Nouveau by Zaw Thet - Interesting New Stuff

Facebook down?

I haven't been able to log in to Facebook tonight (12 am PST). Anyone else experiencing similar problems?

Such huge traffic is both a blessing and a curse.

When is the last time you got a MySpace friend invite?

I get about 5 Facebook and 5 LinkedIn invitations to connect every single day. I can't remember the last time I got a myspace invite. Sign of the times?

The UK is one big Social Network?!?

I was reading this post in Mashable today where they were discussing Bebo's claim that it has over 9M users in the UK. As they point out, there are about 60M people in the UK, so that's about 1-in-6 people with a Bebo account.

Now that I think about it, most of the social networks I've been talking to lately all claim to have the majority of their users in the UK. Is the UK really just one big Social Network?

I won't name names here, but since we provide an advertising-supported text message platform for big web communities - this has come up a lot. Our issue right now is that we only support North America (since that is where all the big advertisers are), but given all the UK hype we'll have to move there soon if we want to continue to own the text messaging / socal networking / sms advertising space.

So Del.Icio.Us

I decided it was finally time for me to start playing around with del.icio.us

I created my first set of links here and added it to my bookmarks toolbar in firefox. See pic below.

This social bookmarking service has actually been around for a while, and it a pretty cool tool for letting people see what things you care about and are reading on the web. Do you like this service? If so, leave a comment!

Jobs and Social Networking

As many of you that read this blog know, I've been involved as either a participant (Spoke Software) or innocent bystander (Friendster, Myspace) in the social networking space for some time now.

There are two new "social networking" sites I thought I would bring to you attention that are pretty interesting (both run by folks I know). Both of these sites are focused on helping people find jobs or helping companies find qualified candidates.

The first is a new site called Doostang. Doostang, at first glance, is similar to another social networking / jobs site called LinkedIn. There are a couple of marked differences though:

1. LinkedIn tried to build a huge network and then monetize it by adding job listings and recruiting. A viable strategy perhaps, but building a job site first and a social network second is Doostang's objective. Time will tell which is the better strategy.
2. The quality of jobs on Doostang is much higher because it is a closed professional network. They even have stuff like going on tour with Coldplay.
3. They don't make you pay to list jobs. I talked with the company and they don't plan to ever charge employers and employees to post jobs. I'm a big believer in the "build value for users and there will be ways to monetize it" theory. I think that's their plan. Other revenue sources might include: advertising, background checks, etc.

The second site is called karmaOne. karmaOne has a totally different take on the job market. They took the typical recruiter model (companies generally pay a recruiter 15-20% of first year salary to hire qualified candidates) and put a new and interesting spin on it.

karmaOne works like this:

1. As an employer I post a job and put the amount I am willing to pay someone to refer a qualified candidate. I only pay if I end up hiring that person.
2. I send an email via karmaOne to my list of contacts (my "social network") asking them if they know anyone they would like to refer.
3. If they do know someone they send them my way. If they don't know someone they can forward on my email and still take a cut of the referral fee if someone they know ends up referring a candidate that is hired.

The cool thing about this is that I can skip out on having to pay a recruiter crazy fees and use my network to find good people that I otherwise might not have known about it. Now my friends really have an incentive to pass along my "hey, we are hiring" email spam!

Looking at how people find jobs has been well-documented in sociology literature. My friend Mark Granovetter was one of the first to point out in his paper "The Strength of Weak Ties,"that "connections between colleagues, acquaintances etc., are more important for personal advancement, such as getting good jobs, than the strong ties of family and friendship." Doostang and karmaOne are two good examples of sites that are that are using this research to create viable businesses.

At 4INFO, my current endeavor in the mobile search space, we've posted jobs on both Doostang and karmaOne. Nobody has been hired yet off either site, but we've had some very good referrals. If we end up hiring anyone I will update this post. Speaking of hiring, we are still in the hunt for a couple of very talented engineers to round out our team. If you know of anyone, send them my way!

Technorati Tags:
4INFO, Social Networking, Jobs, karmaOne, Doostang

You heard it here first...(in english)

The Brazilian community on orkut is revolting and moving to a new social networking site called Gazzag. I have no idea what that means, nor do I speak Portugese, but to see all the buzz check out: http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=gazzag

I heard this first hand from a Brazilian friend of mine! I don't have an invite, so I can't check out the site. Reading the terms of service it seems this company is based out of Brazil.

From their company page:

GAZZAG connects people through their friends and friends of friends. Our intention is to make your social life, and that of your friends, more active and interesting.

GAZZAG helps you to keep in contact with your friends and get to know them better, meet new people, reestablish contact with old friends, participate in communities that share your interests, establish business relationships and organize meetings.

These communities cover thousands of interest areas: From contacts with old school friends, philosophy and music, to the exchange of food recipes.

You will meet new people through friend networks and will know previously by means of which friends they have reached you. You will also be able to invite new people at GAZZAG, who still don't belong to your friend network, to join your network as your guest. But it's up to you to decide which information you want to share or with whom you want to communicate.

Additionally, you may post photo albums and your blog, besides being reminded of your friends' birthday and be informed about any event they might be organizing.

To join GAZZAG click the link of the e-mail you received and follow the instructions to create your account. If you are not interested in joining GAZZAG, just delete your invitation or click the link to quit receiving friends' messages inviting you to join GAZZAG. If you change your mind in the future, don't worry: We will be here waiting for you.

You will be able to meet lots of new people and even start dating if you wish. For this purpose you can use Gazzag Dating, a separate site where you can communicate using a nickname and remain anonymous as long as you wish.

If you have not received an invitation to join GAZZAG yet, please wait for a while. In the near future we will be making available the registration option to start new friend networks from scratch.

Have fun!

The first social network with public profiles

http://center.spoke.com/profiles/zaw -

You can view my professional details without giving away any gory details and decide if Spoke is right for you! Of course you can do this on my website (which you are already on), but most folks don't have their own website so this is a great tool for them to create an on-line persona that they can share with their friends, etc.

Lycos Joins the Social Networking Fray

Lycos U.S. Changes...Everything

Wow. Not suprising..but the first big portal to make such a public shift in strategy. Will the paid subscription model that they espouse work? Probably not. Friendster is going to run into similar problems.

The one interesting piece here is that Lycos will be able to use its large active user base to develop a better understanding of what "clusters" of friends are intrerested in and are searching on (hopefully giving them better CPM advertising numbers). From what I know, Google is trying to do a similar thing with Orkut - building better searches by tapping into your social network to figure out what others you know are interested in.

There's another company that's trying to do this called Eurekster.

Stay tuned.