You know her.

Her name is cutiemonica or Krystal or xxxBabyxxx and she has one pic, 250 guy friends, and absolutely no profile bling whatsoever.

And she's the hottest girl you've ever seen.

Oh, and she's got a link to the site where she keeps all her "real pics" or her webcam or where she keeps all her spyware... umm... I mean...  *fun stuff*. 

The best thing about MySpace is that it lets users do pretty much whatever they want.  Paste 3rd party code?  Sure.  Link off the site?  Sure.  Auto redirects to porn?  Absolutely.

The worst thing about MySpace?  It lets users do pretty much whatever the want. 

MySpace has gotten so huge that it has spawned a whole community of bad guys that are trying to game the system.

And just like Friendster before it, MySpace seems to be having some trouble as of late keeping up.  I get bursts of friend requests in bunches of 20 from spam profiles, and keep waiting for the day the guy who hosts my free layout decides to switch it out for some animal porn. 

That's what is going to threaten MySpace, not the "MySpace isn't cool anymore" factor.  Because, MySpace is us...  it lets users express themselves however they want..   and more and more users are putting videos, pictures, and yes, even avatars, through other services, up on their page.  MySpace doesn't need to be "cool" because we're cool enough and it reflects us.  Combine that with a database of indy music events that aren't even located on venue music pages and from a content perspective, I'm not worried. 

I'm just worried about getting a virus from having unprotected layout swapping. 

As a company looking to enable our users to take our services with them to MySpace's open platform, we have a vested interest in doing whatever we can to differentiate ourselves from the bad guys.  On many other platforms, this means being a part of an authorized developer network.  I'd love to see a developer network for MySpace.  Why wouldn't we want that?  Check us out, make us sign stuff... tell us exactly what our code needs to look like and we'll comply in exchange for not having to play "catch up" when security fixes make our widgets do weird things and require code updates.  Heck, we'll even give you a blood sample...  but we swear, we didn't know that stuff Barry gave us was anything more than a vitamin supplement.

Right now, there's no page of updates for us... no resource to check to see if our stuff is "MySpace compliant."  Its just figure it out as we go, and to be honest, bad guys are always better at playing cat and mouse.  So let's smoke out the FraudRequest folks and band together to fight evil.

Click here to get Justice League HTML.  :)

Sean Johnson is taking the "next" concept out to the Windy City and starting nextChigago.

The nextVirus... spreading across America.  :)

Seriously, though, its an open source brand, just like BarCamp.  In fact, a lot of us here at nextNY think of our group has kind of like BarCamp on a listserv that actually includes going to bars and meeting regularly.  So if you'd like to get some young people in tech together in your area, here's what I had in mind as the principals of nextNY when I set the ball rolling.  Keep in mind none of these principals have ever been approved or officialy endorsed by anyone.

1. No membership or membership criteria.  While I've tried to have the group clump around young people in tech, there's no official criteria.  All we keep doing is talking it up by using terms like "up and coming" (not young... I try to avoid age terms) and running the kind of events where my peer group would show, like Startup 101 for new entreprenuers or bar outings of lots of other "up and comers".

I just added a list of the most recent comments on the sidebar...   maybe that will encourage the chatter.  Here's the code for MT/Typepad:  (Thanks Elise)

<div class="module">
<h2 class="module-header">Recently Commented On</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<ul class="module-list">
<MTComments lastn="10" sort_order="descend">
<li class="module-list-item">
<$MTCommentAuthorLink show_email="0"$> on <MTCommentEntry>
<a href="<MTEntryPermalink>#c<$MTCommentID$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
</MTCommentEntry>
</MTComments>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>

From Eric...

"Computers, and especially games, may also play into this generational shift in attitude. My generation was among the first to really have games around our entire lives. What does that have to do with anything? Unlike children of previous generations, who were presented with unyielding eternal institutions like school and family and even Little League, games gave my generation a chance to create our own worlds, our own institutions. Life was just another realm in which we could play with the rules. 

I wonder whether this sort of game playing and this sort of experimentation with institutions from an early age is what contributed to the massive rise of entrepreneurship we have seen over the past decade or so. Instead of being locked into a world where institutions were king and where the goal was to be a company man, my generation realized that institutions could be brought into being, that starting a new company was like starting a new game. (Okay, the massive drop in capital costs to start a company also contributed, but I’m trying to make a point here)."

Brad and I have been chatting about link density and depth.

I don't know exactly what I want to say about this, but there's an interesting progression in here somewhere.

Craigslist.org, or at least the home page, has high link density.  Almost everything on that page is clickable.

However, it doesn't have great depth.   You click on New York, now you get all the New York catagories.  You click on Missed Connections and then you get listings.  Click on a listing, and that's it.  Dead end.  No more clicking, save for going backwards via the top menu.

Del.icio.us does one better with half its listings.  There's just as much link density on each page as the Craigslist frontpage, but here, half the links bring you to equally dense pages.  Clicking on a tag or a screename will get you yet another Del.icio.us page full of links.  So, as long as you stay on those links, you could go around and around forever.

Even better is IMDB...  lots of links, and every movie has a list of clickable people, each of which brings you to a person with their own set of movies.  And, each of those movies has more people.  Person, movie, person movie.

What more degrees of freedom?  Try Baseball Reference.  Everything, and I mean everything, is clickable.  Years, teams, players, awards, etc.  You can go from David Wright's page to the '94 Mets to Richard Hildago to the 1997 National League page to Andres Gallarraga to Ted Kluscewski to voting on the 1950 MVP award, and so on and so on... colleges, towns, days of debut of final games, birth death... circles and cirlcles and every page is as dense as the last one, and every page infinately deep.

I like the idea of pages where everything is clickable but each click takes you to a new page of clicks...  and we were wondering whether or not that only works with certain kinds of content.  Can you do it with news?  I mean, certainly, news pages could get more link dense and deep... since right now it seems like the most you ever get are like 3 or 4 related articles and like two keywords.  Recipies would be a great one.  Strawberry cheesecake?  Click strawberries and strawberry martinis, too...  and other drinks, or drinks that go with other food... round and round.  What else? 

I just got a MySpace friend request from Status Q Billiards.

Status Q isn't a person, of course... its a pool hall in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

And you know, I pass it all the time, but I really don't hangout that much by my apartment, so I haven't gone in there in ages...   

... but someone over there was smart enough to notice that I had "pool" as a hobby in my profile... or maybe they were just adding people in the local area and they asked to be my friend.

No matter what kind of business you are, setting up shop in MySpace is brilliant.  I'm happy to be friends with Status Q and now it makes me want to go in there...  especially now that I can see who else might be playing there by checking all of the other people who are friends with Status Q.  They've turned marketing into community building.

Leave it to a little pool hall in Brooklyn to understand Web 2.0 guerilla marketing better than most big corporations.

Ignition just funded SecondSpace.  I like the guys over there so I'm curious what the company is up to, but they're being very secretive.

The website says this:

"We have the opportunity to build a groundbreaking new online service that helps consumers get the most from their free time."

Its from a group of people who "have impressive track records building global online brands and services such as Internet Explorer, VeriSign, Microsoft FrontPage, Classmates.com, Quicken Loans and others..."

So what is it?

MySpace for grown-ups?

A porn site?

A great new ajax web calendar?

Submit your guess and I'll buy the best guess (As voted by the audience in a couple of days) an Original size Jamba Juice of any flavor.

My guess is that it will be a site you stare into and get hypnotized into thinking you actually had a great time on the site, but what you really did was randomly click AdSense ads for seven hours.

Does living in a borderless world mean that you increasingly need international specialization or that having "cross-border" expertise matters less and less?

Critical mass of broadband penetration+inexpensive digital cameras+social video site+ripped off TV content=

Crazy DELICIOUS!

Remember that SNL Narnia video?

Try the reduxes...

I'm sorry, but this is UFR.  (Utterly...  Ridiculous).  Friendster just won the patent on social networking.

The idea of interacting with people you know and with people they know is called networking and it has been around long before the internet.  The idea that it is patentable is a farce.

Frankly, if Friendster, who lost the social network battle by being slow, closed, and failing to provide user value, actually goes after anyone or takes a dollar from anyone in licensing after getting awarded this patent, that's like winning the World Series on a balk.

Technically, yes, you're allowed to, but if I was managing a team that won the World Series on a balk, I'd turn around and say, "No thanks, we decline the balk.  We're not winning that way.  Either we actually drive that guy in from third on some sort of actual bat to ball contact or we'll go home, thanks."

People spend a lot of time on paying attention to social networks, but I don't think enough time is spent on social features.  A social feature is one that brings another person into your digital experience... whether its "send to a friend" or commenting or subscribing to a friend's photos.  It actually needs to be a feature, though, and not just "add friends" w/o any context of why you would be adding these friends.

Social has become a bit of a Web 2.0 buzzword, so I was thinking today about some of the concrete value propositions that building in social features represents.

I haven't done one of these in a while, but I think I came up with a good one on the train.

Why isn't anyone doing free VOIP-based, ad supported wakeup callsand meeting reminders?

It seems so easy...  Create a little plugin in Outlook or even easier, cc an e-mail address for the wakeup service and let it call you using a VOIP backend, but with a relevent advertisement as part of the message.  You could generate very targeted ads depending on the time, keywords in the event, location, or even letting the carrier tip you off on your geolocation on the call. 

"Its 6AM... time to wake up for your 9AM Meeting with Jim.   For a quick pick me up, drop by the Jamba Juice on 22nd and 5th for a Bright Eyed and Blueberry.  Tell them we sent you and receive 10% off!"

Just the wakeup calls alone could generate lots of ads from Jamba, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, 7Eleven, etc.  Throw in 1-800 Flowers and FTD for Birthdays, Anniversaries, etc.

Plus, the neat thing is that you could private label it for anyone with a quick paste of some HTML.  Conferences could use it, too.

Knowing where someone is or needs to be, the context of what they'll be doing, and being able to reach them at an appropriate time with an opt-in call should make for great ad potential.  Its probably not too hard to setup either.

Feel free to take this plan and build a company.  Its all yours.

On Wednesday night, the Google NYC office opened its doors to nextNY to give us an insider's view of what its like to work there, what they're working on, and what the future holds... and, we hoped, maybe hire a few of us.  :)

It was a great showing on both sides.  nextNY had around 100 attendees and the Google side was well represented by Marcus Mitchell, David Eun, Tom Thai, Dominic Preuss and Dennis Crowley.  We spoke about a lot of great stuff and the environment their is very open and upfront... hence the reason why I can't go into too much detail about all of it!  :)   Still, it was great to have kicked off our Open House series with such an accomodating host.  Hopefully, after this, we'll start to see more tech firms like Google reach out to engage the local community through us in the future.

Zach reminded me of something I've said to a lot of creative people I know...  there's going to be big demand in short video ad spots for the web.  The explosion of video on the web is going to drive the need for video advertising, and repurposed 30 sec TV spots aren't going to cut it.   If I were going to start a non-tech business, it would be a video ad creation firm.

A couple of months ago, the folks from nextNY started clamoring for some weighter content than our bar outings were providing.  So, in addition to our "Community Conversations" we set out to make inroads into some big tech firms that had a local presence. 

Not surprisingly, Google was the first one to get on board, and so, on Wednesday, 100 nextNYers will invade the midtown office of Google for our first nextNY Open House.   I really have to thank the Google New York staff, particularly Soo Young Kim for pulling out all the stops for us and opening their doors to host our growing little local community.  It really shows a commitment on their part to maintain an active  engagement with NYC and I hope it encourages other large tech firms here, like AOL and IAC, to do the same.

Just saw a note in an Etsy forum...

I think a problem with Etsy is that there are far too many sellers and not enough buyers to compensate. Ebay is very successful because of how much they advertise and before I ran across this website I had never heard of it and neither had anyone that I know. I found through my newspaper a place called Freedom which will send your ad through 11 states for advertising. It cost $275 for 25 words or less and an additional $5 per word after that. I figure if we pitch in we could advertise to the country about Etsy and get some acknowledgment about this wonderful site that so many people are missing out on. If you are interested in pitching in to get Etsy advertised please contact me and let me know how much you are willing to donate. If we get enough people to donate I will let everyone know and then we can work together to make the perfect ad and send it off.

Either Contact me with your willing donation (will not donate until enough people have committed)

Can you imagine chipping in to pay for advertising on behalf of your wireless carrier?  How about for the car you drive?  I don't even think I'd pay to advertise Jamba!

I've been thinking a lot lately about the purpose of a company blog, the style, etc.

Is it supposed to inform customers?  Is it a marketing document?  Is it PR with comments?  Who blogs?  Why?  How does it relate to the company's existing PR and marketing efforts?   

Every company does this differently, but I think that Feedburner has really set the bar for creating a dialogue with the technology community and a site that reflects who they are as a collection of people, not just a company.  They don't even post that much, but they still have 11,000+ subs. 

Why?

I think, most basically, they've created something that people actually want to read, with a style that makes outsiders think of Feedburner as the kind of people they'd like to work with... and probably even work for, too.  Props to Rachelle who has done a great job with their online image, and really for the whole team for giving us some insight into their corporate culture.

On their recent hackathon...

"The developers at FeedBurner have been acting like a bunch of kids in the back of a station wagon lately ... "When's our next Hackathon?! Tell Chris to stop touching me!"

On their new music fan feeds...

The office stereo is cranked up to eleven this morning to welcome our latest customer, Geffen Records. With a date like 06/06/06 upon us, the office flashpot could finally see some use should Rob Zombie drop in on us.

I don't know whether or not the folks at Feedburner decided ahead of time, "Let's just be ourselves..." or whether they just realized this was the accepted norm in the blogosphere, but they could have very easily went out and written the definitive RSS blog as leaders in the space.  However, they'd have to get past the first Google page of all of the other RSS blogs already out there.  So, instead, they went out and created the definitive blog about Feedburner... because, really, who else could do that any better?

And they didn't just stop at blogs.  They have a company Flickr account as well. 

Is there a business benefit to this?  Maybe...   maybe its just fun.  But, as a blogger using their product, it makes me feel like they're "one of us" more so than they're trying to sell me something or make money off me.

Feedburner... made out of people.

So, first I started with Feed Demon... but now I think I want to go web.  I want to be able to check my feeds from any computer, to not have to worry about syncing.  I want to tag feeds, too...  to create easily manageable catagories.

I tried Rojo, and there are things I liked about it and things I didn't.  It was great to be able to tag, and I liked the simplicity of the interface, and I even liked the recommendations...  but it was slow.  REALLY slow.  I'd often have to wait hours before feeds updated.  Maybe I'm an idiot and I don't know where the settings are for it.

So, if you have a web-based reader that you really love, let me know.  It needs to be fast... fast to read, fast to delete and mark as unread, fast to update, catagorize... etc.  I read a lot of feeds and need to be able to go through them quickly. 

Back in August, I wrote about what it takes to be successful in "Web 2.0"...  but now I'm not so sure that's an admirable goal.   Yes, there are lots of really great things about the "second coming", but I think there's a whole lot that makes the pedestal a little bit undeserving.  Obviously, this piece is meant to generate a lot of conversation and feedback through a challenge...    it doesn't mean that I'm no longer interested in slick, user friendly "web 2.0" apps that make my life easier and have gained great market traction. 

So here's my Top 10 Reasons Why Web 2.0 Sucks...    Feel free to blog, remix, mash, tag, aggregate, syndicate, disaggregate, digg, sploof, snorg, coagulate, microchunk, gloog, discombobulate, and comment...

1.   This is going to be small.  Small might be the new big, and that's great when it means lower barriers to adoption, tools which are more lightweight and easier to use... but it also seems like no one is interested in the next "big thing" anymore.  The overbuild of calendar and video clip apps is the equivilent of Seinfeld's take how our greatest scientific minds are working on creating seedless watermelons instead of curing cancer.  That's why, as flakey as it may be, I admire people like Second Life for trying to create fundamental change in how we interact online, or Meetup for trying to actually effect the way we connect and combine in the real world.

2.  The death of teamwork.   The fact that it only takes a handful of people, sometimes even just one, to build services, means that there's actually less community creation going on than there was before in the tech world.  You're not going to have "del.icio.us alumni" the way you have Microsoft alumni...  or you will, but they could all meet by pulling two tables together in a local pizzeria.  Plus, so many of these startups are working in virtual teams and never meeting...   you're really losing all the teamwork that goes on in larger organizations when people work together in person.  That's going to create less loyalty, more turnover, and make it hard for companies to really take on bigger projects that require more employee continuity.

3.  I spell poorly enuff.    Dots.  Dropped concone

There's a PhD student here that modeled out communication in networks.