MySpace has taken a bold step and put a large quantity of bulk user data up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis.

This user data is intended for crunching by everyone from academic researchers to music industry information scientists. Will people buy the data and make interesting use of it? Will MySpace users be ok with that? Is this something Facebook and Twitter ought to do? The MySpace announcement raises a number of interesting questions.

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The 22 sets of data being made available are cheap. Prices range from $10 for raw dumps from the MySpace API to $300 for everything broken out by latitude and longitude. Subsequently derived data sets can be put on sale by InfoChimps users as well, with a revenue split.

Analysis coming from the data could include things like music trends per zipcode, popular URLs being shared, etc.

MySpace is generally thought of as a social network on the decline, but if it is able to position itself as the place to do music still then its hundreds of millions of users could remain engaged. Will data scientists want this data, though? Time will tell, but MySpace has long done cooler things with data than competitors Facebook and Twitter and people haven’t gotten terribly excited about it yet.

Bulk user data has tremendous analytical potential and both Facebook and Twitter have thrown the breaks on 3rd parties offering up their user data more than once. We covered InfoChimps’ offering of bulk Twitter data in depth this Fall, but the marketplace quietly removed that data after Twitter asked them to “wait” for a second time.

In February we profiled Pete Warden (The Man Who Looked Into Facebook’s Soul), a developer who planned on putting a huge pile of Facebook user data online for academic analysis. As we wrote in that article:

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public.

Days later Facebook contacted Warden days later and asked him to hold off on release of that data as well.

Why is this kind of big data interesting? This rational may be less applicable in the case of MySpace given its focus on music, or it may be more applicable given the allegedly poorer user demographics on the site compared to Facebook, but here’s how I explained my interest in big social network data analysis in general, as part of a discussion about an excellent special report on big data in the Economist this month.

I think in big data there lies a lot of hidden patterns that represent both opportunities for action and for reflection. At RWW we’re working on trying to find ways to mine data to find news first (we’ve got some interesting methods employed already) and personally, I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I’m hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real-estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we’ll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today.

What will we see come out of MySpace’s bulk data? What could we see come from Facebook and Twitter data if only they would let people get their hands on it? Time will tell.

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When MySpace announced earlier this week that they had now established themselves as the number one social networking application on the Android platform and the number three download overall, needless to say, we were a bit shocked. After all, (with no offense to MySpace intended), there are more Facebook users than MySpace users in the world. It’s just a simple fact.

So how did this happen? Is the MySpace Android app that much better than Facebook’s? Are Android users more interested in MySpace for some reason? Are they younger than other mobile users and therefore choosing MySpace over Facebook?

As it turns out, the truth is that measuring the mobile downloads of official applications may not be mean anything when it comes to measuring the success of social networking sites.

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After scratching our heads for a good ten minutes, we decided to reach out to a mobile expert for help. Peter Farago of mobile analytics firm Flurry had a few ideas, all of which seem more than plausible.

Theory #1: Third-Party Apps

On the Android platform, there are over ten third-party applications which allow social networking users access to Facebook outside of the Facebook official app or mobile website. This means that thousands upon thousands of Facebook users are downloading other Facebook applications which are not being counted towards the official app’s total.

Meanwhile, there is only one third-party MySpace application, so most of the downloads from MySpace users are going to the official app.

Theory #2: Facebook Pre-Installs

The Facebook application is pre-installed on the Droid, the most popular Android handset. It’s highly likely that those pre-installed copies of the Facebook app are not being counted as downloads on the Android marketplace.

In addition, the Facebook application is included on the Android 2.0 mobile platform, alongside other popular apps like Amazon and Pandora. So again, that’s another potential area where Facebook application downloads are not being counted.

Theory #3: Mobile Web Use

Another theory, (this one ours not Farago’s), is that some Facebook and MySpace users don’t access the sites via apps – they do so via the customized mobile websites. Facebook, for example, has two mobile alternatives to the official app – m.facebook.com and touch.facebook.com. For personal reasons, some Android owners may actually prefer accessing Facebook via these sites instead of by way of the app itself – an app which, unlike its iPhone counterpart, points to the mobile website when you interact with some of its functions, a regular complaint among Android users. In fact, many users actually consider the MySpace app to be the more polished of the two.

Theory #4: All of the Above

MySpace claims that its popularity on the Android is due to “deep integration with the Android platform” and, in their press release, the company mentions the multiple MySpace homescreen widgets for things like voice-enabled updates and photo uploads. The release also notes that the MySpace user base is highly engaged, with 70% of the mobile app users checking in three or more times per day.

However, these are probably not the major reasons contributing to the app’s popularity on the charts, where it now ranks #3 overall. It’s more likely that the combination of factors described above have more to do with where MySpace stands today on Android. Mystery solved.

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Get Satisfaction, the popular online customer service company, just announced that it is bringing its service to Facebook fan pages. This new service, the Facebook Social Engagement Hub, will allow companies that have a presence on Facebook to easily answer questions from their customers on Facebook. The Social Engagement Hub recreates the Get Satisfaction experience on Facebook and allows users to ask questions about products or make suggestion for new features. One key feature here is that the discussion on Facebook and the Get Satisfaction topic pages are synchronized, so that questions that get answered on a company’s topic page on Get Satisfaction also appear on Facebook and vice versa.

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Liberating Content from Facebook

The new Social Engagement Hub on Facebook will cost Get Satisfaction customers an additional $99 per month. As Get Satisfaction’s co-founder Lane Becker told us yesterday, however, this expense could easily be worth it for these companies, as users on Facebook tend to be very active on these fan pages and really want to interact with these companies and brands on the social networking service.

As Lane also noted, conversations that happen around a brand in Facebook tend to be trapped in this silo. Thanks to the synchronization between the two platforms, however, brands can now take this content and make it useful outside of Facebook as well. Another problem for brands that Get Satisfaction is trying to solve here is the simple fact that conversations on Facebook only have a very short lifespan. Get Satsifaction now allows companies to capture these conversations.

Overall, this looks like a very smart way for brands to interact with their customers on Facebook and to streamline their social media customer service efforts.

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Facebook looks to be partnering with event marketplace Eventbrite, a move may have been foreshadowed by recent design changes on the site. The announcement of a partnership was first noticed by a Facebook user who sent in a screenshot to TechCrunch this morning.

Facebook’s recent redesign has showed a much more public events page, a feature that would go along with selling tickets to events quite perfectly.

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The text of the announcement, which was hosted at facebook.eventbrite.com but has since been removed, read as follows:

Collect money for your event with Eventbrite

Eventbrite is partnering with Facebook to enable you to collect money for your event. Your attendees pay with credit card and Eventbrite collects the money on your behalf and sends you a check when your event is over. We charge a small service fee for every ticket sold. 5.5% + $.99c, which attendees pay, costing you nothing.

Eventbrite has helped event organizers around the world sell over 10 million tickets. We’re excited to help you sell yours and put some delightful cash in your pocket.

Until recently, the Facebook events page was primarily focused on one thing – the events you had specifically been invited to. That’s no longer the case. Now, clicking on the “Events” link in the left column brings you to a page that lists not only all the events you’re invited to, but any public events that any of your friends are attending.

This seems like a definite shift in focus toward becoming more of a go-to place for finding what’s going on around you instead of just keeping track of invites. And if companies can get in on the game and start offering events that users can purchase tickets for through Facebook, then we’re talking.

Eventbrite had already made it easy for its users to share events they created on the Eventbrite website on Facebook. This announcement would not only be sharing events, but allowing Facebook users to buy tickets through the site.

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Testifying before a congressional hearing in late February, Mike Altschul with the Wireless Association was blunt: Federal mobile phone privacy policy is undefined and the privacy guidelines for location-based services written in 2008 are obsolete.

The hearing on consumer privacy was the fifth in a series that seeks to evaluate and eventually legislate location-based privacy issues. It comes none too soon. The recent flood of location based apps and services has significantly shifted liabilities from mobile carriers to app developers and end-users. As Congressman and hearing chair Bobby Rush of Illinois said, Yesterday there was Facebook, and in the not-too-distant future we will be encountering something more akin to a “Placebook.”

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While the Wireless Association works on its 2010 guidelines, and while Congress deliberates, what’s going on with all our geolocation privacy rights? Do we have a right to control what location-based advertisers do with our info once they have it? Do we have a right to ensure that law enforcement and government agencies don’t abuse our easily obtained mobile data streams? Are our children safe? What does social science research say about all these changes?

These are the many questions that this congressional hearing sought to address. Here’s a breakdown:

What does the privacy research tell us?

Lorrie Cranor, direct of CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory at Carnegie Melon University testified about her research into how end user’s react to the implication of privacy loss due to location-based technologies. She also reported on her survey of the most popular applications and systems.

“In August 2009 we evaluated 89 location sharing applications and systems to determine the types of privacy protections each offered,” she said. “Overall, we found that most of these applications provided fairly limited privacy controls and about a third of them did not provide readily accessible privacy policies on their websites. We reviewed the websites for these applications again in February 2010 and found similar results for the 84 services still in existence at that time.”

Who will have access to our information?

Last Tuesday we reported in our Ads with Eyes post about a report by the Center for Democracy and Technology on advertising abuses that mobile end-users may face. The center is also concerned about abuses of law enforcement and government agencies related to their use of location-based information.

At last week’s hearing John B. Morris, general counsel for the center presented the case for why the Electronic Communications Privacy Act should be updated to protect location information from inappropriate disclosure to government. He highlighted how recent court proceedings and local government surveillance protocols are creating contradictory rulings, unclear jurisdictions and generally snowballing into a fundamental lack of privacy protection for U.S. citizens.

What’s the latest wording of potential new laws and guidelines?

The preliminary language of almost all future U.S. laws begin in hearings such as these. In his testimony, Tony Bernard, VP of Useful Networks, sought to outline some of the most essential elements of this new language.

“In order to derive an end user’s location from any source, the end user must be presented with notice of how, when and by whom location will be used,” he said. Additionally, said Altschul, senior VP and general counsel for the Wireless Association, “Notice must be provided in plain, easily understood language. It must not be misleading, and if combined with other terms or conditions, the portion pertaining to the location-based service must be conspicuous.”

How will kids and young adults be affected?

Anne Collier, Co-Director, ConnectSafely.org testified that new technologies are not as much of a threat to children as we may believe, and the real issue is the quality of parenting and supervision that kids are getting. As far as kids’ potential for future use of location based services, she presented startling data.

“U.S. teens now send or receive an average of 3,146 text messages a month and 9- to 12-year-olds 1,146, according to the latest figures from Nielsen,” she said. “For them, a text isn’t like a phone call, it’s part of a conversation as well as of the ongoing flow (or seemingly 24/7 drama) of school life. But texting is only one of young people’s social tools. There is as yet no data on teens’ mobile social mapping or LBS use, but we know that more than 65 million, or about a third, of Facebook users of all ages currently access the social site through their mobile devices.”

What comes next? At the end of the hearing, Rush said, “In closing, let me state clearly, for the record, and especially for those interested consumer groups, industries, and government regulators who have been monitoring our series of hearings that, with the information we’ll obtain from today’s hearing, we have now learned enough to take the next major step.”

What should that next step be? Are you ready for more clearly defined location-based privacy protections? How can companies who are currently building applications and services keep themselves out of the courts? Do we really need more regulation to resolve this? What do you think?

Hands photo by Monika Leon. D.C. photo by Barb Ballard.
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We’ve talked about design a lot recently, highlighting the nuances of thoughtful placement and treatment of various elements of a web page. Today I stumbled onto an interesting blog post by Ryan Spoon of Polaris Venture Partners about how small changes or additions, specifically in design, can at times make a huge difference for a product on the Web. In the example Spoon references, Facebook added a post log-out message to their homepage which for some users will suggest they look into using Facebook mobile – a small change that is proving useful for the social media powerhouse.

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Now when users log out of Facebook and are redirected to the homepage, an updated graphic directs their attention to the service’s mobile offerings. One message says “Leaving? Try Facebook on Your Mobile,” and another reads “Headed out? Stay connected: Visit facebook.com on your mobile phone.” It’s a subtle and easily implemented change from the default image, but in terms of visibility for their mobile efforts, its huge.

Previously the main promotion for Facebook’s mobile services came in the form of a small icon and text below the “Connect With Friends” section in the lower right portion of the site. The new promotion is wrangling up users who may or may not have known about the mobile capabilities of Facebook at the exact moment they might need to use the service: when they logout and leave their computer.

Some new data from the blog All Facebook suggests that the site’s new promotion has had a significant impact on use of its iPhone application. During the month of February, daily active users of the app hovered between 13 million and 14 million, but last week this figure leaped 20% to over 16.5 million. It is unclear, however, if a similar uptake in text alerts was seen from the promotion, but it may be fair to assume that it did. This represents a significant boost for Facebook’s mobile options, but it still falls far short of the site’s most used application, FarmVille, which has roughly 30 million daily active users.

Whether or not a 2 million user spike in mobile usage is considered a marketing success for such a large community as Facebook, this still serves as a great example for startups of how small tweaks can make a large difference in the usage of your services. One thing of interest about this data is that it says to me that Facebook mobile, which I would consider a main feature, had gone relatively unnoticed by the majority of Facebook users. Or they just needed a reminder that it existed.

This is a reminder that for the most popular web services, the majority of the users are not like its creators; they are not web savvy geeks. We learned this a few weeks ago with the whole “Facebook login” debacle when wayward Facebook users were directed to an article we had written about Facebook Connect after trying to use Google search to login. What this means is that no matter how obvious you think something is, there will always be a portion of your audience that may be oblivious to it.

In most cases, its better to not constantly bombard users with promotions of secondary services; it can be annoying and it clutters up design. This creates a dilemma for promoting services without taking up precious real-estate for main features, one which Facebook solved with their post log-out promotion. But aside from promoting services, small changes to colors, sizes, and styles for things like call-to-action buttons can make a big difference.

Personally, I was surprised that so many people actually log out of Facebook manually. I always stay logged in on my home computers – I even had to look around to see where the “log out” button was. But once again, the lesson learned here is that not all Facebook users are like me. It also could say that healthy reminders that aren’t overdone can be helpful in promoting services. Don’t be afraid to make a small change and see how it affects your numbers, you could end up learning something useful about your users from it.

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Social media data company Rapleaf recently investigated the profiles of users who “fanned” the iPad on Facebook in order to get a better sense of the type of users who are interested in Apple’s upcoming slate device. After analyzing the top three Facebook pages and their respective fanbases, Rapleaf discovered that there were some common themes among these users. The prospective iPad buyers on Facebook are young – much younger than the overall Facebook population, in fact.

They’re also fairly social, with nearly a third of the fans having over 300 friends. And finally, iPad fans are also very interested in other pop culture activities and themes including various celebs, brands and internet memes.

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To make these determinations, Rapleaf looked at the top three iPad fan pages on Facebook. At the time of their study, these were: The iPad (#1) (69,293 fans), The iPad (#2) (23,637 fans) and The iPad (#3)  (5,009 fans).

There weren’t any major variations in gender differences among the iPad fans. Although the second page skewed more female and the third page skewed more male, the overall numbers balanced out to a fairly even split.

However, when Rapleaf delved into the ages of the fans, they discovered that iPad fans were a lot younger than your typical Facebook user. While 61% of the U.S. Facebook market is under 35, nearly 50% of the iPad fans were between 18 and 25. You can see the differences between the pages and Facebook in general (U.S. only) plotted on the chart here.

Apple iPad fans are also rather social, with 33% having over 300 friends on Facebook and 8% with more than 500 friends. Additionally, perhaps due to their age, a lot of the iPad fans were fans of other pop culture themes like favorite celebs, brands and memes. By analyzing the top 100 other fan pages of these users, Rapleaf discovered interests like Starbucks, Megan Fox, Coca-Cola, Michael Jackson, YouTube, Will Smith, Twilight, Lady Gaga, pizza, and other various Facebook “memes” like “Pants on the Ground,” random laughter, “I need a vacation” and “I really hate slow computers,” (the last being a problem the iPad hopes to solve, incidentally).

iPad for the Young?

What does this tell us about the market for Apple’s new device? Mainly that it has a lot of youth appeal, apparently. While some have predicted the iPad is the sort of computer that your “mom” will use – implying that the iPad is a sort of computer for non-computer users – it appears that “mom” isn’t actually a top demographic among the iPad’s Facebook fans. But then again, you can’t read too much into that finding – after all, “mom” (the older Facebook user) may not even know how to fan things on Facebook yet or she may simply not be interested in doing so. But the study does at least solidify that there is quite a bit of iPad interest out there among the youngest tech users, something that bodes well for the device’s adoption.

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It seems the 17-year-old truant who created Chatroulette has applied for a visa.

The youngster, be he lucky or brilliant, has indicated he might want to transition to the American scene at some time in the near future. With all the media attention he and his service have received and the explosion of traffic – and monetization potential – on his site, his application further opens the can of worms we’ve been discussing tonight: Where’s the best place to raise your startup?

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In December 2009, Chatroulette had 500 users. Today, just four months later, the site sees 1.5 million daily visitors. That statistic alone is enough to inspire investors to beat down the door of its creator, Russian high school student Andrey Ternovskiy.

But what’s much more interesting to many is the mechanics of the site itself. “It’s video 4chan. Unbeatable formula,” said Muhammad Saleem, considered by many to be an excellent authority on engineering virality. Others have called it “brilliant,” “the purest form” of the Internet and its userbase, and “a great way to kill time,” one of the most common uses of the social web.

I’ve frequently described it as a box of game pieces with no rules. Users are invited to create any kind of experience they choose given a simple set of constraints. It’s inherently viral, addictive, imaginative and essentially human.

Here’s the rub: The site is currently unfinanced and non-commercial. The site’s creator, a teenaged school kid, has been placed at the crux of nationalistic, capitalistic and technological debates by being asked to choose between Russian financing and a yellow brick road to Silicon Valley. According to one site, the Russian investors involved are seeking to “break the American hegemony in cyberspace – an ambitious plan, particularly as the United States is home to many of the market leaders in the Internet economy.

“The combined value of Google, Microsoft and Facebook amounts to roughly $500 billion, or about a third of the Russian economy’s annual output. So if Russia – which has more than 50 million Internet users and boasts one of the fastest-growing markets – hopes to catch up, then it will need to keep talents like Ternovskiy at home.”

The Russian investors who have contacted Ternovskiy also invest in Facebook and Zynga; clearly, they have an eye for social virality and profit and see a great deal of potential in Chatroulette. But Ternovskiy, a longtime hacker, dreams of founding a Silicon Valley startup of his own.

Will this young man reinforce the American idiom of Silicon Valley by relocating his seemingly overnight success to the Bay Area? Or will he prove that the startup economy is truly becoming global by accepting Russian financing and remaining in north Moscow?

A more interesting question: Can Ternovskiy sustain this wild success? Or has he simply become lucky with Chatroulette? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

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I’m a big fan of maxims and technology. It should be no surprise, then, that Melvin Kranzbergs six laws of technology really speak to me. Perhaps my favorite is, “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” There have always been – and will always be – winners and losers. Lately I have been wondering if there have been too many of the latter and not enough of the former.

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Guest author Phil Simon is an independent technology consultant and a dynamic public speaker for hire. He focuses on the intersection of business and technology. Phil is the author of two books: Why New Systems Fail and The Next Wave of Technologies. He maintains a blog, writes for a number of technology media outlets, and hosts the podcast Technology Today.

What specifically am I talking about? I’m talking about how there are only a few companies and industries actually creating jobs these days – and how they’re certainly in the driver’s seat. In this post, I’ll take a realistic (as opposed to moralistic) look at the power that technology companies are wielding these days vis-à-vis job creation.

Supply and Demand at Work

Consider the recent announcement by Facebook to create 200 jobs in Austin, Texas. However, there’s a hitch. The company’s U.S. expansion is contingent upon Austin officials approving considerable tax breaks.

Some might question why local governments would essentially bid for jobs. It’s really quite simple: supply and demand. In this case, the demand for jobs is quite high while the supply is not. What’s more, from Austin’s perspective, the costs of lost tax revenues need to be viewed against the self-explanatory benefits of newly created jobs.

Google in North Carolina

With that in mind, it’s hard to blame Facebook or Austin city officials for trying to make a deal. In fact, they are hardly the first parties to work out a sweetheart deal. I can cite a number of recent examples of organizations that have played would-be suitors against each other for the purposes of procuring the lowest corporate taxes.

Perhaps the most publicized recent case involved Google and Research Park, North Carolina. In that very piece, Rick Smith writes about the complicated negotiations that Google executives held with public officials about job creation – and the subsequent public backlash. Smith rightly asks two questions: Should North Carolina government officials accede to Google’s demands? And what’s the alternative?

Technology’s Role in Unemployment

So there’s a fundamental imbalance between the supply and demand of jobs. Let’s not pretend that this has never happened before. However, let’s compare The Great Recession with previous economic crises. What’s different this time? Two things.

First, technology has made jobs more portable, less tied to an individual community. It’s not as if Procter & Gamble in 1932 could make contemporary arguments in an attempt to bargain for tax concessions from local government. Employees had to work near other employees; they weren’t virtual.

Now, my plumber still needs to be local but he is increasingly the exception to the rule. High-tech companies such as Facebook and Google can take their operations virtually anywhere around the globe. What’s more, without getting all political, U.S. tax laws are hardly as employer-friendly as that of other countries that are equally if not more desperate for job creation. Don’t think that tech companies are not acutely aware of these facts when they make local U.S. communities in essence bid for job, a trend that will continue.

Second, technology seems to be destroying jobs much faster than it is creating others. German economist Joseph Schumpeter coined a term for this phenomenon in 1942: creative destruction. No doubt that has endured for both its relevance and its wonderful dichotomy.

Technology has always been a disruptive force, but has it become a net negative with respect to job creation? Journalists certainly come to mind. Also, what about the downward pressure that technology exerts on wages? What about the emergence of “The Disposable Worker“. As Peter Coy, Michelle Conlin and Moira Herbst argue in a recent BusinessWeek article, more and more people are forced to work as independent contractors, absent the benefits of W-2 – e.g., health benefits, sick time, etc.

Business Realities and the Swinging Pendulum

Let’s not kid ourselves here. No economic system is perfect. With capitalism, you have to take the fleas with the dog. Publicly traded corporations such as Google have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders to maximize profits. As for privately held companies such as Facebook, VCs investing millions of dollars surely want to see a ROI sooner rather than later.

Bottom line: We can’t blame any organization for minimizing expenses and seeking the lowest taxes, the biggest loopholes. Current economic conditions allow companies to be extremely picky with regard to hiring and establishing new offices. The pendulum has swung squarely to their side.

The Downside of the Internet and Globalization

The question becomes: Is the pendulum permanently stuck on the side of employers? In other words, have globalization, the widespread adoption of broadband, and collaborative tools collectively put too much power in the hands of employers? If so, then are employers unjustly wielding their power to extort onerous terms from communities desperate for job creation?

I know enough about economics and history to rarely use the term “permanently.” To me, it’s the acme of foolishness. I’d also argue, however, that it’s equally foolish to take a Pollyannaish view of technology. Returning to Kranzberg for a moment, technology always creates winners and losers. For the foreseeable future at least, it appears as if employers will fall into the former group.</P

Photo by dreamguy.
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For entrepreneurs trying to form a startup, one of the first challenges they face that persists throughout the businesses life is how to find and keep talented partners and employees. From finding that first co-founder to finding the prolific programmers to fill your ranks later down the line, talent acquisition is always a major step in any business. Just look at some of the deals that have gone down in the Valley; Facebook didn’t buy FriendFeed for their technology, that deal was mostly about getting FriendFeed’s talented employees on the Facebook team.

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A new book from author David Russo, 17 Rules Successful Companies Use to Attract and Keep Top Talent: Why Engaged Employees Are Your Greatest Sustainable Advantage, seeks to make this process more clear for businesses. Russo is the CEO of Eno River Associates, Inc., which is a consulting service that helps business executives build better team relationships. Their portfolio of clients includes American Express, Johnson & Johnson, and the CIA. With his new book, Russo outlines the key strategies he has learned over the years as a consultant and human resources executive that has helped him and others create winning teams.

The book doesn’t waste any time getting into its 17 rules; after a brief introduction the entirety of the book consists of one chapter per rule. The rules cover a broad base of topics, including the more straightforward rule #4, “Provide Ample and Appropriate Resources,” to the more abstract rule #12, “Understand Human Capital.” One of the key rules that sticks out to me is #3, “Cultivate Leadership, Not Management, and Know the Difference!”

“Whereas managers administrate, leaders have the power to influence, to motivate, even inspire, and those are distinctly different traits,” writes Russo. “Indeed, true leadership is the ability to display attributes that make people want to follow.”

Russo points out that leaders need to have passion, vision, and energy, as well as recognize that each employee has value to the success of the business. He likens this value to a tight end in a football game running “a crisp pattern” and distracting the defense despite knowing before the play that he’s not going to be the ball carrier.

Another rule which will likely strike a chord with the startup culture is #10, “Make Room for Fun in the Workplace (Nurture Lightheatedness/Levity).” Anyone who has seen the popular workplace movie “Office Space” knows what a bland work environment can do to employees spirits, but I don’t think we have to worry about startups not having enough fun on the job.

Aside from being passionate about the job they’re doing, most startup employees are probably used to everyday being “casual Friday” and taking a brain break in a game room. Granted, not every experience is like this, but we all know that many startups are a very relaxed environment, which Russo says is very important for attracting skilled employees and keeping them happy.

Other important rules Russo includes on his list include knowing how and when to “cheerlead,” acknowledging and rewarding efforts and contributions, and the lastly, telling the truth. While this book isn’t aimed directly at startups, young entrepreneurs looking to lead their team to success should certainly take a look at this book.

One of reasons I would suggest it is that at times, young entrepreneurs who have little or no workplace experience are suddenly thrust into a CEO role. If your company takes off, you might be in charge of a lot of people very quickly, and this book will certainly help keep them happy.

Disclosure: A review copy of 17 Rules was provided to ReadWriteWeb by Pearson Education, Inc.

Photo by Flickr user madebytess.

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The popularity of Twitter has produced a number of clones in China, just as there are Facebook clones. Some of China’s Twitter clones have been closed down by the Chinese government, but some have survived. We take a look at both cases in this post. We also assess Twitter’s chances of success in China, should it ever be freed from the ‘Great Firewall of China.’

Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu were some of the first Twitter clones to become successful in China. However
all three – plus Twitter itself – were blocked by the Chinese government in July 2009, due to their usage during the uprisings in Ürümqi.

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According to an AFP article, Chinese authorities blamed online agitators for helping to stoke violence in that region. Prior to being shut down, Fanfou had been dubbed "China’s Twitter" and had almost reached 1 million registered users by the end of June 2009.

An October 2009 report by China Daily noted that Fanfou was founded in July 2007 by Wang Xing, a young entrepreneur who also founded China’s current most popular social network Renren (formally known as Xiaonei). Both Renren and Fanfou were almost carbon copies of their U.S. equivalent services – Facebook and Twitter respectively.

Weibo Rises to Take Fanfou’s Place

Since the closure of Twitter, Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu, other services have risen to take their place. Taotao (owned by the company that produces popular IM service QQ) and
Zuosa.com are two examples.

However it is
Weibo that has emerged to become the biggest micro-blogging service in China. It’s owned by Sina.com, a big portal company in China.

Weibo is very much like Twitter, in that it allows users to post short messages 140 Chinese characters or less via the Web, SMS or MMS. Although according to Chinese Internet expert and Beijing resident Kaiser Kuo, in Chinese 140 characters can actually produce quite a long message.

The major difference between Weibo and Twitter, according to Kuo, is that Weibo is censored. Or in the parlance of Chinese Internet users, it is "harmonized."

Sina’s Weibo probably has a much greater chance of surviving than its counterparts like Twitter and Fanfou, because it knows how to self-censor. Meng Bo, deputy editor-in-chief of Sina.com and project manager of Sina Weibo, told China Daily in October that "Sina is playing by the rules as they are laid down, with strict word filtering in operation."

According to Meng, there are two teams of staff "keeping close watch to ensure there is no vulgar content or anything that violates the rules.”

Would Twitter Succeed in China Anyway?

China’s surviving micro-blogging services are tightly controlled by the censorship climate in China.

However even if Twitter became available again in China, would it take off with mainstream Chinese Internet users? Kaiser Kuo thinks that it wouldn’t, because of the popularity of currently operational services like Weibo and Taotao. He remarked that although there would be an uptake in the number of users on Twitter, if it was ever to be made available again, Weibo and others will have gained too much momentum by then.

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There’s good reason tweets are limited to 140 characters – the microblogging social network was developed specifically with mobile in mind and 140 characters is the size limit for a text message. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that Twitter has experienced a 347% jump since a year ago in people accessing the site via mobile browser.

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According to a comScore report, both Twitter and Facebook have experienced significant increases in mobile browser access over the past year.

“Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web,” said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile, in the company’s press release. “Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile.”

Just over 30% of smartphone users access social networking sites using a mobile browser, comScore reports, up from 22% just a year ago. Access to Facebook using a mobile browser grew 112% while Twitter grew a whopping 347%.

What do these numbers mean in terms of actual number of visitors? According to comScore, Facebook saw 25.1 million mobile users in January 2010, Myspace had 11.4 million and Twitter 4.7 million. As the report points out, “these figures do not include access of the social networking services by the nearly 6 million mobile phone owners who do so exclusively through mobile applications.”

As smartphones continue to grow in popularity, social networking services will get more and more traffic from mobile use, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see mobile access overtake other methods of access at some point in the future.

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The leading social networking site in China, renren.com, started out as a blatant Facebook clone – but it now has tens of millions of users. Despite obvious similarities to Facebook, there is one significant difference from the U.S. in how Renren and other Chinese SNS are used. The bread and butter of these sites is social games using virtual items. Indeed, Farmville originated in China!

In this first post of a series, we outline the most popular social network sites in China. In follow-up posts, we’ll look at Twitter clones, online video, and censorship. This series is based on a discussion I had with Kaiser Kuo, a Beijing-based expert on China’s Internet.

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Kaiser Kuo is a Chinese-American who lives in Beijing. He currently works for one of China’s leading online video services, Youku.com, as a consultant on International Business. Previously he was Group Director, Digital Strategy at Ogilvy & Mather China.

There are 3 social networking sites that are clearly in the lead in China, according to Kaiser Kuo.

Renren.com is the leading social network. It began as a Facebook clone called Xiaonei.com – which means ‘on campus’ in Chinese. In August 2009 it changed its name to Renren, which means ‘everybody.’ Renren had 70 million registered users at that point. The site is owned by Oak Pacific Interactive and has had over $400M pumped into it by investors Softbank.

The site was founded in December 2005, shortly after Facebook began to ramp up. Its founder Wang Xing later founded Fanfou, a popular Twitter clone (see our next post in this series).

Xiaonei.com was literally a Facebook clone when it started, sporting the same shade of blue and the same layout. ReadWriteWeb guest writer Gang Lu wrote on this blog in June 2008 that Xiaonei.com "was like a simplified version of Facebook in Chinese when it was first launched." He noted that it had "the same layout, same color scheme and even a very similar logo," which he said "made people wonder if there was an official connection with Facebook."

Kaixin001.com is another very popular social network. Kaiser said that its users are mostly "white collar middle class" and typically come from a "first tier city."

Kaiser noted that Kaixin001.com is extremely popular among people who work for multinational companies, ad agencies and other white collar companies. Accordingly, the site is valuable because of its relatively wealthy user base.

The third social network that is very popular in China is 51.com, which Kaiser said is mostly used by people who live in "lower tier cities" and even rural areas. He noted that it has a "lower brow offering."

Each of these three hugely popular social networks in China has its own niche; from the mainstream Renren, to the more prestigious Kaixin001, to the populist 51.com.

In our next post in this series, we check out China’s Twitter clones.

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Millions of people around the world don’t know what a browser is, they don’t know the difference between a search bar and an address bar and they sure don’t follow the finer points of Google’s many little changes it makes to their search results. They go to the Google and they type in Facebook login. Then they click on the links that show up, sometimes with very humorous results.

Google today introduced a new feature that will let mainstream users get search results to hold still and remain where they expect them to be. It’s called Stars and it’s essentially pinning a link permanently to the top of a search results page for a certain query.

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Above: Probably not how this feature will generally be used.

When one of our blog posts showed up high in a Google search last month for “Facebook login” we saw hundreds of thousands of confused people stream into our site and post typo-ridden comments like “I WANT MY FAFEBOOK!” Many of them couldn’t tell that they were visiting a blog post about Facebook, and with Facebook Connect login, and not Facebook.com itself. Even though we said as much in big bold letters after the first few thousand of them.

Thousands more people visited the site to gawk at those users and their comments. A common response was for web designers to say “we must not be serving mainstream users very well if they are confused in a situation like this.”

Enter features like Google Stars. It’s a great idea. No dumbing-down the internet for those lucky relative few of us who do know how to use it, just some additional options for those who are still beginning to learn. Expect to see more developments like this as regular web use becomes a more common experience for non technical people. This may be an example of a best-case solution.

Update: Several people in comments have said they don’t think Stars are going to work for mainstream users, either. What do you think?

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