From the category archives:

Social Networks

Michael Wolff: MySpace Users Are Doomed, Poor

by John Jorgensen on December 2, 2008

Michael Wolff, author of The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, released this morning, sat down with BusinessWeek’s Jon FIne and provided a not so glamorous take on MySpace.
On MySpace’s $25 billion+ valuation: “It doesn’t make any difference. That’s gonna go down. What they are looking at is the distinct possibility that it can go down to nothing.”
On MySpace users being tied to the site’s community: “That’s exactly what they said about AOL. Your email was there, because your friends were there. I mean, AOL operated actually as the community of its day… What they saw at the time was that [users] were absolutely wedded to AOL. That was Time Warner’s bet on that.”
On MySpace users: “If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.”

Do you agree with Michael’s assessment of MySpace?

by Jason Wilk on December 1, 2008

College Tonight (CBEGE) is the social network for college students, which took itself public in a reverse merger, raising $1,639,500 in November 2007.
The company which came out of the gates hoping to take on Facebook is standing on some thin sticks.
Since it’s inception, the company has burnt through over $1 million dollars trying to do so.
In a recent gasp for air, the founder, Zachary Suchin tried to launch another social product for college students called TheQuad.com.
The founders went on a road trip and hired Lauren Conrad of The Hills (barf), to promote TheQuad brand and tell students nationwide that they finally have a place online to go hangout.
Maybe they were trying to reach out to the students who hadn’t heard of Facebook, which seems about right according to their traffic numbers. Both properties combined have not been able to pass 15K views a month (according to Comscore reports)
To make legitimate ad dollars in this town (which is what they are relying on driving revenue with), a site must get to at least 100,000 views a month to even have a chance at making a tiny bit of money.
The most important thing to check out is their market cap, which is at $5.5M right now. A site with traffic and revenue like they have is not even worth the legal costs of transferring the company into your name.
This company has no hope in site. Anyone who owns some of the 34 million outstanding shares, it’s time to sell.

by Jason Wilk on November 25, 2008

KickApps CEO Alex Blum cofrimed yesterday the company raised a Sereies C round of $14M with a new lead investor, North Atlantic Capital.
KickApps provides on-demand social media applications and platforms for leading publishers. Big media companies love them because it lets them put social features on sites they already control.
Current properties they power include: San Francisco 49ers, Gossip Girl, Rachel Ray’s Incredible People, the McCainSpace and more.
40 percent of its business is now overseas, including a Guinness World Records social destination.
It’s largest competitor Ning has been losing customers like WarnerBros over the past year because of Ning’s hands off approach to helping publishers control and manage their own enviornment like KickApps does.
Existing investors that joined the round include Softbank, Spark Prism and Jarl Mohn.

by Jason Wilk on November 7, 2008

Friend View is Nokia’s experimental mobile location and micro-blogging service that also works via standard web.
The application uses the built-in GPS, network triangulation, or manual updates to decide where you are.
Once logged-in, it pinpoints you as well as all your friends who are on the service.
Instead of Twitter’s ‘What Are You Doing’ question, Nokia asks ‘What’s Up’.
I’m guessing this will roll out in Japan first as a test.
With Nokia as the smart phone leader, and also having the power to move this app onto every deck they manufacture, will this become an immediate threat to mobile social networks like Loopt and ever-growing Twitter?