I really like Hugh McLeod’s discussion of social markers and social objects on Gapingvoid. His definition of a social object is that it is the “node” that permits interaction between two people. A social marker is a type of social object that provides context of your position in a given social ecosystem.

For example, in NYC, a form of social marker is telling people what neighborhood you live in. If someone tells you that they live in Chelsea, and you do as well, then you have a shared context through that social marker. You may then proceed to discuss all the insider places to go in Chelsea (Grand Sichuan, Chelsea Markets, Cafe Grumpy, galleries, etc.). If someone tells you that they live in Williamsburg, and you live in Chelsea, you still have context through that social marker. It is an information point that *can* provide context for your interaction.

Hugh also has a calling card/biz card service where you can order blogcards and choose from a selection of his illustrations on one side of the card, and put your contact information on the other side. It is kinda funny that Hugh started out by drawing doodles on the back of business cards that were given to him, and now you can buy cards that have his illustrations and hand them out to others. Nice turn of events if you ask me!

As a person who is an ardent fan of Facebook, I have to admit that I’ve become increasingly disappointed with the amount of information that gets populated into my news feed. I’ve discovered that I can consume far more information than the feed provides, the refresh of the feed seems slow, and on top of that, Facebook’s secret-saucy algorithm decides which of my friends I should be seeing posts from, which results in me missing posts from other friends in my news feed.

If you have the perception that you post a note on Facebook and that note will go to all of your friends’ feeds– you are wrong. Well, it will populate into a person’s Notes or Posts page, but frankly a lot of people don’t check those pages frequently (if at all). But regarding the news feed, if your friends don’t log on for a few days, or if you have more than, let’s say, 10 friends, you posts and notes simply will not go to all of your friends. Do not consider that Facebook is a platform for broadcasting information to all of your friends, because it simply does not function as a broadcast platform yet.

But if you do want to read all your friends posts and notes — you’re in luck — because you can do it very easily via RSS subscriptions. I’ve been using subscriptions as a “safety net” to capture posts and notes that don’t go directly into my news feed. A few people have been asking how to do this (because it isn’t very obvious on the Facebook platform), so here is a simple step-by-step guide to setting up RSS feeds from Facebook:

Create an RSS Feed for your friends’ posted items:

• From your profile page, go to posted items: (Go to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php)
• On the lower right column you will see an RSS icon with the title: “My Friends’ Posted Items”
• Click that link and it will automatically give you a feed that you can use with Google Reader, Bloglines or other RSS Aggregators.

Create an RSS Feed for your friends’ posted notes:

• From your profile page, go to notes page (Go to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php)
• On the lower right column you will see an RSS icon with the title “My Friends’ Notes”
• Click that link and it will automatically give you a feed that you can use with Google Reader, Bloglines or other RSS Aggregators

Import a Blog

If you want your blog posts to go into your Mini Feed, you can do a quick import as well.

• You can get to the “Import a blog” page from Notes (on the lower right column), or go directly there with this link: http://www.facebook.com/editnotes.php?import
• Enter Web URL or RSS and voilá - you are done!

Special note to frequent blog posters though: Facebook reserves the right to stop your feed if they feel you are posting too many times in a day and “could result in your account being disabled,” so if you are a blogger who writes multiple posts in one day, it may be best to not use this option.

As part of my (re)introduction to NYC, I have decided to check out the Web 2.0 and tech scene here. So yesterday Zeb Dropkin (a producer at BBH) and I went to a panel discussion hosted by the PGA (Producer’s Guild of America) New Media Council. The topic was on Niche Online Social Networking sites. As sites such as MySpace and Facebook continue to gain popularity, people are searching for smaller sites that are more content specific–hence the niche market that is emerging. The panelists pointed to the already growing segmentation (i.e. Facebook is for college students mainly, LinkedIn for business professionals) in the social networking tools as evidence that this trend will continue to grow.

Zeb made a great point that social networking sites are similar to the gentrification movement in the off-line world. Say you move to an “up and coming” neighborhood because you like the edginess of it, the exclusivity of being “in the know” about something cool that no one else knows about. Suddenly the neighborhood is filled with Starbucks, strollers and investment bankers, so you’re off to seek the next “undiscovered” neighborhood. The same thing seems to be happening in the online space. Friendster turned from being the coolest thing since sliced bread to the world’s most elaborate birthday reminder system; MySpace could easily turn into a place where people simply go to check out the newest bands and musicians.

People continue to seek out exclusive places where they can be in comfortable spaces with their kindred, so the argument goes that online niche networking sites will only continue to grow – and with that growth, advertisers may follow.

Here is a run down of the panelists and some brief notes on their services:

Panelists:
Gene Derose
House Party
Former president of Jupiter Communications Gene Derose started Houseparty.com to be an “end-to-end” party planning social network. It seems to be a mashup of Meetup, Evite and Upcoming tools with a touch of Flickr and a dash of YouTube.

Eric Alterman
KickApps Corp.
Kickapps offers “tools for brands.” Meaning instead of a brand or TV show creating a page on MySpace, they can now have their own social networking tools on their own site using the KickApps platform. This seems like it would be incredibly useful to advertisers and marketers who are looking for an easy plug-and-play way to include social networking tools on microsites or brand landing pages. KickApp offers 3 distinct packages:

• Basic – 1 click social network
• Intermediate – Embed CSS, HTML, Flash, etc.
• Advanced – 100% Customizable

Their business model is to get paid based off of impressions (although I’m guessing they also charge for the customizable development as well).

Examples of their sites are here:

• ABC’s TV Show Lost
• Tag Body Spray

Nicholas Butterworth
Diversion Media
Diversion Media is taking a different tactic to YouTube. Instead of the approach that everyone goes to one destination to find lots of different types of content, Diversion Media is developing the “station approach” where they are launching extremely content specific sites. The first site they launched is specific to travelers, Travelistic, and has both UGC and licensed travel videos. They also launched a Snowboarding video community, SnowVision. The way that they obtained a user base for SnowVision is interesting – they started with a simple logo on a MySpace profile and got over 1100 friends, who they are hoping will join and seed the SnowVision site. Diversion Media plans to build over 25 niche sites in the upcoming years.

Dan Melinger
Socialight
Socialight is extending the online social networking world to mobile phones. The concept is nice – you “check in” to an area and immediately you are given “sticky” notes of places to eat, shop or check out in that area on your mobile phone from your friends, peers or groups. For
instance, you can subscribe to the Flickr Graffiti channel and you will get messages of cool graffiti to check out in the area where you “check
in.” The idea of location based tagging could be expanded at some point to include personalized walking tours. You can watch a video about their technology here.

Kai Bond
Ravewireless.com
Rave Wireless (and Get Rave) is a social networking tool that targets colleges and universities. Unlike Facebook’s recent expansion beyond the college set, Rave wants to focus only on that demographic. Since most students carry their cell phones with them everywhere, Rave Wireless creates web and mobile-based communities that include SMS, alerts and other announcements customized for their schools. Apparently part of their revenue model is to sell handsets to students as well (similar to a laptop purchasing program).

Eric Wachtmeister
A Small World
A Small World has been around for 6 years, and is known as the “exclusive” invite-only online community. With investment money from The Weinstein Company (former Miramax founders), A Small World targets the very wealthy jet setters of the world, and their advertising base reflects that. Their advertisers include luxury brands including NetJets, Moët & Chandon and the like, and all the ad units are custom made for the site (i.e. no ad network serving). A Small World claims that since their group is extremely elite, it is a more trusted network, filled with authentic people who are highly influential in trend making and purchasing decisions.