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Was Facebook’s greatest move to skip usernames? Posted in Main on January 18th, 2010 by Pingdom On most social networks, you have to create a username when you sign up. Not only that, that username has to be unique, no duplicates allowed. Facebook on the other hand just takes your real name, no username, and it doesn’t matter if there’s someone already on the site with the same name as yours. There are probably hundreds of factors that add up to explain Facebook’s success, but the question is if using real names instead of usernames isn’t one of the key features that have helped Facebook grow as large as it has. We think there are three main reasons why using real names and not requiring usernames has helped Facebook grow bigger than any other social network on the planet.

Gartner recently published a list of five new predictions about “social software” that show mix of optimism and pessimism about whether these tools will be embraced by businesses. The most grandiose prediction is the first — that by 2014, social networking services will replace email as the primary communication tool for 20 percent of business users.

Gartner also argues that the distinction between email and social networks is disappearing, with social networks adding email-like capabilities while email adds social data.

Behind Facebook's privacy debacle The site screwed up, big-time. But is this the beginning of the end, or just the cost of social networking? By Mary Elizabeth Williams iStockphoto/Salon Since making the profile information of its 400 million users more, oh, let's call it "accessible," last month, the 6-year-old social networking site has felt the wrath of its populace.

Google is trying to push more media sharing and status update features into Gmail as soon as this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. Gmail users would be able to see a stream of status updates from friends and photos and videos shared by them through Picasa and YouTube. Although Facebook has come to dominate the social networking space with 400 million users, Gmail contacts represent a formidable latent social network with hundreds or thousands of e-mails and chats between friends. While Facebook could support weak links in your broader social network, Gmail could strengthen your closest relationships.

I spoke to Blippy CEO Philip Kaplan earlier tonight. Blippy is a service that lets users publish everything they buy with their credit cards. Crazy right? Who’d want to do that? Well, apparently a lot do. The company has let in 2,500 people so far. Those 2,500 people are publishing $200,000 worth of purchases a day to their friends. It’s less than a month old and they’ve tracked $3.8 million in transactions already, with an average transaction size of $46.

January 24, 2010 by Ben Parr View commentsView Comments What the Web of Tomorrow Will Look Like: 4 Big Trends to Watch

1. The Web Will Be Accessible Anywhere

Evri Acquires Radar Networks In Semantic Search Consolidation 10 Comments Share6 Buzz it by Erick Schonfeld on Mar 11, 2010 After shopping itself around to all the major search engines, Radar Networks finally found a buyer in another semantic search startup. Today, Evri is announcing that it will be acquiring Radar Networks, along with its core technical team and its main product, Twine. Rumors surfaced yesterday on ReadWriteWeb that Evri was being acquired, but that is not the case. Evri is the acquirer. I spoke with both CEOs this morning. They would not disclose the terms of the deal, but it is safe to assume that it was largely an equity-based transaction. Both Evri and Radar Networks share Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital as their largest shareholder. Radar has raised $24 million in total capital, while Evri has raised $8 million. (At least that is what has been publicly disclosed. Paul Allen has poured much more money into Evri almost single-handedly, perhaps even more than Radar raised). Radar was unable to raise more during the recession and kept pushing out the release of its next product, T2, an ambitious project to create a semantic index of the Web. Using this semantic index, T2 can do a better job understanding what each Web page it indexes is about.

Earlier this month social software designer Adrian Chan offered up a proposal for what he called Action Streams.

Action streams would not only share status/activity update meta-data but also permit updates to function as actions. For example, an invitation update posted in twitter could be accepted in Buzz. The vision for action streams thus involves a distributed and decentralized ecosystem of coupled action posts, rendered by third party stream clients and within participating social networks.

The Activity Streams discussion is participated in by engineers from companies like Google, Facebook, Nokia, Yahoo and others. Chris Messina, who joined Google in January, is one of the key voices, and semantic web builder Monica Keller, who left MySpace for Facebook last month, appears to be taking an even more active role in the effort than she had before.

The current Social Networking space is a mess. We describe the problems both technical, pragmatic and philosophical of current social netoworks, and present a solution deployable immediately that works in current browsers: an open global secure network - The Social Web.In this 10 min Video we start with Robert Scoble getting thrown of Facebook, how this lead to the Data Portability movement, its failings, and the practical solution: the Social Web. This is part of a collection on the theme.

How old is the average Twitter or Facebook user? What about all the other social network sites, like MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on? How is age distributed across the millions and millions of social network users out there?

Evri Ties the Knot with Twine — Twine CEO Comments and Analysis March 11th, 2010  Share Today I am pleased to announce that my company, Radar Networks, and its flagship product, Twine, have been acquired by Evri. TechCrunch broke the story here. This acquisition consolidates the two leading providers of semantic discovery and search. It is also the culmination of my long and challenging venture to pioneer the adoption of the consumer Semantic Web.

At the time of beta launch and for almost six months after, Twine was still very much a work in progress. Fortunately our users and the press were fairly forgiving as we worked through evolving the GUI and feature set from what was initially just slightly better than an alpha site to the highly refined and graphical UI we have today. During these early days of Twine.com we were fortunate to have a devoted user-base and this became a thriving community of power-users who really helped us to refine the product and develop great content within it.

These losses meant we could no longer create compelling content or to manage the Twine community. So we put Twine.com on auto-pilot and let the traffic fall off. While painful to watch, this at least had the benefit of reducing the pressure to scale the system and support it under load, giving us time to focus all our energy on getting T2 finished and raising more funds.

A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on