TechCrunch is reporting that MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary. The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet.

A mockup of how the data sharing will look in action with Twitter is shown above. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including
*Publicly available basic profile information,
*MySpace photos,
*MySpaceTV videos, and
*friend networks, available to partners via their (previously internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth.

Twitter could use the data to recommend other Twitter users who are your MySpace friends (luckily I have only a few friends on Myspace). I think this a good move in the right direction of the concept of data portability. It could be win/win/win for all participating parties.

I would imagine not too many people on myspace are currently on twitter (but they could come racing over if myspace promotes this properly). I hope twitter is ready for such an influx of new users and dramatic increase on their network.

Twitter needs to be careful about allowing too many changes to occur on thier site. They sure as heck don’t want to take on the feel of myspace.

While myspace beats facebook to the punch with this there are currently ways that you can use your facebook credentials and share some of your data outside of facebook. As an example you can login to a 3rd party site with your Facebook credentials, and a user account is created on the 3rd party site with your Facebook information. Look at 83degrees as an example.

Technorati Tags: twitter, myspace

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Breaking: Facebook and 49 Attorney Generals Join Forces: As part of an ongoing joint effort with the Attorneys General of 49 states and DC around online safety, Facebook has agreed to continue and enhance a number of protections that it has deployed on the site centered around inappropriate conduct and content.

According to Chris Kelly, Facebook chief privacy officer: “Building a safe and trusted online experience has been part of Facebook from its outset. We are proud to join 49 states and the District of Columbia in affirming our commitment to these principles and to continue improving our technology and policy solutions to keep kids safer on Facebook. The Attorneys General have shown great leadership in helping to address the critical issue of Internet safety and we commend them for continuing to set high standards for all players in the online arena.”

The following is a list of safety features and privacy initiatives that Facebook will continue and enhance under the agreement:
- Age and identity identification tools

- Automatic warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an unknown adult

- Restricting the ability of users to change their listed ages

- Aggressive response to remove inappropriate content and groups from the site

- Safety and privacy guidelines that third party vendors and developers are required to adhere to as part of Facebook’s Terms of Service

- Immediate severance of links to pornographic websites

- Immediate removal of Facebook Groups dedicated to incest, pedophilia, cyber-bullying and other topics that violate Facebook’s
Terms of Services

- Immediate investigation of Facebook users who violate the Terms of Service, and expulsion of those individuals that violate the safety or privacy of other users

- Prominent display of privacy information and safety tips

- Require users under 18 to affirm they have read Facebook’s safety tips when they sign up

- Review models for abuse reporting and perform a test using the New Jersey Attorney General’s abuse reporting icon

Technorati Tags: facebook

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Cha… Cha… Changes are coming very soon to facebook profiles. Facebook has been talking about making some significant changes to the profile pages and how they look and feel and interact with applications. Up until a few hours ago we were sort of in the dark as to what it will entail. Facebook has just released the details for what we can expect.

Later in May developers will have access to a beta sandbox with the new profile in order to test and design your applications. The changes that they will be implementing will be pretty expansive. This is going to require some work on updating existing applications on facebook so that they continue to behave properly in the new environment.

The viral carrier mechanisms continue to evolve and the new mini-feed will present some challenges for apps. We will provide some more insights after we have had some time to further digest the implications of the massive changes that are coming our way. The bottom line here is that there are both new challenges and opportunities for applications.

The new facebook design integration guide is available here.

The word from facebook:
Here are some of the most important changes and new features. Please remember that exact details may still change in the coming weeks, but we want to get you as much info as we can now to help you prepare.

New Feed Stories and Templates: With the new design, the Feed tab is front-and-center on users’ profiles. Showing and sharing interesting and relevant Feed stories is going to continue to be a primary way users express themselves. Users will continue to control what appears and doesn’t appear in their Feed. To make Feed stories even better, we’re enabling three sizes of stories – one line, short, and full. Applications can offer stories in any of these sizes (users will approve short and full stories as they are published). Short stories will use templates, and full stories will use FBML.

Publisher: On the new Feed and Wall tabs, adding content to your own Feed or to a friend’s Feed or Wall will be a main focus of the experience. The Publisher allows users to add content such as text or photos, or rich content from any application such as music, videos, images, links, and more. The Publisher is a major upgrade to Wall attachments, and we think it will be integral to how users use Facebook.

Application Tabs: Users will start with 5 tabs on their profiles by default (Feed, Wall, Info, Photos, “Boxes”) and can add tabs from their favorite applications to better represent themselves. Users can add as many application tabs as they want –- up to 6 tabs can appear (space-permitting) and additional tabs will be included in a More dropdown. An application tab is similar to a canvas page, and should directly represent the user. We encourage you to have your applications offer rich ways for users to express themselves so they’ll put your application on its own tab.

Profile Boxes: Existing wide and narrow profile boxes will now appear on a new Boxes tab that every user can enable/disable on their profile. In addition, we’re supporting a new profile box type that can appear on the left-hand side of the user’s profile across the Feed, Wall, and Info tabs. These new boxes use standard templates and are up to 250 pixels in height.

Application Info Sections: The new Info tab will allow users to express themselves in a more structured way than before. This includes standard Facebook profile data such as contact information, user interests, and school/work histories. Additionally, users can add structured information with application info sections. An application info section is a list of text and/or images provided by an application.Application Info Sections.

What’s Next: Over the next two weeks, we are going to update you with more details on issues like the new application installation flow and other Platform Changes, as well as additions to Platform Policy. Later this month, we are going to open up a beta site for you to build and test out changes to your applications before we make these changes live for our collective users.

TechCrunch also has a few thoughts on the facebook changes.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook applications

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BIG THINK has arrived on FaceReviews.

Every week we will be posting a BIG THINK of The Week. The purpose of these BIG THINK posts will be to share some creative insights that will get you thinking about what you do online and challenge conventional thinking. We want to spark some thinking in your mind that can help you and your business.

We want you to start thinking BIG THINK.

BIG THINK: How are you thinking of creating Social Equity for Your Brand?

Social Equity Branding is the Future that is Here Now! People are talking about you, your company, your products, your services, your good points, your bad points and everything in between. The velocity of these conversations are happening faster than ever in the history of the world.

I used to say that everyone has a soapbox when blogging & podcasting were gaining popularity 2-4 years ago. Now everyone has a particle accelerator as the tool sets evolve and are starting to include more social networks where people have thousands of connections.

The social equity & capitol that can be gained or lost in this day and age are huge. The velocity, magnitude & speed at which they can turn are dramatically increased. Facebook, Myspace, twitter, blogs, video streaming, friendfeed and the like are allowing people to become power nodes of influence. These nodes can easily accelerate the velocity of traditional WOMA.

Do you have any idea as to what your social equity is for your brand online? How do you create social brand equity? You had better start thinking about these issues and putting together a strategy and specific tactics to implement.

Social Equity for Your Brand: BIG THINK Discovery Questions
Where are my customers gathering?
Where are my potential customers gathering?
How can we listen more effectively?
How can we interact quickly and visibly?
Are we willing to take our lumps?
Are we willing to engage and invest in social equity branding?
What budget can we allocate to social equity branding?
Who will spearhead the social equity engagement?
What media types will we use to increase our social equity? (social applications, blog outreach, twitter, social networks, video, streaming, events, etc.)
How can we bring real value for our brand and put it into the ecosystems for our fans/evangelists to build more social capitol & equity? No BS!
What tools will we need to build social brand equity?

Tell us what YOU think!

Technorati Tags: bigthink, big think, social equity, social brand equity, social equity branding

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TwitterFone
Rating:

We are testing a new apha version of a service called TwitterFone and this is exactly the service I had told someone 3 months ago that I wanted to see built off of the Twitter API. (I am still waiting for video: anyone at Seesmic or kyte.tv listening?)

TwitterFone allows you to easily send audio messages to twitter using voice. You simply dial the TwitterFone number and leave your message. TwitterFone will then automatically translate the spoken word message into text and post it to twitter for you automatically along with a hyperlink to listen to the audio message. We found the translation of spoken word to text to be nearly 100% accurate which is highly impressive.

People can see the tweet and follow a hyperlink to listen to the actual message in your voice. The use cases for this application are many, let your imagination run wild. Sometimes you need to convey to your followers the emotion that comes through best with the inflections from your voice. The audio quality was very good. The solution is simple, straightforward and has a clean UI. Once people use TwitterFone we suspect that they will become fans.

How could the service improve? It would be nice if there were an archive page of all the TwitterFone tweets that are done by a user and if you could search a particular twitter user and see a list of their audio messages. It would also be nice if you could see how many times your message was listened to and if people could respond directly with an audio response. The monetization model for this service is easy.

Video Demo of TwitterFone in Action

Translated Text that Was Auto-posted to Twitter. See message here

Hyperlink from tweet takes people here to listen and also read the message.

Technorati Tags: twitter, twitterfone

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Find Cheap Gas on Facebook
Cheap Gas! Rating:

Want to find the cheapest gas close by and save a few bucks? Then you should try the cheap gas application on facebook. The app simply takes your Zip Code that you have registered and automatically shows you the locations & prices for the cheapest gas. It breaks these down by regular unleaded and premium. Cheap Gas! uses the Motor Trend database for pricing data.

I now know that by simply driving 2 exits north of my house I can save almost 20 cents per gallon. Now that is useful! If you click on the gas station location it pops up a Google map with the location of the gas stations. Nice. The app is very minimalist and really has no other features other than to invite your friends.

So if you are looking to save some cash on expensive gasoline use this Cheap Gas facebook application.

Features coming soon according to the developers:
* A friend tab to see the gas prices near them
* An attachment page showing the lowest gas prices by grade for attaching to walls and messages.

Cheap gasoline prices by location and grade


Google Map locations of the Cheap Gas Stations

Technorati Tags: facebook, cheap gas

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The executive team at Facebook continues to gain strength, depth and experience. Facebook has just landed former Vice President of Global Communications & Public Affairs from Google Elliot Schrage.

He will be serving at facebook in the capacity of VP of Communications & Corporate Policy. He brings a wealth of experience and depth to the facebook team.

He handled the hot potato of the Google/China issue with flying colors by most accounts during his tenure at Google. While at Google he was responsible for the company’s public-facing communications, including media relations, policy strategy and stakeholder outreach, as well as internal communications.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has welcomed Elliot to the team with a memo to facebook employees. The full letter can be seen at AllThingsDigital as reported by Kara Swisher.

Here is a quick excerpt:
“In this role, he will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do. The goal here is to help people understand how the internet can strengthen people’s relationships. Elliot will direct our efforts to work with users, media, governments and other entities around the world to ensure that Facebook’s policies are transparent, responsive, effective and are recognized as being those things.”

“This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness, and honest internal communications.”

Having someone with his level of experience will help facebook avoid some of the PR setbacks that have happened in the past. You can read between the lines here and see that facebook is really focused on international growth. Dealing with that international growth and messaging to multiple cultures will keep him hopping. Navigation of international waters with a social networking site that challenges many cultures concepts might prove challenging. Seems like they have hired the right person for the job.

I am surprised Google has not taken him off the executives page yet. You can read more about Elliot Schrage there.

Update: Techcrunch also has a post up.

Technorati Tags: facebook, google

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Twitter from Your Google Homepage: BeTwittered Rating:

While doing some research we came across a lightweight widget that will easily allow you to drop a widget onto your iGoogle homepage and send and receive twitter updates easily.

BeTwittered is simple, easy to use and self explanatory. They could improve this tool by adding more robust functionality. The one feature that is missing that really makes it a challenge is the “reply” feature. It is not included. Also it does not have any of the tabbed navigation that many people are used to on twitter.

If you want a quick way to twitter directly from your iGoogle homepage then this is the tool for you. You can get it on Google Here. Or try here as an alternate.

BeTwittered on your iGoogle homepage.

Technorati Tags: twitter, google

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Twitter Solves a Murder… Not in the real world, but hey… they used it on CSI. From the show, as they are talking about Twitter: “They don’t expect privacy, they value openness.” “Whatever.”

It’s all about openness and sharing with Twitter. The fact that it is on CSI and it talks about how people use Twitter as another way of communication; is yet another indicator that Twitter is moving more out of the geek circles and into the mainstream culture.

What people are saying is important. Listening to what people are saying spreads knowledge & value. Interacting with peers, friends, clients, brands, & businesses adds value and enrichment to people’s live in many different ways.

Twitter is a social ecosystem that is in its relative infancy, but the implications will be large (yes, even for businesses) in the very near future. People are talking about you, your products and brands on Twitter. You just don’t know it yet. Don’t stand on the sidelines.

This is the person that was “Killed” on CSI if you look at the video closely.

As always, you can follow me on twitter.
[tags]twitter, communication, CSI[/twitter]

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Microsoft has just launched a Live Messenger Application on facebook. Rating:

Windows Live Messenger Facebook App Stinks: I would expect a better solution from Microsoft. It just goes to show how difficult it can be for very sophisticated companies that try to shoehorn a depreciated solution into facebook.

I can see who else has added the facebook windows messenger app and if they are online. I can message people from their profile. I should be able to chat with anyone easily and seamlessly.

This windows live messenger app does not facilitate communication. It seems to make it as difficult as possible. It does not appear that I can have multiple chats going on simultaneously.

The app is clunky and makes me sign in repeatedly & enter a Kaptcha every time I want to start a new chat with someone else. This is pointless, cumbersome and will never fly especially since facebook has launched a much more sophisticated and integrated IM solution that is painless to use.

Friends who have also installed the app that I can chat with. Yippee! Let’s look at this objectively. I can chat with 3 people if i use this app or over 1000 with facebooks solution.

Have to enter a Kaptcha every time I want to start a new conversation. Very Bad!

I am not sure what Microsoft was thinking when they hatched this idea. You can watch a video of the Microsoft Windows Live Team guys telling you how and why they designed and built this app.

I think they just need to punt and start fresh with an idea that leverages the social graph outside of facebook.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, facebook, windows messenger

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