There is never any shortage of news — if not useful, then at least fun and interesting — from the world of social media and user generated content. Three of my favorites this week:

• Facebook is apparently developing a new feature that will allow users to separate work friends from social friends, a move that could mean competition for LinkedIn. Personally, I prefer Facebook to LinkedIn for professional associations. LinkedIn amounts to little more than a list of contacts, whereas Facebook encourages me to actively keep up with my colleagues’ activities and discuss important industry issues (primarily through Groups). The one issue I have with Facebook is that I don’t exactly want my personal life to be profiled alongside my professional one. For example, several of my daughter’s friends (IRL) have “friended” me on Facebook. Have you seen the average profile of a teen girl on Facebook? Right. Nuff said. No word on when the new feature is scheduled for launch.

• Seems like everyone is getting the memo about incorporating user generated content into their online offering. MSNBC.com just announced its purchase of Newsvine, a social news site that allows users to write articles, comment on other articles, post links, etc. Even US News and World Report, a conventional print publication, is taking a page out of the UCG book – well, sort of. US News is launching a new online rankings/ratings service for luxury goods to compete with Consumer Reports. Rankings are based on a scoring system compiled from “dozens of automotive reviewers at newspapers and magazines” which are then assigned a numerical value and aggregated into final scores based on a complicated, “top secret” algorithm. Hmmm. Why automotive reviewers at conventional newspapers and magazines? Why not real people who post their opinions and experiences every day on sites like Epinions (which, after all, beats Consumer Reports in terms of traffic). The older demographic targeted by luxury goods items are heavy users of such sites and tend to trust peers most when it comes to product reviews. Come to think of it, maybe this would be a nice side business for Nielsen Buzz Metrics.

• Digg and Reddit crashed the server of a Blogger who posted the now infamous CraigsList exchange that went viral recently. The initial post on Criagslist.com was from a woman seeking advice on finding a rich husband in New York City. The post received a scathing response that read, in part “In economic terms, you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset…Your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity.” Blogger Howard Lindzon (who writes about financial trends) posted the full exchange on his Blog and jokingly responded to a commenter that he had written the scathing response. Thinking that Lindzon wrote the response, Digg and Reddit users pushed Lindzon’s blog post to the top of the heap, sending more than 100,000 visitors to a blog that normally gets only about 3000 visits per day. While the Web is still abuzz with musings about who the real author is, Lindzon noted that what he had learned from the incident was that “Digg and Reddit leave a firestorm coming through your Blog.”

Filed under: Off Topic on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 by Nan Dawkins | No Comments
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