.: On Tokyo Time :.

I start seeing more articles that emphasize the social  ‘features’ over the social ‘network’ (also see my post Increasing relevance by adding social networking features). This video on FriendConnect shows some examples and makes the difference more obvious.

I love Nova Spivack’s comparison to cars and how the choice of a Social Network will come down to personal preference (ultimately determined by brand). For this to happen the Social Networks will have to open up and support a common base feature set. This is already happening today but will accelerate. I’m convinced that soon most of our online activity will be aware of our friends and that ‘social context’ will lead to a more relevant user experience:

• Amazon book and NetFlix movie suggestions based on what your friends like
• Craiglist and ebay items from friends of friends
• Search results ranking enhanced by sites friends clicked on
• Yelp reviews and ratings from friends rather than 200 strangers
• News that your friends have read
• …

Things to think about:

• ‘Friend’ is probably to strong a term. What are better terms? How will this evolve over time?
• ‘Soocial context’ brings trust. Trust brings economic opportunities.
• How can the 2nd and 3rd degree be used especially on commercial sites (LinkedIn is already using this)?
• When will large retail sites grasp the concept and what kind of opportunities will arise?

And the big question is:  How can the Social Networks be open (interop) and closed (privacy) at the same time?

ReadWriteWeb picked up the latest Hitwise numbers that indicate that Myspace is still way bigger than Facebook in terms of traffic. Depending on which metric you’re looking at you end up with a very different picture though.

I’ve only recently started using Myspace and I use it exclusively to listen to music. I don’t even have a Myspace account. I consider myself more of a visitor to the site than a user of the ‘social network’ Myspace. However I’m a user of their ‘DJ/Band pages’ and a consumer of the online music.

I’m a pretty engaged Facebook user on the other hand. I have an account with over 300 friends and log in about 4 days a week if not more. I change my status, send messages and post on walls.

My engagement and therefore user value is clearly higher on Facebook.

I think Hitwise could measure active accounts by looking at the subset of URLs that is only accessible when logged in and report that number separately from overall traffic to the entire site.

As mentioned before I’ve been fascinated by the play by play evolution of the attempted takeover of Yahoo! by Microsoft. A few days ago I started having a feeling that the deal will not go through. Even when the rumors of a higher bid started surfacing I still didn’t believe the deal would happen. And today Microsoft announced that it withdraws its offer!

I think that’s good longer term for Yahoo! even though it will hurt the stock in the short term. It might have actually helped rallying the troops behind Yahoo! even though we lost a bunch of good employees. It’s now up to the leadership to send strong signals to the employees asap and get them fired up.

Steve Ballmer seems to be very nervous about the recent (partial) outsourcing of search monetization to Google and has included a few remarks on that topic. I’m surprised Valleywag didn’t point out that these bullets were directly addressed to regulators rather than Yahoo!.

It’ll be an interesting Monday. For sure.

I’ve been having issues in the last weeks where my CPU would peg at 100%. This is typically caused by a web page with an embedded Flash object (e.g. an ad or a music player). Closing the respective tab brings the CPU back to normal. This happens to me on Firefox 2, IE6, Safari 3.1 and SeaMonkey 1.1.9.

I’m running Flash 9,0,115,0. I will try upgrading to the latest version and see if this improves anything.

It’s not the first time that I see a third party component hurting performance and stability of the browser. I wonder how many extension the Mashable guys are running and how those impact the stability of Firefox. Disable/remove all extensions for a few days and see if the browser still crashes as often.

Also see “Firebug and Yahoo! Mail“.