DanLin.net » Social Networks

Mixed Tapes are Cool Again

dan.lin — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:40:49 +0000

Remember those mix tapes your buddies use to make you? Ok, maybe if you are under 25 years old you probably haven’t even seen a cassette in real life. But take my word for it, it was cool at one point in time.

Muxtape is bringing back some retro-chic to the online music sharing community. It allows you to make a MP3 online ‘muxtape’ up to 12 songs at 10 MBytes each. The design and execution is dead simple but some how very appealing. It looks like someone made it in their bedroom when they were grounded by their parents. Its design is also clearly Apple inspired with its iphone-esque interface but i suspect it does not work on an iphone since the music is played via a Flash media player embedded on the site.

Take a look for yourself and I’ll be waiting to hear your very own muxtape.

Quick review of Driftr.com

dan.lin — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:36:33 +0000

Driftr.com is a new traveler centric social networking site. I just got my invite last night and gave it a quick spin around the block.

The alpha release has a nice and polished Web 2.0 design with plenty of AJAX. As it is still a alpha release, many of the features are still not enabled. The site lets you log the time, place and details of the trips you have taken and organizes them via a visual map display or chronological drop down list. You can upload photos directly to driftr.com or link your flickr photos to their site via the flickr API.

Driftr allows you to enter places you stayed as well as places you ate at which I guess will eventually allow them to build a database of user reviews to compete with Yelp.com.

The current implementation is very basic but it has promise assuming more useful features are added. A few that come to mind are trip planning and peer recommendations. I’ve got a few more invites so let me know if you want to try it out.

Screen shots

Good one Rupert

dan.lin — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 21:08:56 +0000

MySpace today (actually the time is dated in the future at the time of this post. interesting) is alerting their users that YouTube.com seems to be running ’slow’ today. Ummmm. I’m not so sure its true. Especially went the recommended fix by our friend Tom is to REMOVE ALL YOUTUBE VIDEOS. Good one. I wonder if anyone got suckered into this one…

Brokeback Jaiku

dan.lin — Mon, 21 May 2007 23:20:45 +0000

Apparent Google Adsense thinks my Jaiku page is pretty gay. And by gay I mean blogging about horse breeding.

Digg.com no longer serving ads from Federated Media?

dan.lin — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 01:36:32 +0000

Digg.com has been using John Battelle’s Federated Media for their ad serving ever since the initial investment by Omidyar Network. Being funded by the same guy and all. But recently it looks like Digg has ditched FM in favor of their ex-ad server Google Adsense. Is it just me or has anyone else noticed this? Is there any story behind the switch? It seems that Federated Media would be able to fetch a higher CPM rate by selling ads using their sales people than the ‘we’ll make it up in volume’, notoriously under paid system Google offers. I suspect that Digg might be in talks with Google about an acquisition deal. That would explain why Digg is favoring adsense exclusively to show Google why they are worth the $150M price tag they are asking. It’s just my speculation and contribution to the Google rumor mill. Thank you very much.

Social Networks as a Commodity

dan.lin — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:48:18 +0000

Ning is a company that has been around for about 2 years now and this week they finally launched a product that is worth discussing. They are near the forefront of commoditizing social networks by allowing people to create vertical social networks based on their interests. Conceptually this is pretty cool and as it is free, it might have put fiveacross out of business had they not been acquired by Cisco earlier this month.

From a development and design perspective, the product is very beautifully made with gratuitous Web 2.0 UI features. Usability is very intuitive and setting up a social network is literally a few clicks away. I tested the service and created my own trendy Web 2.0 social network called ThunderAndLight.Ning.com.

Today’s social networks are like the message forums of the 90’s and the blogs of 2003. Ning to me is the PHPBB and Wordpress of social networks. The only difference is that it is free but not open source. I can see a lot of small organizations like schools and churches begin building social networks of their own using services like this. Ning’s business model currently looks like purely advertising driven and they are betting on the vertically integrated model to drive enough traffic to build revenue.

Founded by Mosaic co-creator Marc Andreessen and his protege and Stanford Business School grad Gina Bianchini (Link to Flickr profile), cash and industry connections are not likely gonna be problems. Let’s just hope this vertical market thing lives up to its hype.