Keeping Up With Your Social Networks

It’s an issue that faces even those of us who are only active in a few social networks. I can’t really imagine how difficult it must be for people who seriously use multiple networks, especially if it’s for business purposes.

One of my students saw the post about Yoono on CNET. She, of course, posted the link in our class community--good going, Zoe! I haven’t found a good Twitter app for my Yahoo! page that displays exactly the way I want it, so I was interested.

I finally got around to checking it out. I downloaded the Firefox app and it happily showed up, on my Yahoo! opening page (image 1), my Gmail page (image 2), and wherever I go from them (image 3)--which is essentially everywhere! It has a good search bar; that’s how I found the Washington Post article. I’d be perfectly happy with just having it on my opening page but I can’t find any settings that let me control the placement. It does let me control which social networks I include, and I choose just Facebook and Twitter. I actually would like to include two Facebook and two Twitter accounts; don’t know whether I can do that.


One thing that I find amusing. It shoves my Gmail box over so far that the AdWords ads are lost. When I’m composing, I see links to the AdWords ads, but not the ads themselves. I have to guess that Google won’t put up with this if Yoono becomes widely used!

I agree with some of the issues in the Washington Post article; especially about the amount of real estate it occupies on a page. You can minimize it easily (that minimizes it everywhere, not just on the one page) or you can drag to make the space smaller. In that case, it only shows one or two posts, and I don’t like that. So it does take up space; otherwise it seems to work fine. I searched, made a Tweet, checked out my Facebook page—all worked fine. It’s very busy this morning. Many of the people I follow are at South by Southwest and they are socializing away!

The only other thing I’d point out is that Yoono comes from a firm that appears to be French, with a cosmopolitan management team. Occasionally you run into information you might like to read, but it’s in French (and my French is not up to it!). I see their blog in English, so I don’t have any complaints about the amount of support they provide. And, oh yes, it’s a free app.

This is a good example of the social media space maturing. I’ve tried other aggregation sites, and I like this better than others because I can get what I want on my existing home page. I don’t want to lose the news feeds that are there.

My personal suggestions would be choice of formats. I’d like to be able to open a page that shows a half-dozen or so social networks in essentially the same format that my news and blog feeds show up on the Yahoo! opening page. Maybe that’s just familiarity speaking. Yoonoo works, and I think it’s something I’m going to keep around.

OpenSocial Attracts "Friends"

When Google’s OpenSocial debuted in November of last year it attracted a lot of attention. It was positioned as Google’s answer to Facebook’s open platform. When I wrote about the social graph and related apps in February I noted that Facebook had over 15,000 apps that members could use on Facebook or sites. When I looked today, it had over 20,000. The industry quickly realized that Facebook was onto something when it opened its platform to developers so they could write these apps. Google was not to be left behind.

Just before OpenSocial debuted in November, Michael Arrington wrote a post on TechCrunch that proved to be prophetic:

Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open - allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.
In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.

Given the incredible success of the Facebook open platform, it was big news on Tuesday when Yahoo! and MySpace opted to join Google’s initiative, forming the OpenSocial Foundation. Several smaller networks had already signed on.

A lot of this is written for developers who have to do the work of creating the apps. It isn’t DIY for most of us. What does it actually mean to marketers? Charlene Li of Forrester has a graphic that portrays it well.
She calls it ‘relationship mapping” and explains that the technology will help us keep track of all our important relationships. Now we have them in separate places. The social networking APIs will help us to organize them in a single repository. According to Google, developers “can create apps with OpenSocial that access a social network's friends and update feeds.” In plain terms, organize them all in one place and keep them up to date. I haven’t seen any mention of Charlene’s vision that they could monitor frequency of use and regulate access, but Facebook’s open platform and OpenSocial are first steps. Who knows what will follow?

And that’s what marketers need to think about. This suggests both convenience and loss of privacy for the user. It also makes it possible that one of your network “friends” could use an app that accesses data in a way that you didn’t/wouldn’t approve. However, the fact that you are connected on the network gives her app access to your data.

I suggest that there are two issues. The first is that this particular horse is already out of the barn. User agreements like Facebooks already make that sort of data sharing possible. The second is that most users, even young sophisticates, don’t seem to really understand that. What will they say when they do?
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