As part of our Super Fan podcast series, we interviewed Jason Feffer, Founder and CEO, of SodaHead. Jason was one of the earliest employees at MySpace and experienced their rapid rise into a major social networking site. After MySpace, Jason founded SodaHead, a company in the Social Answers space. SodaHead allows users to set up opinion polls that users get to vote and comment on. It’s a fun and addictive experience, and well worth trying.

Jason’s discussion of his experience at MySpace illustrates the importance of operational optimization to drive monetization of super fans. In his new company, Jason is putting a lot of what he’s learned to use in creating a new and fun social site. SodaHead has mastered the art of lowering the difficulty and barriers to user generated content. It leads to an experience where its much easier to join in the social mix in a more meaningful way than just asking someone to be your friend. SodaHead is definitely an experience everyone should try.

 

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Jason Feffer has an exciting eight-year history of Internet startup experience leading up to his most recent startup, SodaHead.com. Mr. Feffer helped start MySpace in 2003, which sold to News Corp for $580M. During his three years at MySpace, Jason served on the executive committee and as Vice President of Operations as the membership grew to 100 million. Mr. Feffer oversaw advertising operations, revenue reporting, policy enforcement, government relations and several other departments at MySpace.

Technorati Tags: Jason Feffer, MySpace, SodaHead, social media, social networking, social media optimization, super fans

Nokia has produced a fun little video that tries to define Web 2.0. Nokia defines Web 2.0 as being all about connecting people. It makes sense coming from Nokia given their focus on mobile communications, but I think they’ve got it right. To much is made of all the technology and not enough about people’s basic desire to connect and know other people.

In a post I made a while back, I think it is all about people communicating with people.

It should be obvious that since the invention of runners to carry messages it’s been about people communicating with people. Mail, telephone, email, IM, texting are all killer apps that have been about people communicating with people.

That’s why social networking is important. It’s not about the documents or what the documents are about, it’s about the people and what the people are all about. And yes, we do need a way to figure out how we are all connected other than telling everybody every time.

Thanks to Gigaom for bringing the video to my attention.

Technorati Tags: Nokia, web 2.0, social networking, video

Alex Blum, CEO of KickApps, met with me at Digital Hollywood. KickApps like some of the other companies Digital Podcast interviewed at the show provides an on demand white label social network application. Unlike some of the other services, KickApps can be self administered and if you are willing to give up some advertising inventory KickApps can be used without cost.

 

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A KickApps-enabled website provides your visitors with a complete rich media community experience. Users are invited to upload media and create their very own “personal space” directly at your site. Site visitors are provided with easy to use media management tools to manage their personal space. Similarly, your site administrator is provided an array of easy-to-use media management and administrative tools to ensure that only appropriate content makes it on to your website.

KickApps has a rich feature set focused on social networking, community building and managing user generated content.

Sites that use KickApps have lots of features to choose from including uploading videos, audio and photos, user customizable profiles, guest books, blogs, feeds and a variety of widgets. They also go beyond technology and offer help via white papers such as their current whitepaper called Nine Steps to a Successful Online Community which you can download for free.

You can use KickApps for free if you allow KickApps to take part of the advertising. If you want to keep all the advertising for yourself, then you can use their paid version which is based upon a CPM model.

This is definitely worth checking out if you want to add social networking features to your site.

Technorati Tags: KickApps, Social Networking Application, Social Networking, Digital Hollywood

Rex Wong, CEO of DAVE Networks, met with me at Digital Hollywood. DAVE Networks provides white label social networks. That means that DAVE Networks provides the infrastructure to power sites like America’s Funniest Home Videos, Stargate’s Community and Dave.TV. The users of the sites don’t see DAVE Networks, they see the customer’s brand. The customers get the benefits of offering a wide range of social community tools to their users.

 

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The system provides the tools to deploy a custom social broadcast network, including

• Self publishing
• Video upload, download, rating, comments
• Blog, video blog, moblog
• DAVE points system
• A modular player can be customized with your brand and embedded in user’s MySpace, blog or web page
• User contests

Rex also told me about an exciting new project that DAVE Networks has launched called Next.TV. NEXT.TV, a competitor to the much hyped Joost, is a new Internet TV service that delivers over 50 channels of high quality TV content. NEXT.TV’s content is sponsored by advertisers so that you can get premium TV content for free.

NEXT.TV will be available initially in October 2007 on HP consumer notebooks. A version will also be available to the general public shortly thereafter for download of which you can sign up to be part of the Private Beta Program by signing up at www.next.tv.

Technorati Tags: DAVE Networks, Rex Wong, Next.TV, IPTV, online video, video, Digital Hollywood

TechCrunch UK is reporting that:

An unconfirmed rumour has reached me via a reliable source that LinkedIn is in talks with media giant News Corporation over a possible buyout in January 2008.

This kind of move would really make sense given the growing importance of the “Social Graph” and the potential for LinkedIn to play a role in providing the social glue that connects us all.

Given that LinkedIn covers a completely different demographic than MySpace, News Corp could also use an acquisition to extend its scale, content and advertising inventory to another segmented social network.

Maybe this will be the next generation of what it means to be a network where demographically segmented social networks are aggregated under an umbrella network that allows for super scale on the infrastructure.

Via Techmeme.

Technorati Tags: social networking, LinkedIn, News Corp

David Bankston, Executive Vice President and CTO of Neighborhood America, sat down with me to talk about Enterprise Social Networks. Neighborhood America is in the business of helping enterprises create and manage social networks. They provide a software as a service based platform to enable uploads of user generated content, user web pages, and social networking tools.

 

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They have quite few customers in both the business & media sector and the public sector. The service powers sites like Fox News where Neighborhood America powers Fox News uReport section that enables users to upload content to Fox News. It also powers HGTV’s Rate My Space community site where users can share, comment on and rate photos of redecorating projects.

They have a very impressive list of clients using the service to power various aspects of their websites. If you need an enterprise class social network for your site, Neighborhood America should be on your list of potential vendors.

Technorati Tags: Neighborhood America, social networks, Digital Hollywood

I sat down with Derrick Oien, the President and Co-founder of Intercasting, at Digital Hollywood. Derrick shared with me the exciting new things Intercasting has going on in the mobile space.

 

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Intercasting got started running a mobile social networking service called Rabble. From there, Intercasting has extended its offering to enable wireless network operators to integrate other social networking or community services through a social networking platform interface called Anthem.

The Anthem client is a user interface that provides access all of the user’s social networking providers. Anthem is currently used by Sprint, Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile and will be launching on other top tier carriers. Through Anthem, wireless carriers are able to offer their subscribers access to social networking sites including LiveJournal, Vox, Xanga, AsianAve.com, BlackPlanet.com, Faithbase.com, GLEE.com, MiGente.com and Rabble.

With Anthem, camera on phone can be set up for one-click distribution of photos to PCs, email recipients, imaging services and social networking providers on the Anthem platform.

Anthem also provides users with the ability to connect their address books or Personal Information Manager(PIM) with some of the most popular social networking providers.

It’s exciting to see the extension of social networking services onto the mobile environment. The integration with the phone has so much potential to make social networking even more powerful when you have 24 hour access to your connections and data.

Technorati Tags: derrick oien, derrickoien, mobile, intercasting, anthem, rabble, social networking, mobile social networking