This morning, InsideFacebook reports that “Facebook has added two new undocumented functions to its API Test Console this evening that appear to reference an as-yet-unreleased feature called “Friend Lists.”” They continue: “The addition of Friend Lists means one can now much more flexibly and powerfully manage privacy settings per List. Work friends see one portion of your profile, personal friends see another, best friends see yet another.”
In addition, a few minutes ago, my friend (and Praized Media partner) Sylvain sends me this relationships chart, part of an effort to standardize the definition of “friend”. He found the reference to it on a Google group that discusses Social Network Portability (see my post about the web becoming a giant word of mouth machine to understand the impact of social network portability).
The relationships chart tries to capture all types of relationships that can exist between two persons. Examples include lifePartnerOf, neighborOf, worksWith and wouldLikeToKnow.
What it means: 6 weeks ago, I had forecasted that Facebook would modify and add layers to their definition of “friend”. It seems like this is coming sooner than later. This could represent a serious threat to Linkedin. Moreover, many smart people on the world wide web’s edge are thinking about social network interoperability. That’s why I strongly believe “social” will become part of the fabric of the web. Better follow these conversations now if you want to hook yourself early on with these new standards.
(via TechCrunch)
Seattle-based Farecast, a startup that launched about 18 months ago to focus on predicting flight prices and guaranteeing users against increases, just expanded to help people find deals on hotel rooms as well.
The hotels area of the site helps users see prices based on a number of travel search engines (Orbitz, CheapTickets and ReserveTravel). All the results are shown on a map along with price and other basic information.
But the service also looks at each of the hotels to let you know if it’s priced attractively or not. For most hotels, the star rating isn’t enough to tell if the price is too high or low v. local competition. Over the long run market forces even the playing field, but a traveler unfamiliar with a specific hotel can (and often is) overcharged occasionally. Farecast will help you understand if you are getting a deal or not on that specific hotel.
What it means: I love these services that crack open what I call “black-box” industries and give the power back to the users. Farecast does it for flights and hotels. Zillow does it for real estate. I can think of at least a dozen other industries that could be disrupted that way.
(seen in Mediapost’s OnlineMediaDaily this morning)
In order to succeed in the long run, content producers must acknowledge the importance of blogs, portals, and aggregators in connecting with their audiences, according to a new JupiterResearch report, “Networked Media: Thriving In An Intermediated World.” The report points out, for example, that 57% of 18- to-24-year-old Internet users get their news from portals versus 21% from cable news sites–and online users now trust portals nearly as much as traditional news media.
“To thrive on the Web, news sites must become more network-focused and aggregate content from other sources while distributing their own content through intermediaries,” said David Schatsky, president of JupiterResearch. “By paying closer attention to the tendencies of the end user, these sites will be able to evolve and meet the needs of a wider online audience.” “Not only must content producers embrace intermediaries to serve their own audiences and reach out to new ones” explained JupiterResearch analyst Barry Parr, but “they should exploit opportunities to become intermediaries for their core audiences.”
What it means: I think the recommendation above applies to most (if not all) content producers. First, they need to become curators of content (aggregation within editorial guidelines) in addition to creators of content (dixit Ted Shelton). Second, as the web is much more fragmented than the offline world, it is critical to atomize the content to distribute it to other web sites to increase the total reach.
The day started with Robert Scoble discussing how “social graph-based search” (Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook, etc.) is going to beat Google and other search engines.
Scott Karp summarizes Robert’s points:
- Humans can judge what’s missing from an aggregation of information on a topic
- The key to effective human filtering is leveraging a “fabric of trusted individuals”/”people who are trusted and credible”
- By connecting these trusted people through a social network, you can leverage that resulting social graph to validate trust and create network effects
Then, Karl Martino added:
(…) there is a growing role for “Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web”. Our friends, our families, our communities. Not just machines and algorithms. My favorite and fellow bloggers, Slashdot, Salon, the home page of the NYTimes, Philly Future, Shelley Powers, Scott himself, my news reader subscriptions, are all trusted humans, or representations of trusted humans, filtering the Web for me. So it
still comes down to trust - What organizations do we trust? What systems do we trust? What communities do we trust? What people do we trust?
What it means: I believe the web is slowly transforming itself into a big word of mouth machine. Social will eventually be embedded directly in the fabric of the world wide web. Media companies have an advantage today as they are a trusted source but those that resist the “socialization” of the web will be left behind. In the directory business, there is a saying that word of mouth is the biggest competitor out there. I think it can become the biggest opportunity in local search.
