Recently in socialmedian Category

That's what one of our alpha users said to me by email today in reference to our Newsmaker feature on socialmedian.  Nice.  Thanks!

Just like Drudge enables anyone/anywhere to follow the stories he's clipping on any given day, that's what socialmedian enables our users to do -- at a much greater scale. 

On socialmedian you can follow people who share your interests and essentially get your news through them.  We call the people you follow your "Newsmakers."  You can easily track the stories your Newsmakers are clipping and discussing.  Best of all, you can do that across many users all in one place. 

And, of course, you can also become a Newsmaker yourself and build your own following.

As an example, here's what my own version of the drudgereport on socialmedian looks like to other users.  As you can see, there is a list of recent stories I've clipped.  If they want, my followers can just sit back and follow what I'm reading today.  (Let me do the work for them).



And then here is what it looks like for the user on their personalized homepage where they can view the aggregated clippings of their Newsmakers, in this case me and a few other people this user has chosen to follow.

Following on our very successful 1st socialmedian design contest, we are announcing today details for the 2nd socialmedian design contest: 



*** An iphone app is one of the top recent socialmedian alpha user requests.  Here's your opportunity to design the app, win some great prizes, and get great public recognition for your design talents.

Contest details:

• Anyone can participate.  Please email me to let me know you plan to participate.
  
• The contest will run until July 28, 2008.  Entries must be received no later than midnight New York time on July 28, 2008. 
  
• To enter, you will need to submit a proposed design for a socialmedian iphone application.  Your design can be submitted in any format you'd like.  JPG images preferred.  You should submit design pages for as many pages as possible to represent your design.  Submit your design by email to me.
  
• Extra credit will go to designs that optimize the socialmedian experience for the iphone interface.  We're looking for user experience design here as much as graphic design. 
  
• All of the contest entries will be featured on the socialmedian blog and on the socialmedian website.  The socialmedian team will select the winning design which will win a $1000 prize + a free iphone 3G device.  We will also have a public vote.  The winner of the public vote (if different from the winner of the socialmedian team vote) will win $500 prize + a free iphone 3G device.
• The winning designs will be featured and the winning designers will receive public accolades.
  
• The winning design will be likely be launched by socialmedian as our iphone application.  If so, the designer will be publicly acknowledged for his/her work (e.g. designed by "name").
• If you do not have a socialmedian alpha account, you can access socialmedian to participate in the design contest, by clicking on "create an account" from www.socialmedian.com and using the invite code "nearlybeta"
• Note:  also email me if you want image files for our logo, small s|m icon, etc.
  

Over the weekend we shipped socialmedian "M5", our 5th major milestone during our alpha phase.

This milestone is highly significant for a # of reasons:

1. It is the last milestone before we move from private invite-only alpha to public beta.  Our next major milestone, "M6" will mark our beta release to the general public.
2. It marks the first time that current socialmedian users are able to invite other users to check out the service.
3. The features in this release go a long way towards making socialmedian an interactive and viable social news network.

Regarding the features of this release, here are the highlights:

• Newsmakers.
  
  
   
  
• This is a feature many months in the works that we are really excited about. 
  
• Here's some quick background on the need for this feature.  On socialmedian, users join "news networks" on topics like "web 2.0" "iphone" or the "olympics" or "madonna" and then are able to discover news by following the activities of people in those networks.  That works great if you are in a small network but has the potential to get kinda noisy if you are in a large network.  For instance, with only ~3500 alpha users on socialmedian, there are already >1000 members of the "web 2.0 News Network" -- tracking the news clippings of 1000+ people can get a little overwhelming.  So, we started thinking about, "what if I wanted to be in the web 2.0 network but often only really care about what some of the members of the network are reading?  Or, just my designated Newsmakers.  And, with some people who I really trust and look up to, I may want to discover everything they are reading, not just articles relevant to the networks I belong to.
  

• That's where Newsmakers come in.  The high level concept behind Newsmakers is as follows.  One user of socialmedian can "follow" another user by clicking on the "follow" button.  Once you are following someone on socialmedian, you can get the news through them, by following what stories they clip for their followers, comment on, submit, etc.  In essence, they become your Newsmaker.
  
  Here you see what someone's mini profile looks just before I decide to "follow" them
  
  Unlike other services (e.g. Twitter or FriendFeed) in which it's generally an all-or-nothing when it comes to following another user, socialmedian adds a new filter to following your Newsmakers.  When following someone on socialmedian, you can decide whether you want to follow all of that person's updates (e.g. every time they clip a story or comment, etc.), OR only follow that person's activities as relevant to the News Networks you belong to.  In the latter, for instance, if you only wanted to see Jason Goldberg's news clippings as related to technology, you could do so, and never hear a blip about my interests in wine or music, etc.
  
  Here, you see that I can set my preferences as to how I want to follow someone.
  
  And here, once I am following someone:
  
  
  
• Here, you can view the most popular Newsmakers on socialmedian.

• New Personalized Homepage News Feed Views
  
  
  
  
• Related to the Newsmaker feature, socialmedian users can now view their personalized homepage news feed in 4 ways: 
  
• My Newsmakers (just the activities of my Newsmakers
• My Networks (the activies of all the people in my News Networks)
• Me (my activities)
• All (the most recent activities of all the people on socialmedian)
  
  
• Notifications
• Pretty basic stuff here but we just hadn't gotten around to it yet.  We have now implemented notifications to let users know when someone else is following their updates, when a story they submit is getting popular, when they have comments, etc.
  
  
• Find (and follow) Your Friends on socialmedian
• Users can quickly find which of their gmail, hotmail, yahoo, or twitter buddies are currently using socialmedian.  Or, you can just search for a user by name.  Then, you can decide if you want to follow them.
• Oh, and in a really cool feature, if you have entered your twitter or friendfeed or other links in your profile, we use the Google Social Graph API to automatically suggest people we think you'll want to follow, based on the people you already know on other sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, etc.
  
  
  
• Invite Your Friends to socialmedian
• That's right, current socialmedian users can now invite their friends to join them on socialmedian.  You can easily invite your gmail, hotmail, yahoo, and twitter buddies.  You can invite your contacts to join you on socialmedian in general and follow your updates, OR you can invite them to join a specific News Network.
• If you like socialmedian, please invite your friends to check it out!  (thanks)

Alright, that's it for now.  BUT, M6, our public beta, is just around the corner.  We're hoping to get there in the next 2 weeks.  M6 will include an all new easier way to create News Networks, and will mark the opening up of the site for anyone to join socialmedian without an invite code.

Best,

-jason & the socialmedian team.

We've been playing around with the Google Social Graph API over here at socialmedian lately and have today begun to slowly add some features which make use of this API.

What is the Social Graph API?

The Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful for developers. Developers can query this public information to offer their users dramatically streamlined "add friends" functionality and other useful features.

As this quick demo from Google shows, the API can detect how sites are connected/related and how people are connected based on public links on websites, marked up using Open standards such as XFN and FOAF, designed to express relationships online.

At socialmedian, our first use of this API is to guess at what other sites might also belong to an individual.  i.e. in the example pictured below, in my profile settings, I have told socialmedian what my Twitter account username is as well as my FriendFeed user name and based on that, using the GSG API, we are able to instantly suggest some other sites which might be mine as well.

In this case, we accurately find my blog, linkedin account, facebook account, etc., which I can easily one-click now to add to my socialmedian profile.

This is a fairly basic use of the API around site connectivity.  We'll be doing some more advanced work with the API soon around user connectivity which should be even more interesting.

In terms of our use of the API, here are some of the observations thus far:

1. We wish that more services would use the XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markups It's very simple and more developers should be made aware of this.  More developers should be made aware of the benefits of using these markups. Right now, hardly anyone bothers using these markups.  It may not be a proper comparison...but developers started using proper html tags because that gave them SEO benefit.
   
2. The response data isn't entirely clean so you need to be cautious and apply your own filters on top of it.  As an example, for one of our team members, Nishith Shah, for twitter.com/neesheeth, Social Graph API thinks that friendfeed.com/neesheeth is an unverified claiming node. However, for friendfeed.com/neesheeth, it thinks twitter.com/neesheeth is a claimed node.
3. Also, the user connections are understandably not in real time. So can't be used in situations where you need most up-to-date information
   

Apart from this, as far as implementation of social graph api is concerned.. it's pretty straightforward. Just have to get around to understanding the response. It could be confusing to start with

We wrote our first line of code on February 6, 2008.

We shipped our first alpha on March 3, 2008 and we've been adding new features just about every other day since, as we respond to feedback from our alpha users.

We add new alpha users regularly as we digest feedback from current alpha users and then bring on some more users to test the newer features with.  We had about 50 alpha users at end of March, 500 at end of April, 2300 at end of May.

There are now 3357 alpha users.  We hope to move from alpha to beta in about 4-6 weeks.  We need to finish some more features first.

Our primary vehicle for issuing alpha invites is via Twitter, where we release new invites every Tuesday.  Most of the last 2000 registrants have come via our twitter tweeted invites.

socialmedian users can create News Networks on any topic.

Our 3357 users have created 807 News Networks on topics big and small.

Some of our most recent member-created News Networks include:

the Fred Wilson News Network

SMU FOOTBALL

Tony Romo

prescription drugs and suicide

Asthma

Socialutions

Ace goes to the movies - 2008

The most popular news networks on socialmedian are:

Web 2.0 Created by: Sunil on Feb 15, 2008 Users: 1033 Sources: 87 Stories in 24 hours: 89

Tech News Created by: Nishith on Feb 15, 2008 Users: 626 Sources: 90 Stories in 24 hours: 364

social media watch Created by: Jasongoldberg on Feb 12, 2008 Users: 584 Sources: 56 Stories in 24 hours: 146

Social Networking Created by: Ajayagrawal on Feb 15, 2008 Users: 509 Sources: 30 Stories in 24 hours: 78 Join

twitter Created by: Jasongoldberg on Mar 29, 2008 Users: 351 Sources: 42 Stories in 24 hours: 17

Campaign 2008 Created by: Jasongoldberg on Feb 17, 2008 Users: 268 Sources: 80 Stories in 24 hours: 468

venture capital Created by: Jasongoldberg on Feb 22, 2008 Users: 257 Sources: 33 Stories in 24 hours: 32

apple Created by: Deepa on Feb 13, 2008 Users: 208 Sources: 35 Stories in 24 hours: 116

Arts & Entertainment Created by: Deepa on Feb 27, 2008 Users: 148 Sources: 15 Stories in 24 hours: 22

online recruiting news Created by: Jasongoldberg on Feb 17, 2008 Users: 139 Sources: 39 Stories in 24 hours: 24

Last night Fred Wilson went on a bit of a tirade on twitter about his desire for a good news aggregator for his favorite blogs.

Fred tweets:

is there a techmeme that is full of people like seth godin, jeff jarvis, dave winer, scoble, umair, calacanis, nick carr, etc? ie people about 11 hours ago from web

i want someone to build an aggregator of blogs written by people not companies about 11 hours ago from web in reply to ispivey

@stein yes, FF can do that. but i have to do that work. the beauty of techmeme is gabe does that work for me about 11 hours ago from web in reply to stein

@Shripriya i don't use a feedreader. i use techmeme, hacker news, del popular, etc so i need an aggregator for the things i want to read. about 10 hours ago from web in reply to Shripriya

@gaberivera i'm back for a brief reply to gabe. search rules. if writing a stored query like that was done over months of usage, i'd love it about 10 hours ago from web in reply to gaberivera

You can follow the discussion and responses over at summize.

Alright Fred -- you asked for it, you got.  Plus a whole lot more.

socialmedian presents the Fred Wilson News Network. 

It has a running summary of posts from Fred's favorite blogs (we started with the blogs he mentions above), with a stored continuous search on key topics. 

New blogs can be added as sources.  Only the blogs entered will be searched.  

Topics can be added/voted on/edited/deleted.

Members of the Network can clip stories to highlight them to other users, comment on them, email them, share them, etc.

Right now, anyone can join this News Network, as all socialmedian News Networks are currently "public."  In the near future, we'll also enable Fred to make this a private network (if he so desires) and only include certain people in it.

If you would like to check out Fred Wilson's News Network on socialmedian, I've opened up 50 new alpha invites for socialmedian using the code "fredwilson" -- just go to www.socialmedian.com, click on "create an account" and enter the code "fredwilson" to get started.

    

Every Tuesday we release some more alpha invites to socialmedian.

We're keeping the "iphone" invite code open for socialmedian alpha for the rest of Tuesday.
Feel free to retweet, blog about it, and forward. 150 new invites avail.

Details here.

Since it's the only thing that anyone/everyone in the tech community is paying attention to today anyway, we thought what the heck ... we'll play along too.

Get all your iphone news from more than 50 sources all in one place. 
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/iphone
Open invitation for anyone to join.  Use special invite code "iphone" to register.  100 invites available today only.

Join socialmedian for the 3rd in our series of "salon" events for startups, founders, and key topics of interest.

Founders talking to founders about founding strategies.

Who should attend?  Current startup founders and/or individuals considering founding a new startup. 

Location:  The Edgewater Hotel | 2411 Alaskan Way, Pier 67
Seattle , WA 98121

Program:

• 4-6 pm discussion
• 6-7 pm happy hour 

Topics:

• raising funds
• VC vs. angel
• the founding team
• strategic decisions
• on-shore vs. offshor dev models
• other topics tbd

MUST REGISTER IN ORDER TO ATTEND -- REGISTER HERE