How to Make Money Onlinea blog by Sohaib Thiab

I’ve noticed in the past couple of weeks that the networks link in Facebook’s header has been removed, at 1st I thought it was a small bug and the link will be added back soon, but I was wrong, today I find this msg in my network page:

” Network Pages will be discontinued soon

Facebook will soon be removing Network Pages from the site. Please keep this in mind when communicating with others on the Wall and on the discussion board. You can use Groups to connect with the people around you.”

Is this happening for country based networks or all networks even university based networks? my guess that its happening for all networks which is strange, considering that Facebook started on the basis of networks of universities and then countries, its a bit strange for them to take them out.

Here is a screenshot of how it looks

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook networks

Well here is the story, I signed up for twitter a couple of weeks ago in hopes of seeing what everyone is talking about, with all of those posts on blogs and sites like techcrunch, rev2 and Mashable I was expecting allot more than what I found!

So what did I find? a glorified Facebook status msg. or a very simple blog with some social networking abilities, its cool that you can publish news through your mobile, but lots of other sites have the same functionality to update your profile. In their explanation video on what Twitter is on their homepage, they say its a way to get to know your friends more, but cant I do that on Facebook or Myspace? those sites give me a better idea on what my friends are doing especially on Facebook and the Newsfeeds you get.

On a side note I do realize that Twitter is a strong marketing tool if used properly, it does offer you a good way of getting quick updates about your friends and colleagues, but thats just it, and that certainly doesnt deserve all the fuss that has been going around on social media blogs about it. Sorry guys but I am not a Twitter fan!

Technorati Tags: twitter, twitter sucks, social media, techcrunch, rev2, mashable

Myspace’s new advertising program, named hypertargeting was recently launched, Myspace announced their plans for their new ad targeting system recently after the launch of Facebook’s Beacon which was covered well on Techcrunch, basically the hypertargeting system allows advertisers to target ads based on the information on the user’s profile, such as interests, occupation and other data as well as user actions.

According to Myspace, Google’s search dollars made $62 millions out of the $233 million that Myspace generated in revenue in the last quarter, this will place more strain and will be a good opportunity to see if the new hypertageting system will perform better than Google’s contextual ad system and which one is better for social networks. How well the Hypertageting system performs will also be a main indicator whether will Newscorp reach their goal of $1 Billion revenue in 2008 or not.

Social Media Ad company, lotame which specializes in serving ads for social networks and user generated content sites raised $10 million in a new round of funding, the company says that they figured out how to generate money out of social networks which are well know for their popularity and for their difficulty in selling ads on, which seems to be similar to Myspace’s Hypertargeting system.

All of this hype regarding this new method of ad targeting is exciting and might be the light at the end of the tunnel for social networks which so far have been struggling at increasing their ad revenue dollars especially after the not so popular Facebook social ads launch.

Technorati Tags: hypertargeting, myspace, facebook, social ads, social media, social networks

Reuters reported that Plaxoo, a 2nd tier social networking website which helps members keep their friends’ contact information up to date is on the market for what it is estimated to be $200 million, other reports said that Plaxo was looking for offers around $100 million.

Plaxo had a flat growth in 2006 and 2007, however it might be a logical target for other social networks, especially sites like Myspace and Facebook to acquire a 2nd tier professional social networking website, a niche that both of theese major players have been looking to and working on getting a piece of.

Plaxo claims that it has signed up over 15 million members, how many of them are active is a different story though, no specific numbers were made public by Plaxo.

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo and all possible buyers for Plaxo, besides Newscorp and Facebook ofcourse, whether thePlaxo sale is going to be the 1st sale for a social network in 2008 or not is something we will have to wait for to see.

Technorati Tags: plaxo, plaxo sale

It looks like the increased complaints regarding Facebook’s new advertising offering (Beacon) forced the company to update Beacon’s privacy policy, the clear discontent that spread through the media world surely made an effect and here is how Facebook reacted:

1. You now can say No Thanks to the option of distributing an activity you made on a website that has the Beacon code added to it, selecting no thanks will disallow this news item from being distributed anywhere on Facebook.
2. If you close the notification box or ignore it (it appears in the lower right corner), the story will be sent to Facebook but not published.

In the previuos Beacon version, the news would have been published right away on your website with no notification.

However, even with the new version, and when selecting the 1st option, will Facebook store the data anyways but not display it publicly? this is something that I can’t seem to find an answer for in Facebook’s FAQ or in other blog posts that cover this topic. Such information is worth lots of money, and while I loved the concept behind Beacon, I think its just overdoing it and mainly concentrating on the advertiser’s benefit.

Technorati Tags: facebook beacon, social ads

While I extremely liked the new concept behind Facebook’s Beacon, I can’t help but be worried about the privacy issues it raises, with more and more sites eventually use Facebook Beacon, our browsing, purchasing and general internet habits will be recorded and distributed in our news feeds, yes you can turn distributing the news feeds from Facebook Beacon off, but the data has already been sent to Facebook.

This partially answers the questions everyone has been asking, why is Facebook worth that much (15 billion)? consumer data that Facebook is gathering is and will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if not more.

Others have been raising the same concerns and have even recommended blocking facebook beacon by disabling that javascript in pages that connect to facebook beacon. Which is exactly what I am going to do.

Technorati Tags: facebook beacon, privacy issues, privacy concerns

Facebook announced the launch of its new and highly anticipated social ads platform on Nov. 5th, the new ad platform promises to offer new ways for businesses to interact with their audience, their official launch press release said: “an ad system for businesses to connect with users and target advertising to the exact audiences they want”.

So whats new in this platform? facebook broke down their offerings into 3 main parts which are:

1- Social Ads, which as far as I can see it doesn’t include anything new in terms of advertising offerings, it includes Facebook flyer’s and the sponsored news feeds part, all are advertising offers available prior to the launch of social ads. Targeting and reporting of the ads might have something new but its not apparent from those pages.

2- Business Pages, new offering as far as I can tell, it basically allows advertisers to creare their own pages on facebook, totally branded for them, the cool thing about these pages is that it allows advertisers to interact directly with their customers and fans, get direct feedback from them etc. however lots of companies have already been doing this on Myspace for example by creating a profile and customize it for their brand, whether Facebook has a new way to push users “naturally” to the advertiser’s page and encourage interaction is something we’ll have to wait and see, btw its free to create a business page, Facebook recommends that you use their social ads (news feed advertising) to promote your business page.

3- Facebook Beacon, now this is something totally new, with Facebook beacon you basically add a couple of lines of code to your website after determining which action on your website you want promoted, which include making an order, registering on the site etc. after doing so activities made by a Facebook member in your site will appear in his/her news feeds, which in turn promotes your business in a natural viral way. This is definitely going to be something interesting to watch and try!

Thats it in terms of advertising offerings, the platform however also includes Facebook Insights, which is a metrics interface for your Ad campaigns.

Myspace is also set to launch a new targeted Ad platform which as far as we can tell is going to be based on a CPC model, allows targeting of ads based on demographic, geographic and user interest categories and will have a minimum spend of $10.

Technorati Tags: Social ads, Facebook Ad platform, Myspace Ad platform

Its an exciting weekend thats for sure, after lots of speculation about Google and Myspace’s counter attack to Facebook’s growth and the huge popularity of their apps platform, and after Google wasn’t able to outbid Microsoft for a piece of Facebook, whether they weren’t able to outbid Microsoft or they weren’t that interested because they had OpenSocial up their sleeves remains unknown.

So what is OpenSocial, basically its a gathering of social networks that allows 3rd party developers to get data from these social networks and write applications for them through the use of the common API’s that will be made available for them by OpenSocial.

Myspace is far the largest social network to join the OpenSocial platform, this means that they have neglected he option of building their own platform and opted to use Google’s, which is definitely a good idea since from the looks of it, Facebook and Microsoft are forming a team against Google and the others.

Other “2nd tier social networks” joined the OpenSocial platform including Ning, Linked In, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut and others. Orkut officially announced the launch of their open platform on November 1st making it the 1st website to use and implement OpenSocial.

Techcrunch and the New York times were among the 1st websites o report the rumors about OpenSocial, which later was confirmed by Google, As Google described their new platform by saying, if Facebook is 98% open, OpenSocial will be 100% open.

Data privacy are amongst one of the issues about all of this openness, especially with the news about Facebook’s SocialAds and the targeting of ads based on profile data. Which you can bet your ass Google is planning to do something similar to with all of these networks joining OpenSocial.

Today’s question is, will Fcebook join OpenSocial? or will they take their own path and risk being viewed as an outsider, from the looks of it every other social network is joining OpenSocial, personally I don’t think Facebook will join OpenSocial simply because they already have their own, very successful platform, and there is no reason to join OpenSocial except for the reason mentioned earlier, for the sake of not being viewed as an outsider.

From a webmaster and an internet Entrepreneur’s view, the more social networks join OpenSocial and the more open their platforms are the happier I am, so far I missed the train with Facebook apps but I am planning to get on board, and with large social networks like Myspace opening, the opportunities of cashing out in their platforms are greater.

Technorati Tags: OpenSocial, Socialads, apps, open platform

According to Alexa, youtube gets more traffic than Myspace, how accurate is that? I cant bring myself to believe this kind of information, especially with the recent traffic information released by Comscore about Youtube doubling its traffic in May reaching 12.6 million visitors, while Myspace surpassed the 50 million unique visitor-mark in May, this is just another proof of how screwed up Alexa’s data is (below)

Here a few links that I came across the past few days which I found useful:

• Google’s ambition to grow Orkut, A world of ambition.
• Good tactics on getting traffic to your blog, How this Blog received 100,000 Pageviews in 14 Days.
• Good read by Jonathan Mendez on Facebook’s Gold Rush.
• Is Facebook the Google killer? Or only a time killer? Shor at SEOMoz answers.
• Having a roadtrip? plan it with tripcart, reviewed at rev2.
• Computer Geeks have a new home.
• Intel’s new digg clone Cool Software reviewed.

This post introduces the new Social Media category.

Technorati Tags: Cool Software, facebook’s gold rush, blog traffic, trip management