1. Facebook will have a problem managing the public/private divide. Making some things public and some things private makes the logic exponentially more complex. Not just the programming, but the semantics of it — telling me clearly whether am I sending a jello shot to just Grandma or the whole world. Facebook has already got an unusable interface. This will make it worse.
2. “Real time search” is a misnomer, in that it doesn’t accurately describe what is going on with Twitter. Yes, we here at Modern Media search Twitter for “TWTRCON” and our competitors.   But the real value for both our audience and us is “real-time call & response,” the paradigm and shining example of which was the case of the veggie sandwich and the Hotel Nikko at TWTRCON SF 09. The concierge had just started her Twitter account the morning of our event; grasped how to use it; and put it into action brilliantly.  The result was  a happy (vegetarian, I’m assuming) customer. Would she have been able to do the same with Facebook (remembering that they will be making it more complex rather than less?)

The speaker lineup features people who are showing the rest of us how to use Twitter to market brands and make happy customers, including Porter Gale from Virgin America, Seth Greenberg from Intuit, Jeremy Pepper from Boingo Wireless and Mike Prasad of Kogi BBQ.  We’ve also got Guy Kawasaki, MC Hammer from DanceJam, Dave McClure from Founders Fund, Steve Rubel from Edelman Digital, Paul Saffo from Stanford Media X, and Shel Israel, author of Naked Conversations–how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with  customers and the upcoming Twitterville, how businesses can thrive in Global Neighborhoods.

We’re using Twitter to get feedback and suggestions.  Love to hear from you on Twitter (use #twtrcon) and we hope to see you there!

Facebook users are understandably nervous about this development (though I’m not sure that most of them know — when I logged into my Facebook account, I was not notified of any change in the TOS).  There are great discussions in the Cosumerist story comments, with many people who clearly do have legal expertise commenting, and a lot of irate comments on the Digg page for this story, too.  There are also several Facebook groups discussing the new TOS, too.

The issue I’m concerned about is: what does this mean for brands and celebrities who are using Facebook to connect with their customers or fans??  Does Facebook now own the rights to the image of Christian Bale as Batman that is posted on the Dark Knight page?  (I checked and there does not seem to be a separate TOS for the Business pages.)  Or what about media brands that use Facebook to re-distribute some of their content?

At the very least, brands that care about both protecting their content and engaging with customers will be keeping their legal teams busy analyzing this.  Let us know if you have any more insights…

UPDATE:

The Industry Standard has published an email they received from a Facebook spokesman, claiming that Facebook is not claiming ownership of material uploaded by users, and were simply trying to clarify the Terms to be “more consistent with the behavior of the site.”  The email goes on to draw the analogy beween using an email service to send a message to another user – which then doesn’t disappear from the server even if the sender deletes it.  To me this analogy doesn’t quite work – I publish content on my page, in addition to writing on other people’s pages or using Facebook for messaging.  IMHO, Facebook has a little more clarifying to do …

UPDATE #2:

Mark Zuckerberg has written a blog post addressing the issue (“On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information”); with commentary on Mashable.

What’s unique is their easy drag and drop user interface.  You no longer need a programmer to build your widget.  It’s easy to set up and format a widget that incorporates text, feeds or video (although I wasn’t quite able to figure out how to make a polling widget in the limited time I had to play around with it).  Some of the samples the company has on its site are pretty cool.  I especially liked the YouTube widget and the package tracking widget.

iWidget also stands out in how easy they make it for people to publish their widgets to different platforms – Facebook, MySpace or iGoogle – without a lot of complicated engineering to adapt it to each platform.

The vision, as described by iWidgets founder Peter Yared, is to let brands follow their customers to where the customers are and become part of the content that people are curating for themselves on various portals.  From the iWidgets site:

Widget ads are just the first step. Instead of simply trying to build brand awareness, marketers now have the ability to reach out to customers with useful features to enhance their personalized pages on social networks. An athletic gear company could offer an application that lets a group of running buddies track how their times and distances compare. An airline could offer a “come visit me” application that displays the latest fares for a trip between the hometowns of viewers and Web page owners. Even better, an airline might offer a widget that lets users track their frequent-flier miles and search for award trips right from their iGoogle pages. These types of applications can be useful, engaging, and viral—when you see one on your friend’s profile, you are likely to install it as well.

Here’s the rub:  short-term, the company is stuck with the ad model.  The site describes a revenue-sharing approach: if you include ad content in your widget, they will take a 15% cut; if you don’t include advertising they reserve the right to load ads and give you a 15% cut.  A) what advertisers and who will sell them?  B) will individuals want widgets on their page that are loaded with ads?  C) a brand won’t want ads on their widget … so there’s a tease for a ‘private label’ model to come.   This approach begs the question:  what value is iWidgets adding to the advertiser in an ad-supported model?  Advertisers buy audience, and they can already reach the same audience through Facebook or Google or MySpace directly.

Long-term, iWidgets will try and teach brands how to use widgets to create useful apps that engage customers.  That’s very cool, but it will take some doing to figure out the appropriate business model there, too.

Clearly, iWidgets has some ideas on how to monetize all this, or they wouldn’t be getting funding in this environment.  We wish them luck, and we’ll be keeping an eye on them.  If we come up with any cool widgets we’ll let you know!

That’s where a young company called Searchles comes in.  Based on technology developed by founder and CTO Chris Seline and backed by angel investors, the company’s mission is to marry elements of social bookmarking, search and networking (Search + Circles = Searchles –get it?) to connect users with relevant content and a relevant network of other users.  The benefit to publishers: increased stickiness and engagement, and, potentially, increased revenue through a revenue share model (more on that later).
Today the company has announced the release of its plug-and-play Related Content widget, which it promises is seriously easy to install (we’ll try it out on Social Media at Work and let you know).  The open platform widget automatically spiders the site on which it’s installed, with no need for tagging or content linking on the part of the publisher, and then automatically delivers related content and networking features across the site.
What’s new is not only how easy it now is to showcase related content (no more clunky inflexible content management systems!!!), but also the types of content that the widget can flag.  Related articles, forum posts, blog posts, comments, users, communities, categories can all be highlighted, allowing sites to promote their own content but also any content generated by their users, in addition to connecting like-minded users to each other.

The widget comes pre-populated with advertising content, and Searchles is promoting a revenue-share model, which essentially puts to company into competition with all of the online ad networks for a shrinking pool of ad dollars.  Advertisers will be skeptical of yet another untested model, and continue to raise concern about having their ad appear next to un-vetted content.  That said, if the company’s search technology is as powerful as it claims, the potential to deliver highly relevant ads could make them very compelling.  (Another model might be for marketers to use the technology to spider their own content libraries, and then serve links to relevant content on the advertiser’s site, which would be more valuable to the user vs. just seeing an ad … )

The company is still at an early stage, but it does boast The Denver Post as a client, although I couldn’t yet find the technology implemented on the paper’s site at denverpost.com, and Mashables reported last July that The Washington Post was using its technology on its social networking pages.

Let us know what you think of the concept – and if you see the widget start to appear on any sites!

“We wanted to make your life online easier by bringing all of the things you care about to one place.

The top part of the homepage allows you to receive email updates from AOL, Yahoo Mail, Gmail directly to your Bebo homepage. Underneath that section, you will see a “changes” area that let’s you see what is going on with your AIM, Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, YouTube and, of course, your Bebo friends. On the right hand side, you will see a media recommendations area which includes all of your subscriptions and stuff we think you’ll enjoy.”

The Bebo press release refers to the new feature as a “social inbox”.

Kara Swisher reports that AOL, which owns Bebo, has additional plans to allow third-party sites to embed its various social networking services.

Whether these changes help Bebo and AOL compete with Facebook, and whether users adopt this approach or some other approach, such as OpenSocial, remains to be seen.  What’s important is that the push to allow users to unify various aspects of their social media experience will continue to accelerate usage of social media moving forward.

So what are they actually selling?  It’s a little tough to figure out, but it sounds like they are trying to deliver targeted ad impressions using a blend of behavioral tracking and something they call “network neighbors”.  They explain the technology on their privacy policy page:

““Network neighbors” are generally two or more people that visit the same website pages while surfing the Internet. For example, a network neighbor might be someone whose social networking profile page you’ve visited, or someone that visits the same website that you visit. Network neighbors are likely to share many similar interests, hobbies and other key demographic characteristics with you. Moreover, we believe that if you’re interested in a particular product or service, your network neighbors are likely to also be interested in that product or service. Therefore, by understanding who your network neighbors are and what they like, our Technology enables us to do a better job determining which online advertisements are likely to be of interest to you.”

In order to make all this work, the company needs to collect something called a PII – personally identifiable information that users “choose to” provide them.

There doesn’t seem to be a clear benefit to users for participating in Media6Degree-powered programs, and it’s unclear whether users will even be aware that they are being tracked in this way.  That said, advertisers will always be interested in more effective ways of delivering a message to interested prospects.  We’ll be tracking this start-up to see how it develops its solutions.

According to the MySpace press release, the MySpace Mobile site (m.myspace.com) receives approximately three billion worldwide page views per month from more than 10 million monthly unique users.  The service will be rolled out in beta globally.

YouTube already offers a similar service.

MySpace has posted an instructional video.  They’re not offering a lot of detail around which phones are supported other than to say “This feature is in beta and only available for certain phones.”

My Videos on MySpace Mobile website

Is your video available on mobile devices? How easy are you making it for users to share your video content with their network?