSense talk, tagging to find out who is using the apps and matching advertising to those attributes. How do we do this effectively on a local basis?
• Developer support is absolutely available for almost all of these - some code knowledge is required.
• This stuff is smart. It can pull in info from outside server side databases and/or existing social networks.
• This has a huge potential for a lot of our PAK projects and also the SME initiative.

Okay, I’m ready to go back to Iowa and start working on understanding all of these social platform apps more… wait… there’s three more days.

Some Links:
http://del.icio.us/chanezon/opensocial <– open social links
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open <– already existing iGoogle Gadgets
http://www.orkut.com<– Orkut

Becky O.