Website Hype

Are you mad about the movies? If so, then you will be pleased to hear that there is now a social networking site especially for you. With the tagline “Stop watching bad movies”, Flixster is the social networking site for movie buffs, and within just one year has grown into one of the largest movie sites on the web, with over fifteen million registered users, and has outstripped other movie sites such as Fandango.

Like most social networking sites, users can create their own profiles and invite friends, but here they can also rate movies and actors, and write their own movie reviews for other users to read. The site also offers information about movies, and generates overall movie rankings on the basis of the 500 million movie ratings that have been provided by the users.

Users can chat to one another, look up movie showtimes, catch up with the latest movie news and gossip, view images of their favorite actors, and also see clips from popular movies and TV shows.

Just one worrying thing though, if you Google “Flixter” in conjunction with McAfee site advisor, the site is listed with a red cross next to the listing, and you are advised to use caution. Why? Well, it seems that Flixter has been cited as sending out too many “spammy emails”.

As for overall cosmetics, I have to admit that the home page is a bit busy, ad-filled and unappealing – your eye doesn’t quite know where to look.

So, my overall impression is: good idea, but could do with a bit more careful website design in terms of eye-appeal. Still, the proof of the pudding is Flixter’s success.

Cute, pink, flowery, refreshing and girly, Glogster is a new site that lets users create web pages, which they call “posters”, using Flash elements. Glogster exhort you to “Poster yourself” – now how can you resist that? You can upload photos, songs, text and various other items. Supposedly, you can even embed your poster on another website, but at 960 pixels wide, your poster will be way too big for most blogs or the likes of Facebook et al.

You can build a friend network to which you add other “Glogsters”, making it very much like some of the current social networking sites. You can rate other people’s Glogs too.

When you sign up for an account with Glogster you quickly arrive at a large Flash rectangle where you can drag and drop images, videos, and sounds. You can either use either preloaded images and snazzy decorations from the site itself, or upload your own. Then as an added embellishment you can play about with drop-shadows, fonts, and the like. You can add links too of course.

Some pundits are already saying that the site is a little like Geocities was, before the explosion of social networking sites and blogs. For people who are already using Facebook and MySpace, it is difficult to see what Glogster really has to offer, and the site faces competitors such as Scrapblog that launched about a year ago - although, admittedly, Scrapblog does not have such a pretty homepage.

There was a time when the idea of creating your own website for free was revolutionary, but now it is just old hat. Most ISP’s offer free websites nowadays. A serious part of the critique is that Glogster are not really offering anything new.

At the moment Glogster is attempting to pull in the punters by giving away some iPods and gift certificates to new users who create posters.

Glogster is one way of using Flash without giving yourself a heart attack, and the very pink and chic homepage may well pull in the teenage girls who love scrapbooking. It will be interesting to see if this poster site takes off. If its design is anything to go by, it could do.

For those who are interested in both travel and the web, and the way in which various websites can enhance the travel experience, the new website Hi Everywhere! will be of interest. Hi Everywhere! offers to match travelers to people who already live in the area that they are visiting, who are willing to show visitors around, and encourages both guide and visitor to write travel journals of the experience.

The site is based in the US, but many of the people using it so far appear to be based outside North America, and in fact the majority appear to be in Asia.

There are only around 100 members at the moment, which is still not enough to give the site “critical mass”. Social networking sites, forums, and other sites that are relying on user-generated content always face a starting problem – people will only be attracted to the site if it has content, and content will only be created by people coming to the site and joining up.

The presence of this new site has already brought forth howls from pundits who are worried about the safety aspects, yet as long as you meet the other person in a public place, stay in public places, and exercise the usual caution that you would with strangers, there doesn’t seem to be anything to get unduly concerned about. Just use your common sense.

It seems that Hi Everywhere! is a reasonably good idea, you always see more of a place and get an inside perspective when shown round by, and talking to, people who are local to the area. This way you can avoid the tourist traps, and see those hidden away places that tourists tend to miss.

It will be interesting to see if Hi Everywhere! grows in membership, and if it leads to some good sightseeing.

Social networks are always intriguing, both within and outside cyberspace. It seems at the moment that online social networks are all launching platforms – LinkedIn has done so this week, and Friendster also. Then yesterday Bebo announced that it is going to launch an application platform of its own, similar to and compatible with that of Facebook. Not only this, but Bebo CEO Michael Birch has suggested that his company is also going to work with Google’s OpenSocial.

Bebo, with around 40 million users, is somewhat behind social network giants Facebook and MySpace. Bebo tends to have more of a following in the UK, with somewhat less of an appeal in the US.

MySpace has started including widgets from outside developers, and Bebo is now following suit. It seems that Bebo may be trying to combine the functionality of Facebook, with the freedom of expression afforded by MySpace.

Bebo’s platform is very similar to Facebook’s - users can rate applications using a star system, developers can skin their app pages with their own design. It looks like Bebo and Facebook will be working closely together in the future, and if Bebo is compatible with Facebook, then apps can just be ported from one to the other.

Some people in the business are saying that the OpenSocial vs Facebook issue could be a bit like Windows vs Mac, and a lot of people are not keen to see two competing standards.

It will be interesting to see how the situation vis-a-vis the social networking sites develops over the next few months – there seems to be a lot at stake.

It seems that there is considerable competition between Facebook and Google of late, with the two falling over themselves to sign up the best and the brightest in terms of developer talent, and the two virtually neck and neck in terms of the online advertising race. And when it comes down to it, it seems that it is Facebook that can’t really do without Google, indeed Facebook is now advertising on Google - to get advertising.

Facebook will soon be announcing that some of their pages that don’t require login will become indexable by search engines such as Google, so information that normally you would have to be logged in to get, will now become more publicly available. This follows on from the fact that recently Facebook launched a public listings search, whereby anyone can now search for a specific person.

It is argued by some that social networking sites, though extremely popular, have an inherent difficulty in making money, people don’t really go to them to search for information or look at ads, but to communicate with other users, so Facebook is perhaps having to work hard to monetize the site effectively.

Back in the summer Facebook signed an advertising deal with Microsoft to put Microsoft adCenter sponsored links and other ads on the Facebook site, right through to 2009. This news raised eyebrows because it was Microsoft that was chosen for the ad deal and not Google, which is surprising given that Google has been going all out for the big advertising deals, even offering 90% or more of total revenue to certain big name partners, such as AOL and Ask.

So what does the future hold for Facebook in terms of its relationship with Google? Let’s see.

Heard the latest? Rumour has it that Facebook has made an offer of $85 million to buy Zhanzuo.com, which is China’s largest social networking site. And it’s no surprise that Facebook is after a piece of the action in ever fast growing China, where the economy has been booming for some considerable time, and demand for modern goods and services continues apace.

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, there are some 162 million internet users in China, a figure which has grown by around 140 million users in the past seven years, despite some efforts on the part of the government to restrict or control use of the internet. And it seems that the current trend for social networking online, which has taken off exponentially in recent years, is by no means confined to the West, as around seven million Chinese internet users are on Zhanzuo.com.

It seems that the news of the $85 million offer has come from The Times, (that’s the UK Times), and now the word is out all over the web. The Times also reports that Zhanzuo.com CEO Jack Zhang, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, have had talks, but that no deal has actually been completed. It is intriguing that Facebook is denying all these reports.

So what will come of this? It will be interesting to see if Facebook eventually do acquire Zhanzuo.com, and how this might alter the site. The acquisition, if it does go ahead, will certainly give Facebook’s already strong international credentials an added dimension.

While we wonder if Facebook will join OpenSocial, it seems that Facebook has other things on its plate. Next week Facebook will be launching its Social Ads advertising service, which takes the Facebook ads outside the social network, and allows third party sites to run them. Interesting. It’s Facebook’s very own version of Google Adsense, and will take Facebook and Google into an even more competitive position vis-a-vis one another.

The whole thing will not actually be unveiled until November 6th, but it looks like it will work in a similar way to AdSense, but the ads will be targeted to Facebook members profile data, and interests. This will be done, surprise, surprise, via cookies which will identify the members later when they visit other sites hosting Social Ads.

Facebook has already had a go at targeting ads on its own site, by means of its Facebook Flyers program, using demographic and psychographic data gleaned from members’ profiles. With Social Ads, that targeting will be extended right across the web.

The only glitch in all of this is that the targeting will only work for Facebook members, who are still not a major proportion of all web users, despite the fact that Facebook has grown so dramatically in membership.

There is also some talk that Facebook will be targeting ads according to who networks with who on the site, but this remains to be seen. Meanwhile industry pundits are waiting for November 6th to see what lies in store on the Facebook scene.

OpenSocial seems to be the word, (or is it words?), on everyone’s lips at the moment. And in case you don’t know what that is, it’s a set of common application programming interfaces (API’s) for web-based social network applications, that has been developed by Google, and was released today, November 1, 2007. So what does this mean? Applications implementing the OpenSocial API’s will be interoperable with any social network system that supports them, including features on sites such as MySpace and Friendster.

OpenSocial provides as a more open cross-platform alternative to the Facebook Platform, and was initially seen as a potential challenge to the big social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook. However it now seems that MySpace has joined OpenSocial as a partner. Chris De Wolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace, says, “this is about helping the start-up spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network.” Now everyone is waiting for the reaction of Facebook, whose platform has received some criticism for not being open enough.

The whole project will tie together Google, MySpace and numerous other social networking platforms in a common environment that application publishers can publish widgets to with one set of code.

Since the release of OpenSocial, it has apparently already been hacked. Somebody going under the handle of theharmonyguy, and claiming to be a mere amateur, has already compromised the RockYou OpenSocial application on Plaxo called emote, having added a number of emoticons to Plaxo VP Marketing John McCrea’s profile within 45 minutes of it launching.