During the last couple of days at the next09 conference here in Hamburg Germany, I enjoyed quite a few very interesting presentations, talks and discussions. Amongst the internationally known people were bloggers/thinkers such as Jeff Jarvis, Brian Solis, Umair Haque, Steve Rubel, Stowe Boyd plus a few others. Of course, there were also many well known digerati from Germany/Europe, checkout the next conference homepage for a list of the speakers.
One of the most inspiring speaches was the keynote of Jeff Jarvis, who just wrote the book „what would Google do„.
Techcrunch’s Robin Wauters interviewed Jeff Jarvis during the conference for a quick take on the points he made during his presentations at next09:
We expected it, didn’t we. Facebook offering advertising targeted to peoples interests and likes. Now they offer this kind of advertising via their facebook flyers, reports TechCrunch.
The targeting offered covers the following sofar:
the Flyers let you target by country, city, gender, age range, political views, relationship status, education level, workplace affiliation, or any keyword in a person’s stated interests. It’s that last option that could be really powerful. For instance, simply putting in different keywords into the Facebook Flyers ad-targeting page reveals that of the 19,951,900 Facebook members in the U.S., 101,000 are into rock climbing, 411,000 are into cooking, and 706,160 people are into traveling.
Regarding Facebook: there are already many rumours spreading. And depending on who is seen with whom in photos (which are so blurry you can’t see anything), the valuations for Facebook are going up and up. Currently at $15 billion.
According to the this article, MySpace is going into the same direction offering targeted advertising.
Interesting. Only a few days ago I wrote about possible competitors to facebook, and now I find two posts on techcrunch that relate to my post plus the discussion I had with Mr. White.
Until today Pageflakes users could create pages for their own use, and/or make public pages called Pagecasts. The content was and continues to be completely up to the user. Now, however, each user also gets a profile page and can add other Pageflakes users as friends. Effectively, Pageflakes is now a social network, and users can connect based on common interests.
The second one is about the walled gardens of social networks and how this might be overcome, citing the new Plaxo Pulse as an example.
Plaxo Pulse ties together disparate services from across the web unlike the news feed, which ties together only Facebook’s content. While Plaxo hasn’t launched a platform to a crowded hall of over-eager developers, they have quietly focused on linking to existing applications on the web. Currently the provide a single interface for syncing with the social feeds, email, contact, and calendaring applications business people care about. It’s no long stretch to see this developing into even deeper integration with more web applications.
This relates to this comment of Mr. White (plus his subsequent comment) about introducing a protocol layer. Something similar is already on its way by initiatives such as the OpenID Directory.
Wo ich sonst so bin...