From CQ Weekly: Candidates Link Into the Social Networking Scene for 2008
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Voters are by now accustomed to seeing political leaders impertinently pop up on the social networking side of cyberspace. Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois has significant Facebook and MySpace profiles; former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who is also seeking the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, recently debuted a page on the Ã¢ÂÂavatarÃ¢ÂÂ social networking site Second Life.
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Late on the day that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) announced he was forming a presidential exploratory committee, Farouk Olu Aregbe logged on to Facebook.com, the popular online community where college students post profiles, share photos and blog. On a whim he created a group called "One Million...
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Bill Thompson loooks at how the social web is transforming friendships and the way we view the world.
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Local bloggers now play a key role in influencing national media. Their blogs have become prime sites to watch as the 2008 presidential campaign gets hot.
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TechMeme really likes Friday evening's Monkey piece, it's been #1 for almost 24 hours. Even if people still use the Social Graph term, it may have done some good by asking the question -- what's the difference between a network and a graph? In math there is no difference, a network is a graph and vice versa.  I got one thing wrong, apparently the term came from Facebook, presumably as a way of separating what they do from their predecessors.  Dan Farber reported in May. "Zuckerberg describes the Facebook core function that the new third-party applications can tap into as a 'social graph,' the network of connections and relationships between people on the service." Google Trends comparison of "social network" vs "social graph." Fred Wilson posted a comment pointing to a post where he wondered what the graph thing was all about. His post was one that inspired me to write my piece. Buzzwords and phrases are useful if they describe something new. For example, I remember when platform was new, but I didn&#185;t object to it, because it explained a concept that we needed a word for. Today it's still much in use, and there's little or no confusion about what it means. I was doing audio blog posts before we had the term podcast, and I totally got behind it because we needed a word for what we were doing. But social graph is not needed, it makes something simple sound complicated, and we totally need it to sound simple if the problems are going to get solved. They&#185;re not trivial problems, they&#185;ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes. Another problem with new names for old things is that it tends to push aside the pioneers and makes it sound like newcomers are not also-rans. Fred had a reasonable gripe as a backer of Wasabe when Mint started getting credit for being a first mover. At least they didn&#185;t have the chutzpah to try to make it a trend and give it a buzzword.  Someone is being pushed aside with the term &#179;social graph&#178; likely some competitors of Facebook like MySpace and LinkedIn, and some pioneers are going to lose credit for their innovation if it takes root. It may still take root, but I felt I had to say something. BTW, the title of the post contains a grammatic error because I changed the title to monkey from something else and didn't look carefully at the resulting title.
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NEW YORK -- Lecterns are so 2004. In the latest chapter of new Web-empowered debates and interaction with presidential candidates, social networking site MySpace and MTV will bring together 2008 hopefuls and young voters for real-time online conversations.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's online and cable broadcast Monday night is a landmark event in a year of experiments with Web 2.0 amid the most exciting presidential race in decades.
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As long as I've been involved in the tech industry there's been the concept of The Year of X, where X has been artificial intelligence, personal information managers, local area networks, CD-ROMs, P2P. Proclaimed by tech pubs, most likely to help their ad sales reps sell space, they focused the attention on areas the industry was investing money, in hopes of being there when lightning strikes, when wealth is created, as it often is in the tech industry. Sometimes the "year of" prognostications are right, more often they're wrong.  In that sense, there's no doubt that 2007 is the year of the social network in Silicon Valley. This may not be the year when huge wealth is created, but I don't doubt that the area is fertile, and I don't say that lightly, because I'm often a contrarian when it comes to self-induced Silicon Valley euphoria. There are a couple of ideas I've been getting ready to write about, I'm not quite ready yet, but here they are anyway. 1. When people get together to discuss Twitter, and perhaps other social networks (and Twitter is that, a bare-bones social network), they often discuss as if there were a common user experience, but this is a misperception, there are many different experiences, they may group into large subsets of the users, and they may not. Some food for thought. On Twitter I try to keep a ten percent ratio of people I follow over people who follow me. For other people, maybe most, the ratio is 1-to-1, they follow approximately the same number of people as follow them. Scoble follows thousands of people. For him Twitter is like a very fast chatroom. For me it's like weblogs.com on a busy day in 2002. I've seen people who follow 0 people, for them Twitter is a publishing environment. Very different experiences. To each of them Twitter is a different product. Note that when reporters cover Twitter, before they've become users, they probably write about the home page at Twitter, where complete strangers report on the kind of spaghetti sauce they like. That may be why so many articles dismiss Twitter as useless.  2. Integration is so tempting, but elusive. The other day a friend on Twitter wrote about a movie he liked. I looked it up on the NY Times movie review site (a newly revealed location now that their archive is open and a very valuable one, another topic I plan to cover, the wealth of the NY Times archive). I would have then liked to have clicked over to Netflix to order it. And even better, I'd have liked to have looked at what other movies he likes. Now we're very close to having this, we just need a way to co-relate two identity systems, Twitter's and Netflix's. And think of the value in integrating Amazon with Twitter. The mind explodes at the possibilities. This is what I meant when I said earlier "they&#185;re not trivial problems, they&#185;ve been there since the Internet outgrew academia and started being used for commercial purposes." This issue is now coming to a head, as the users can see the next step clearly. How to integrate the systems is known technology, but it's not a solved problem economically and politically. We need to get clear on the opportunities, and feel free to dream when the barriers between the networks come down.
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Presidential hopefuls starting to use blogs, social networking sites to advance their cause.
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Search Engine Journal is pleased to announce that we have a new contributor who will be covering search oriented marketing and news centering around viral and social media platforms, John Boyle. John is the author of the SocialNext blog, where he covers &#8220;the next generation of marketing via viral video and social networks like MySpace.&#8221; Based in [...]
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A South Korean version of MySpace is emerging as a potent political force. How Cyworld is reshaping the country's presidential campaign.
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A report coming from the Inside Facebook blog today details 3 new features that may be making their debut in Q1 2008.
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U.S. Sen. Barack Obama launched a new Web 2.0 campaign effort Wednesday, using LinkedIn's professional networking site to solicit comments from the network's 14 million users about business topics.
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New site doses social networking with literate lists. Plus: Is
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Channeling the wisdom of the crowd Comment The social networking phenomenon is upon us, and it seems that half the world (in reality, less than one sixth) is instant messaging, blogging, wiki-ing and generally collaborating and communicating in new and exciting ways.â¦
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A report coming from the Inside Facebook blog today details three new features that may be making their debut in the first few months of 2008.
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By Smith, Craig  Leader  Another week, another branded social network. Last week, Marketing reported on fashion retailer French Connection's plan to harness the power of user-generated content through its site www.anewmovement.com.