8apps

I am trying the 8apps set of lightweight online tools. Handshake is the SNS and is billed as

... the place to meet your next friend, programmer, project manager, accountant, interface designer and more. By adding someone as a contact here, you can collaborate online in 8apps. Handshake is social networking with purpose.

Radar (aka spider) charts are popular in Japan, and it is interesting to see how they are being used here.

This could hit a little closer to home than I would wish. If I disappear suddenly from Handshake, you'll know a lightweight SNS does not necessarily need to be anodyne.

mixi marketing

I never noticed this before. Mixi has embedded video ads. The screenshot is from my mixi page. Unless you are a member of mixi, you won't be able to see it. It shows a Japanese version of the cool (but evidently, in the U.S. context, teeth-grindingly irritating) Apple guy vs the dweeb Windows guy. For reference you can see several of this series here. You don't need to understand Japanese to know exactly what's being said.

addenda
* mari diary
* finding japan
* finding japan mashup of a US and Japanese version of one of the commercials
* click opera

wiki spam

Today, I saw my first in-the-wild example of wiki spam. It's difficult to know what to call this particular and no doubt increasingly common excrescence. It seems the progression is spam, spim, splog; thus spiki?. Dunno 'bout that one; spwiki doesn't roll off the tongue, and swiki has a reputable meaning.

Anyway, YASNS is a wiki devoted to making a timeline of developments in major SNS.

The wiki syntax is to use square brackets to link to other wiki pages. One cynical individual, attempting to harness the wiki's Google juice, used the convention but instead of linking to something useful and informative, linked to an obscure and irrelevant website which has absolutely nothing to do with the stated aim of the wiki and breaks the social contract of the wiki community. Interestingly, the linked-to site is the public face of some real web2.0 hepcats, so they wouldn't have done something so annoying and counterproductive themselves. Perhaps they have stupid friends or clever enemies.

Another individual created an entry for an SNS and accompanied it with a link to a personal resume. Again, probably some malefactor set on making the unwitting linkee appear to be cynical and venal.

Japan SNS mixi MySpace

Tonight I was visited by someone with an ISP in the hinterlands of Japan (i.e. not in Tokyo; sorry Osaka, but you know it's true) running a Japanese-language OS. This person was searching for an "invitation to myspace." Mixi, the dominant Japan SNS, requires an invitation from a member (easily gamed, but it suggests the ethos). Inferring from that, my visitor thought one would need an invitation to join the free-for-all SNS where, among other non-sentient members, hamburgers and bottled water vie to join Tom as one of my friends. East is east, and . . .

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mixi ID market

mixi is the dominant Japan SNS. It is an invitation-only system. There has been a market for invitations on, for example, Yahoo! Auctions. Today, I ran across a site that sells existing IDs. How 'bout that for some guerilla marketing? You buy the ID of someone - this example is representative as well as being offered for the highest price - whose interests are "adult." This person participates in 42 communities, has 957 "friends" who are 100% male, and has been accessed 43k times. Presumably this guy's virtual identity has some sort of authority. You throw this weight behind a new product or service or retail outlet, whatever. Wal Mart already has their bloggers bought and paid for, but for a small producer of porn this may be the way to go.

follow up:
- evidently Japan has a growing (illegal) market in internet ids link

mixi identity

Sometimes entries here refer to "mixi" and sometimes "identity." Earlier this week, I received visits from people using Google (mainly) to search for "mixi identity." I didn't understand this sudden interest until I read fukumimi's (Shin Fukushige) post.
addenda
podcast

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InternetAddressBook

After reading about Internet Address Book on mashable.com and learning it's focused on SNS and it's not U.S.-based, I decided to try it out.

One creates an account via email. Then using this account one lays claim to email addresses, urls, and membership in various SNS. This information can be supplemented by additional identifying details provided to the service. This screenshot shows the outcome of a few minutes work. I need to use a screenshot because I could not find or the service does not provide each user with a personal URL, which surprises me.

At this barebones level, except for the lack of a personal URL, this service is similar to ClaimID, Ziggs, and ZoomInfo. It's what the companies do with this voluntary self-identification that is interesting.

ClaimID focuses on disambiguation - there is emphasis on identifying information on the web that may appear to pertain to you but is actually about someone with the same name or slight variant. The service is free. At this point ClaimID is more about maintaining consistency with evolving non-proprietary digital identity frameworks than about collecting information about users that they can monetize. Along with attentiontrust, I reckon the tide of history is with them, but that's another story.

Ziggs and ZoomInfo are all about collecting information about people and then monetizing the data.

Ziggs focuses on helping you maintain and publicize a professional profile. If you want to be found by a potential client or headhunter, this is the way to go. The basic service is free. The paid service is essentially SEO for your name/personal brand. You pay Ziggs five dollars a month, and they pay Google and Overture. For me, this would be a pure arbitrage with the five dollars going straight to Ziggs (assuming a combination of low-cost keywords and/or zero clickthroughs) with no cost of deliver of service. I wonder how it works for someone who wants to build a personal brand in a category with very expensive keywords such as these. Maybe Ziggs is best for getting the word out about John Doe but not necessarily connecting him to his expertise in, say mesothelioma.

Like Ziggs, ZoomInfo focuses on helping you publicize yourself; additionally, it encourages you to place yourself in the context of your professional network. The basic service is free. The paid service is the mirror image of Ziggs. ZoomInfo monetizes by mining the data and selling enhanced search to people who want to find professionals, i.e. recruiters. One quick indication of this recruiter focus can be seen by the message they place near where you input you email address: "An email address is necessary to . . . allow you to be contacted by recruiters." It has a different starting point than LinkedIn (which seems to have a better way of collecting social network information than does ZoomInfo) but it seems to end up in the same place - a database of resumes with all sorts of self-identified links between people and companies access to which can be sold to recruiters. It's mining the relationship network that allows these sites to offer something a clever recruiter to offer value-added service, finding the individuals who have not placed their resumes on a job listing board and are therefore available to one and all.

InternetAddressBook is a Europe-based service and therefore does not have implicit within it assumptions that U.S.-based services often have; for example, everyone resides in one of the 50 states. An earlier-generation address-book site like Bigfoot has a U.S. bias, and is barely workable without identifying a state of residence. The service is geared toward collecting information about users of SNS. The service is free. As more people become more heavily involved in a variety of SNS, information that links one individual with multiple SNS -- MySpace, Yahoo-Flickr-del.icio.us, Friendster, LinkedIn, the many smaller SNS gaining traction outside of the US such as Orkut and Bebo -- will be valuable. I am still having trouble figuring out monetization for non-professional SNS. This service which is a degree removed is even harder for me to understand.

Japan's big SNS is mixi. It's a closed, invitation-only site and does not fit in well with any of the above. Even if someone explicitly ties themselves to a mixi account it is not broadly useful. Non-members of mixi cannot see even the most basic information, and members of mixi can only see the information that the user has chosen to reveal to each class of user - friend, friend of a friend, other (i.e. mixi members who have not been specifically identified as falling in one of the first two categories). This link http://mixi.jp/show_friend.pl?id=863706 should show my profile to you if you are a member of mixi, but show you only a generic landing page if you are not. I think this is a very good thing and believe there is room for more SNS like mixi: invitation only, default level of privacy is high, not indexed by search engines. People can have a public identity accessible via Google as well as a less-public (private would certainly be an overstatement) persona.

As for me, I am thinking everything I do on the internet is recorded; that's for sure. Lately I have been wondering if Japan has as many CCTV as other places, but just keeps quiet about it.

follow up:
* after the above was written, I found the dedicated member url - example
* recruiter's perspective on ZoomInfo Vs. LinkedIn

Charlene Li meetup in Tokyo

DRAFT NOTES

I attended a short presentation by Charlene Li of Forrester Research on 12 Sep 2006. Her presentation touched on some of the implications of a four-tier taxonomy of social-network based sites:
- couch potato
- tagger
- critic
- creator

As you would expect, she was succinct and featured many ideas per minute. She also seemed to know all of the social-computing players and A-listers well. My biggest takeaway was that she was surprised by the range and vigor of communication on SNS and bulletin boards; she ascribes this to a greater use of pseudonyms than she expected.

Following on from Ms. Li's observations about (pseudo)anonymity, one guy told me about a couple of people he knows who post to mixi under the mistaken impression that they are doing so in a manner that will not harm themselves; his view is that it is only the collective forebearance of readers like himself that prevent these people from having their false sense of anonymity shattered when they get fired for disrespecting their bosses/co-workers; in this respect mixi and 2ch are very different, and he expects this issue to surface with painful results for some before people wise up.

Her ideas and the conversations following the presentation included, but were by no means limited to (wish I could have overheard everything), and in no particular order:
* mixi (IPO 14 Sept)
* digg - ability to subscribe to individual aggregators, who themselves are subscribers to aggregators, who . . . Evidently, the value in Digg is not on the front page but can be obtained by selecting one or more layers of information filtering/gatekeepers
* youtube - limiting clips to 10 mins; co-operative attitude toward the content owners
* myspace - aquavit water has 16,000 friends?
* technorati/del.icio.us - tagging as a value-creating activity
* revver - taking copyright very (too?) seriously
* facebook - perhaps diluting core value proposition
* netscape - perhaps growing organically would be better than hiring away diggers; the netscape user base may be more interested in bargain shopping (and aren't we all?) than xbox or linux
* firefox japanize extension
* vox - aiming for an older group of users than livejournal
* Japan's privacy protection law
* BMW - made engaging, short car videos with high production values prior to the birth of youtube; underwrites TED presentations
* rikai
* online identity - openID, claimID
* 2ch - see wikipedia
* Amazon's Mechanical Turk and google's image-matching game
* 100shiki
* bargain shopping sites - wish I had written the recommended site down; searching on "bargain and shopping" via algorithms (Google) or recommendations/tags (del.icio.us, furl, etc) is a descent into the netherworld of the internet
***I will try to flesh these notes out a bit more later . . . but don't hold your breath.

Follow up:
A few days later, Ms Li posted a comment on the mixi IPO.

Lessons for mixi from Facebook?

A US academic reports on recent developments at Facebook. It appears that Facebook has taken investor money, and this is forcing it to expand, and more aggressively monetize, its user base. Facebook was previously exclusively for people with .edu email addresses. With this restriction relaxed, user numbers will grow, but the main appeal of the site for its original and most enthusiastic users will fade; the backlash appears imminent. I wonder if there is a lesson in here for mixi, which will IPO on the 14th of this month. It's an invitation-only system at present, but one could imagine the same financial pressures leading it to implement policies which end up killing the goose that lays golden eggs.

For more on Asian SNS.