Ex MySpacers Moving On: the New Cutting Edge of Social Media?

Once upon a time, MySpace was the most revolutionary thing on the social web (that most people knew about). These days, it’s passé. But several of its former executives are still actively pondering how they can revolutionize social interaction on the Internet—and they’re doing it through a new startup, Gravity.

Led by former MySpacer (then-COO) Amit Kapur, (then-SVP) Steve Pearman and (then-SVP) Jim Benedetto, the company is rethinking forums and groups, online social meetingplaces that haven’t evolved a whole lot since they began. Gravity is bringing forums and groups into the 21st century—and that’s just one of the things they’re working on.

They’ve also looked at the performance indicators and metrics they’re most interested in tracking on these new social meetingplaces—and offering those analytics for any site that hosts conversations (like Twitter, Google Wave, FriendFeed, etc.), free to third parties. Oh, and they’re ready to take all the information they gather about users to great an interest graph, following their conversations to indicate what they’re most passionate about.

Hm. We’ll come back to that one.

The Gravity forums, according to TechCrunch, will be intuitive to anyone familiar with forums, “But their goal is to bring some more recent thinking on data architecture and user interface to the table.” That includes tools that are similar to other popular social sites. Gravity calls their product “conversation engines,” and they’ll be including familiar ways to follow conversations, share information and advertise that you like it, as well as participation incentives. The forums will be based around interests and topics (like most forums) and will be available on the Gravity website—or other websites, through widgets and APIs.

The analytics, Gravity Insight, is even more useful, tracking conversations, posts and topics. It also tracks what posts are most viewed, what threads and users are most active, and the interest areas of the posts. They’ll provide this service free for third parties—to help better collect data for their interest graph.

The Interest Graph is the “religion of the Gravity service.” It examines not only what topics you follow and talk about the most, but the language you use about those topics. It tracks your interest over time (’interest decay’).

All that leads to a interest-based profile of you, which can make it better at bringing you content (and friends?) you’d like. (Kind of like StumbleUpon, I guess, except that it just figures out what you like, or when you’re over your Hannah Montana phase.) I can’t decide whether that’s creepy or cool. (The service, not liking Hannah Montana. Because if you’re over about 20, that’s straight up creepy.)

Gravity is taking sign ups for the private beta at their website now.

What do you think? What is most interesting about these features to you? Which would you most like to try out?

NFL (No Fun League) Policies Around Social Media Expand

While it’s probably not fair to attach the “No Fun League” tag to the NFL in this instance it certainly makes for a better headline, so there. The league, which earlier this year linked itself to the US Marine Corps and others by limiting social media use by its ‘employees’ has expanded those terms before the start of the regular season. With the start of the regular season a little over a week away the premier US sports league has decided to at least say that it wants to exercise more control over how the game and its image is portrayed in the new world of social media interaction.

cnet reports

On Monday, the league announced that it had modified its social-media policy to limit Twitter and social-networking use by players, coaches, league officials, and even the media.

The NFL said that it will let players, coaches, and other team personnel engage in social networking during the season. However, they will be prohibited from using Twitter and from updating profiles on Facebook and other social-networking sites during games.

In addition, they will not be allowed to tweet or update social-networking profiles 90 minutes before a game and until post-game interviews are completed.

The rules even extend to people “representing” a player or coach on their personal accounts.

The NFL didn’t just stop with the league itself, though. The organization also said that media attending games will be prohibited from providing game updates through social networks.

It appears that the league is trying to extend the policy that has is used in the broadcast of the games which is usually read during a down time in the action by an obviously bored announcer restricting any retransmission or reproduction of the game and that it’s prohibited etc, etc. The NFL claims it is trying to prevent people from providing a play by play description during a game because it would be an unauthorized use of the product. How they intend to enforce this is another question altogether.

So will the players test the limits? Probably so, especially those who make up for on field lack of performance by over performance in the public eye via social media like Chad Johnson Ochocinco. How about the media itself? There are likely to many wannabe sports reporters out there (and actual ones as well) that will expand their coverage of these games and the ‘stories’ surrounding them via Twitter, Facebook etc. What will be interesting is just how the league metes out justice when the first violators are caught.

So why did I say that the NFL’s ‘No Fun League’ may not apply here? I think they deserve to exercise some control over how the product is presented at least around the games themselves. Imagine that a player misses a play or causes a penalty because he is busy tweeting to his adoring (bizarre) fans? Will it be a game or a media showdown? I like the games myself.

So your take? Whether you like football or not this type of situation is playing out in companies and organizations every day as the ‘rules of engagement’ in the social media world are being set on the fly. Precedents are being set and mistakes are being made all the time. Is the NFL setting a good precedent or committing the Internet’s version of a turnover?

Facebook’s New Incubator fbFund REV Announces Winners

You have to give Facebook credit. They get in the news more a lot. Maybe it’s investment. Maybe it’s a look at their numbers. Maybe it’s someone on the executive team has a hang nail. You name it they are there.

That’s why this news seemed more interesting than just the usual talk. TechCrunch reports that Facebook has announced the 20 winners of a competition to be included in a program to help them develop their platforms with a combination of money and other benefits.

Twenty companies, which include two nonprofits, will take part in a program headed by Founders Fund’s Dave McClure, and will have the chance to work with Facebook engineers and a range of Silicon Valley veterans. Facebook intends to keep us posted on the startups’ progress throughout the session, and will be holding a demo day at the end of the summer to help expose the companies to investors and press.

The list of companies are focused primarily in companies that are either social networking platforms like MyChurch.org or RunThere which is a social platform for runners and cyclists or other applications and services that facilitate online social interaction. McClure is interested in helping these folks get to business with this program.

it will emphasize getting the companies to release and iterate their products quickly, rather than spending a long time on the development cycle.

While there are two non-profits on the roster the fund is not operating as such. In other words they aren’t doing this for free. McClure says

The average amount of investment is $25,000, with over $500,000 being distributed in total (the non-profits are excluded from receiving funding, but are invited to the program for free). Investments are being made as a convertible note, with a discount for future priced rounds. fbFund is taking roughly a 1-5% stake in each company (around 2% for most of them), which is in line with what other incubators have been doing.

No word on any other Incubalooza events in the future but it might be a good time for aspiring social networking companies to set up camp in Facebook town. As we have noted recently, they do have the money.

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