social network

AOL buys Bebo for $850 million

March 13, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I don’t have time to start hypothesizing, but thought this was worth sharing asap. AOL has announced today it has entered into an agreement to buy Bebo for $850 million.

Bebo’s one of the biggest social networking sites in the UK, number 1 in Ireland and New Zealand, and is number 3 in the US. It’s also more focused on the early and pre-teen market, and has also been developing video channels/promotions, including Kate Modern (currently the most successful web TV show).

There’s more info on the purchase as BusinessWire.

My quick response is that I have an element of fear about a Myspace type stagnation due to a purchase, but coming a week after opening up AOL Instant Messenger, hopefully AOL has thought carefully about how to oversee Bebo without destroying what has made it successful. And it’ll be interesting to see what efforts they might make to change the monetisation of the site – something social networks have traditionally struggled with despite huge predictions of ever-increasing advertisement spending.

As long as I don’t get bombarded with cd’s to set me up on Bebo, I’ll be happy.

Even the industries you think get Web 2.0 can miss…

October 19, 2007 By Dan Thornton

When you imagine the markets which should be embracing the internet, communities, and engagement, you’d imagine marketing, PR, and media would be all clamouring to be at the forefront of the list.

So it was a bit of a shock when I noticed a distant Facebook friend had been banned from using the social network whilst at work. At a PR firm…

In a world where the broadcast model of traditional PR and media will become less and less effective, I’d be making sure my employees knew Facebook, and their business contacts, incredibly well. Rather than emailing 400 journalists with one stock message, why not spend time looking at their profiles, their interests, and their hobbies. Find out what makes them tick away from work, and use all that information to invidually target the most receptive journalists and outlets…

And increasingly you’ll be needing to reach an army of bloggers, and amateur writers. How will you even find them without building a network now?

Or you could just send out a mass email and hope it isn’t caught in a spam filter or deleted…

Digg bad IP address solved, USB problems encountered…

August 7, 2007 By Dan Thornton

Well, a very basic email arrived from Digg this morning, stating Digg should work now if I try it.

So I did. And it appears the IP ban against our building has been lifted. Which is great, but it still leaves me wondering what the point is?

I used Digg as a way to find sources of news that I enjoyed or found interesting, as a way to occasionally drive traffic here by posting if I had a really good story, and adding friends to filter news and build networks…

But if posting links to my site, and digging the stories by people with the same interest is a bannable offence, then what’s the point? It’s just a big RSS aggregator which misses lots of stories if they aren’t suitable to catch the attention of a reasonable amount of people. So anything other than gadgets and humour.

Still, nice not to be banned.

It was also nice to get a Lacie 120GB Mobile Drive to use to swap info between my two work desktops, and two home laptops. I’ve wanted one for ages, since one of my work hard drives collapsed and I realised how limited the back-up is for my firm.

It all looked good until I was unable to read/write to the drive. Turns out that at some point my web geek/developer spec machine had lost some privileges, including USB read/write access.

Yes. In our foward-thinking, tech-savvy world, USB ports are automatically blocked for most people, and it takes a request to the IT dept, with approval of a manager, to get them opened up again.

Exactly which virus or top secret document can only be transmitted by USB is a mystery…

Sorry – bad IP address: Why Digg isn’t helping communities…

August 6, 2007 By Dan Thornton

It seems like we’ve fallen foul of the hidden rule of Digg, mentioned here, and here.

Basically, if you make a habit of Digging stories by people on your friends list, you’ll find yourself IP banned. Or indeed, find your entire company IP banned overnight. No warning, no discussion, and nowhere does it mentioned that you shouldn’t engage in the community.

Interestingly even Digg founder Kevin Rose could be seen as guilty, if you look at his profile here, and see how many times he’s Dugg the site of a fellow Digg user, Smash…

The valid reason for the banning is to stop people ‘gaming’ Digg by using multiple accounts to boost a story. For about 30 seconds, until they access a proxy server, anyway.

The problem is that small sites, and anyone with a small group of friends, is likely to be followed quite closely by their friends…So run a big risk of getting banned if they want anything they’ve done to be discovered. And at the same time, anyone who is aware of the rule can easily get around it. Instead of adding friends on Digg, just collect email address for other users…

That’s beside the fact that you’re more likely to look at the links submitted by friends and find something interesting. I add people to my friends list because they consistently come up with interesting articles, then get banned for digging the very reason I added them as friends…

Perhaps rather than venturing into new start-ups like Pownce, he’d be better off making some adjustments to Digg. The categories still leave a lot to be desired for non-tech news, and their attempts to combat ‘gaming’ are irritating at best, and do nothing to tackle the problem…