I was thinking about getting to know each other better and I started a community wiki page a few days ago where around 80 French readers of my blog already introduced themselves, I also thought it would be fun to see where we are geographically and started a Frappr! group if you want to join us, it would be cool...
Originally saw it on Sam's blog and I really liked the idea of Eventful, a social software to share your events with friends, I started using it for the conferences I speak to and added the end of 2005 ones. The conferences are now in my sidebar (bottom right, I know it starts getting messy) and also available here and as Ical and RSS feeds... Here they are in clear:
Congrats to the Open BC team for launching their blog and thanks for having chosen TypePad. The design is very clean as well. The blog was made by Björn, Christiane and Karsten.
Disclosure: being a stockholders from certain competitors of OB does not prevent me from congratulating a very successful european startup !
You can draw together with friends, exchange your thoughts and work together. It is really cool, try it, send a drawing to your friends by email. I am sure Hugh will love it.
Update: I have deleted this post. One of the very few posts I have deleted, sorry about that.
Let's carry on this conversation around Linked In and Open BC and the
new features of Linked In. Being a business angel at Linked In, I also respect its competitors and I think Open BC is a good european initiative, both with different models.
Technorati Tags: blog, transparency
No, I will not subscribe to Shagster
David Tebbutt just wrote an article in The Guardian about how the lesblogs conference was organised: word spread on blogs and the conference mostly self-organised on the wiki page.
David says: "for most of those who attended, the engagement started well before the event.
People signed up for the conference by hitting the edit button and adding their details to Le Meur's Socialtext Wiki pages. They paid by clicking a link to the payment page. They entered their personal details, and added notes such as "Anyone need a lift from Amsterdam?" or "Anyone fancy dinner on 24th?" to the Travel/what to do page.
Pages materialised according to need, and adding and editing information was straightforward. Best of all, everything was always up to date."
The fact that most participants were not only participants but also helped getting the programme ready, helped us find speakers, filled-in the wiki with tips to travel to Paris, restaurant ideas (and even what do in Paris for five days ?) to help everybody and gathered all the posts, audio files, articles about the event was an amazing support.
I felt like we all organized the conference together. Obviously, there were still some heavy logistics left...
Thanks David for this article, to your question about the blog etiquette to talk about your own article, I think that's fine ;-) I would just regret they were no links in your article to get the Guardian readers to the blogs and conference pages you are talking about but I guess this is The Guardian policy outside of its own blogs, Neil ?
but Sixfoo! 660° feta is fun. via Joi.
Congratulations, Flickr team and Flickr investors.
I just had the confirmation that Le Sénat (the French Senate) will host our one day conference on April 25th on blogs and social software ! You are all welcome to join, there are 200 seats in the room we have and we already have 85 people booked from around Europe so don't take too much time to decide... There is a 100 euros participation fee to cover all the costs, lunch and coffee breaks provided etc.
Mena's Friendster blog.
We have just annnounced the launch of Friendster's blog service on TypePad. Friendster members can get a free blog with advertising and upgrade to more advanced offers without ads.
In 24 hours, tens of thousands of Friendster members have already created their blogs.
Cnet talks about it.
Congrats Reid and all the Linked In team, for raising another $10M, I am so happy, proud and honored to be in such an amazing list of Angel Investors.
Linked In has now more than 1.2 million members and over 50 million connected contacts, wew ! Now Reid, let's go international...
My highest ever, I just refused a LinkedIn invitation from a person with 1685 connections. This is totally pointless as you end up being asked to introduce people you don't know to other people you don't know. I only connect to people I have met at least once in LinkedIn.
Flickr seems to have good new functionalities
I have been invited by three friends to join aSmallWorld that positions itself as a very exclusive social network. For example, they don't allow people below 5 connections to invite other people (I have three...).
Here is how they present themselves.
Pierre Omidyar, founder of Ebay, blogged again yesterday and announced the launch of the Omidyar Network that just invested in Socialtext.
Disclosure: I invested too.
Congrats Felix and Stefan for having launched your new venture, Plazes.
I just joined this new social software and I like the idea, when you are in, Plazes allow you to fill-in new places you have been to (or you are at) and find people and things of interest around you. Really cool, give it a try !
There is also a Plazes blog if you want to follow how Felix and Stefan grow their startup.
After 10 invites, I finally registered on multiply here is my page (I did not fill-in much up to now). This is called pressure :=)
Blogging is definitely an excellent social networking tool, I agree with Peter Caputa's post: "blogging is the Ultimate Social Software"
However, when I was that enthusiastic with Reid Hoffman, head of Linked In, I remember Reid very clearly asking me: "Do you think everybody will blog ?" I wish, but no, not everybody will blog, and for a long time, that is what will make blogs a social software for bloggers between bloggers only.
The Wall Street Journal is preparing an article about Professional Social Software such as Linked In .
If you have experiences with professional contacts made via Linked In or other Social Networks or if you have hired or have been hired via these networks, please let me know I will either talk about it or suggest the journalist to call you if you are interested.
Canadian Press writer Angela Pacienza, in The Winnipeg Sun, calls Habbo Hotel
a—Vibrant vitual hangout. Habbos
have made it to Canadian shores. Other Habbo Hotels can be found in England, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain.
Mix in a little chat, instant
messaging, and social networking along with an avatar body of your choice and you have
Habbo Hotel.
This virtual hangout is free lest you find yourself desirous of additional furniture for your room or fancy a video
game or two—and those can be purchased for pennies a piece. Heavily moderated and profanity free (all conversations are
filtered before being posted to your screen), Habbos are designed for 13-20 year olds and have about 2 million ‘unique’
users already checked in to Habbo Hotels worldwide.
Anyone checked in to a Habbo Hotel lately?
I really like the new Linked In for Groups . It helps you connect with people who attended the same conference as you, are from the same alumni or association. If you want to add a group you belong to, you can ask Linked In.
This is exactly what the phones will become very shortly, they will have a public server that allow others to learn more about you, share your ideas with them, will do personal advertising and matchmaking.
Howard reviews the use of Pocketster, which does this on Pocket PC. Unfortunately having it available on a Pocket PC will result in Geek matchmaking only, the real social change will happen when it hits the phones.
For those of you who want to do Geek matchmaking now, Pocketster is available today for download.
"The new social software turbo-charges friendships, sexual hookups and the business of human relationship -- and could turn our lives into an open book. Part 1 of a two-part series." Marc and Joi compete in this Salon.com article about social software (be warned if you are not a subscriber you can view the article but after a very long full page video ad... still it is worth it).
I have never even tried to compete with them with my 413 Linked In friends (which is the one I use the most, almost daily), I should use Orkut more, I only have 71 friends there :=)
The question is what is a friend ?
Good question. Both travel getting cheaper and the Internet of course gets us all closer. We used to have school friends (we still have) because it was the only way to find friends, the local way.
I like this new way of finding friends as I have met extraordinary people (more through my blog that is also social software of course) that I would have never met otherwise, but the first thing I want is of course to meet them in reality, and this is why I enjoy the blogger dinners.
I guess my new definition of a friend is somebody I share a lot of common interests or passions, they can be business or personal passions. Therefore many people with passion about blogging are my (new) friends. I probably have to blog about kite surfing (I don't have the time) to find new friends around but these friends I actually prefer to find them on the beach where I do kite surfing.
I guess social software is really helpful to gather people with the same business or personal interests that would not meet easily without it.
Now I am not sure I would change my orkut profile like Marc did to "open mariage" (I would not anyway, righ :=) even for fun. Of course it says something about you and if I had an open mariage which is not the case, I guess I would not show it to all my contacts...
What is your definition of a friend ?
Socialtext highlighted by Business Week as something that could transform Corporate America.
Congrats, Ross.
Disclosure: I invested in Socialtext
Last week I had another great dinner in San Francisco with Reid Hoffman, founder of Linked In. Reid is one of the most impressive and visionary friends I know.
I am very proud to join its investors list. Reid has secured Series A financing of $4.7 million in November last year. The investment was led by Sequoia Capital, the venture investors behind well-known Internet brands such as Yahoo!, Google and PayPal. A round with business angels that I participated in will be announced within a few weeks.
Here is some information about Linked In's recent growth, if you are interested:
600,000+ users (30,000+ growth per week)
28,000,000+ email addresses sent through Linked In (3,000,000+ growth per week)
12 months old
Within the 600,000+ users:
265,000+ international users
120,000+ senior management-level users
8,000+ entrepreneurs
10,000+ VCs
100% professional users
and 28,000+ in France only.
Congrats, Reid !
From Corante via Marc Canter, some social software trends, clearly Linked In leads the way by adding value to people (providing people with jobs for example !).
TrendIQ Social Networking "Internet Presence".
April 13, 2004
TrendIQ Social Networking "Internet Presence"
TrendIQ has been measuring "internet presence" of the Social Networking meme over at Social-all, which I mentioned recently.
Looks like LinkedIn has been getting a lot of buzz, recently. [Get Real]
Excellent post from Ross on blogs ans social software for the next-next generation of kids. Unfortunately my three boys do not speak english yet I cannot see them try it !
The coming influence of Net-Gens (14-24 year olds) with their multi-modal and connected ways is well expected and studied. But what about 7-14 year olds, the Next Next Generation?
The problem with Children and Social Software is the balance between letting them express themselves and privacy. In California, well intended regulations make it almost impossible to have children use, let alone create something on the Internet.
So where do the kids blog? Either from home under supervision or Think.com. Under an Oracle grant, any K-12 school in the US & UK can provide kids blogs, email, social networking and group collaboration for free. All password protected, available in three languages and with pilots underway in Chile, Thailand, New Zealand and China. Its a pretty great project attempting to balance significant stakeholder issues to let kids learn socially:
Think.com - version 3 new features include a "Parent Page" and buddy lists. Using the "Parent Page" teachers can now post homework assignments, class calendars, permission slips and much more for parents to easily access. Buddy lists let kids see when their friends are on line and allow them to quickly send email or navigate to their "buddy's" web page. Email functionality has been enhanced, giving schools the choice to block all attachments, turn off external email, and monitor messages for bad language.
Perhaps the only perk my 7-year old daughter gets from being the CEO's daughter (aside from being dragged to conferences while being told its a vacation), is her own workspace to blog privately. Of course, if I'm sitting around with my laptop, her first question is "Daddy, can I post to my weblog." She is pretty excited about it, maybe thinks she has more than one reader and her posts may be a treasure for her one day. I would open it up, but I also get Google traffic for distrubing queries like "pictures of my daughter."
Great to see social software for kids through schools, but sitting down with them to let them explore can't be beat.
[Ross Mayfield's Weblog (Social Text)]Thanks Rob for the pointer, I just subscribed to this new social software demoed at E-tech. Should you want to link me or contact me in Flickr, my id is loiclemeur...
Stewart Butterfield is giving me a demo of flickr. Real-time media sharing. Collaborative drawing. Real-time Photoshop contests. Uploading samples. Playing with the media we all generate.
Free, ad-based. Expected to see "pro" accounts. Stewart wrote the user interaction/UI for it. This is impressive.
It was turned on on Tuesday. Already a couple thousand users. Real launch is next week.
[The Scobleizer Weblog]
Great FOAF session today. Dan Brickley who created FOAF, gave a good overview of what it is and how it is used.
I enjoyed the idea of dating on phones via bluetooth and FOAF.
This way you can date somebody who is in the same room, same restaurant, immediately, with the same interests as you... Great stuff.
Marc and Eric also OF COURSE showed People Aggregator. I really like the idea of linking the friends I have in Orkut with the friends I have in Linked In, with the friends I have in ...
I am not sure these networks will agree to share their databases with you (or anybody else), Marc, but let's see what happens. I agree on the fact that if we all own our own identity on a FOAF file, it is better than having to fill-it in in 10 different networks...
Also saw a demo of NewsMonster, it is an RSS reader that supports FOAF. Nice work, John.
"There is too many social networks. You do not own my data, I do. "
John is also working on "Exportster", which is a plugin that should be ready within a month. Its goal is to be able to export the data from the different networks and sync them.
"We export the data from social networks and sync them all, so that there is one macro level FOAF file, in order to have a unified data model."
Tribe also announced that they support FOAF.
Greg Elin showed fotonotes.net that is coordinating a semantic photo project which is exploring the issues combining FOAF and RDF for photos, impressive.
Marc Powell talked briefly about Indyvoter.org, "injecting the virus of political dialogue into online social networks", also supporting FOAF.
Just wanted to share with those of you not physically present here the official E-Tech 2004 joke I heard 30 times today, coming from Orkut's way of accepting friends invitations.
Just not quite right like a "0" or "1" choice, right ?
So are you a friend, YES or NO ?
Most of my friends here at E-tech are saying they always answer YES to that question in Orkut as it is too rude to say NO to somebody even if you do not know him or her.
I guess we should maybe define better our definition of friend ? Will you go for Joi's or Marc's definition of a friend ?
After Friendster and Linked In and so many others, let me introduce you to Rumba, Alex's dog, who has become one of the most connected dogs in the social software Dogster... Congratulations Alex !
Where will all that lead us ? Will we check dogs online reputation too ?
After having received about 10 invitations to join Orkut, I finally registered in it...
My first impressions are that it is very simple and well done and most important, very fast.
The only problem is really to join all these tools and then manage the requests. Alex pointed me today to somebody hiring an assistant whose main job will be to manage full time the social software relationships, I believe it is a joke ;=)
Each time I use a social software tool like linked in or plaxo, I realize how many contacts I have who changed their email address, changed position.
I would be ready to pay a manual service for somebody actually calling some of my old contacts companies to find out what are the new right contact information of people not using these tools.
I guess this is the kind of small business that would work if completely outsourced to a country like India for example.
Here is an idea for entrepreneurs looking for ideas ;=)
Do you know of any company providing this type of services ? Or should I just stop talking to anybody that does not use Plaxo or Linked In ;=) ?
Under heavy pressure from friends (just joking) I finally joined linkedin.
So if you are in, start linking into me ! If you are not, you can experiment it too.
I am sorry for having sent this to my contacts who consider it as spam, as I did that with Plaxo too some time ago (which I cannot use anymore and I'd like too, as I now have a mac).
So here are my first feelings:
-the profile form to build your cv is well done
-I like very much the endorsements capability, giving credibility to what you have done in your past business experience
-enlarging your own network by the network of your friends is good
-I was impressed by the customer service, I had troubles importing my adress book and tech support answered me within an hour on a Sunday !
I regret:
-not being able to map the network visually, with people connected to one another, and possibly pictures of them, links to their weblogs
-the form and process to send invitations was incredibly slow, with 1200 contacts.
-linkedin should adopt the great update function of Plaxo or work with them
Have any of you already used it for some time and happy with it ?
