Comcast Acquires Plaxo

In today’s odd social networking news Comcast is going to acquire Plaxo! At first glance, you think – Comcast is going to put Plaxo on my TV — uhh…that doesn’t make sense. After further research it does in a big way cause Comcast has been creating community features on it’s comcast.net and other interactive properties since December 2005.  Taking a glance at their pre-release site – http://labs.comcast.net/ – they are working hard at community features within their product. Cause as everybody knows when I watch my Comcast box I usually have my computer with me or very close by.  

My ultimate TV-related community site is this:  

• A site where I can view the show(s) online
• Post messages and get my questions answers about the show and actor gossip
• Tell my friends about a new show by clicking on a button and it creates an email, blog post, or content worthy of sharing on my other social networks where my friends reside
• Find new shows and schedule recordings directly from the web or my mobile phone

On Comcast’s labs site they do have a product called Fans 4.0 that allows you to watch on-demand shows.

 

Is this where Plaxo can add community features and really nail the user-experience for Comcast customers?  Time will tell.  Tell me your thoughts on this acquisition by adding your comments below. 

Social Media Outreach via Blog It by Typepad

In launching a new product at a company in today’s web 2.0 world you need to update all your company’s presence on each social network.  Here a sample scenario that the person in charge of social media needs to do when a product launches:

• Update corporate blog with post and tag. 
• Make sure Technorati profile is setup, blog is claimed and pinged
• Update Facebook fan page with photos, videos, and message to fans
• Update MySpace page with post and message to “friends”
• Update your statuses on Facebook (your personal account if you promote yourself as the company evangelist), Twitter (your corporate account), Tumblr, and Pownce
• Post, create sets, and tag photos to Flickr (if time join groups related to company and add photos to group)

As you can see it is quite a bit of work, time consuming and repetitive in some cases. Can a company create a tool that can manage my social media outreach to each of my networks? Blogging company Typepad created a Facebook application called Blog It that can update my statuses and blogs all within one site. I can link up my social network profiles, enter in one status and/or blog, and it gets sent to the respective sites. Pretty cool and time saving!  Blog It is tied into the following social networks as of this posting (5:32 PM 4/19/2008):

• TypePad
• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• Movable Type
• Pownce
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Vox
• WordPress.com
• WordPress.org Site

Unfortunately, it’s not tied into all the social networks that I need to update and their blog editor is just a simple text box. This is just version 0.1 of the software and it is fairly simple to connect to another network via APIs so great start by Typepad! I look forward to the next release and maybe other competitive products because there is a real need out there for us folks managing social media outreach for companies. 

Here is snapshot of the page on Blog It that ties all my social networks together:

Here is snapshot of the Blog It page to update my status on Facebook, Twitter, and Pownce:

Here is a snapshot of the post to blog page with the very simple text box:

Add your comment below on your experience with Blog It and/or other tools you’ve used at your company. Thanks and talk to you all soon,

 

DJ Ksar
rksar at yahoo dot com

Whatgives.com – New Social Network from eBay

My contact over at eBay GivingWorks pinged me this recently launched blog and social network called whatgives?!

Each blog entry is tied into an eBay GivingWorks (non-profit division of eBay to support non-profits raise funds on eBay) auction with the accompanying badge code, send to a friend functionality and the “add to” Delicious (a Yahoo! company), StumbleUpon (an eBay company), Digg, Reddit, Furl, Yahoo! and Facebook links. The site encourages members to comment on each entry and allows you to create a profile that showcases which non-profits you believe in. The profile can also include 5 photos of themselves, a short bio, and links to blogs and other public profiles on the web.

One huge set-back to this site is the ability to connect with other members with similar charity interests. How am I suppose to find other members who support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society or Boys and Girls Club? The “socialize” page (shown below) was an attempt by eBay but the only thing you can do there is search by name and location. Once you get the results the three columns of content displayed are name, location, and # of comments. Not a useful feature and really not too much thought put into the social aspect of the site. It’s a shame that eBay put all this effort into helping non-profits and executed poorly

 

Try the site out and let me know your thoughts by adding a comment below.

Thanks.

DJ Ksar

MyBlogLog

A Yahoo! company called MyBlogLog helps companies create a social network around the viewership/readership of your web site and/or blog. If you think about it the people that view your web site probably have the same interests and why not create a social network around that. Those viewers/readers should be given the ability to network with each other. MyBlogLog similiar to technorati allows you to claim your blog and create a profile page where it shows the users (fans on Technorati and readers on MyBlogLog) coming to your blog. No more as a blogger are you looking at traffic numbers such as unique users but actually users that you can communicate with.Check out the badge on right of this page which shows the most recent readers of this blog. Small piece of code that you can get from MyBlogLog. One down-side to this badge is it is not customizable unlike other badges that are being produced these days.To view my public profile on MyBlogLog go to http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/lifeofrandyksar/