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Hot Potato to be shut down as team moves to Facebook
I’m sad to see Hot Potato go — but it looks like their acquisition by Facebook is now confirmed. Hot Potato was a great service that still had plenty of room to grow. It will now be shut down under its new owners. It was definitely ahead of its time.
It’s been an exciting year at Hot Potato. Since going live last November, we’ve been inspired and energized by your reaction to the service and people’s appetite for socializing around activities and live events.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce that some of the features and thinking behind Hot…
News vs Facebook (guess who won?)
But here’s the real surprise: News sites scored higher than Facebook.
Here’s a summary of the scores:
Guess what Facebook got? 64. MySpace scored 63.
ACSI attributed the low numbers for social networks to “controversies over privacy issues, frequent changes to user interfaces, and increasing commercialization.”
Social media and the TV connection
A new post by Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins is highlighting an interesting (but perhaps not too surprising) trend regarding news consumption on Facebook vs Google News.
Facebook sends news traffic to:
Google News, on the other hand, sends news traffic to:
Note the difference and possible conclusion: Facebook is great at directing news to broadcast sites, presumably for breaking news and live events; Google, by contrast, sends traffic to high reputation newspaper sites, presumably for the broader picture.
This data coincides with what the TV industry already knows: social media is helping to create an online water-cooler conversation, encouraging people to spend time online and on TV at the same time.
Case in point: NBC showed the Golden Globes on both coasts in the U.S. for the first time this year, in a nod to the symbiotic relationship between TV and social media; ultimately, people witnessing a live event want to be attached to each other.
Worrying: Facebook patents the Newsfeed
Patents are nothing new in the tech industry; giants like Intel and Apple have played this card for years to deliver the goods that we’re now so familiar with.
But what happens when your activity online suddenly becomes a patent fight?
Facebook this week was granted a patent on — guess what — its Newsfeed.
According to the patent filing, the Newsfeed is:
A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items.
Can you imagine a social web experience in 2010 without a news feed?
This is a massive game changer as it take the fight straight into what everyone else is trying to do right now: help users discover relevant and interesting stories flagged through their primary filter — their friends.
As I wrote previously, status updates will be the most valuable consumer content in the next two years as a gold mine of insights into user behavior and preference. Facebook’s move to create a moat around this is troubling.
So is this the end of the line for other companies? Probably not. In fact, this could be a good thing. Since many of us hate the way Newsfeeds are presented, this is a fabulous opportunity for innovators to present social news in new ways.
How would you like to see your social news feed?
(Illustration: Geek and Poke/Creative Commons)
Is Facebook now a major news site?
I always knew it would happen, but not this quickly.
According to data crunched by Hitwise, Facebook is now the fourth largest source of traffic to news and media sites, sitting just behind MSN. 
With its dizzying growth and the new options it creates for content publishers, Facebook could avoid the vampire stigma attached to machine aggregators like Google News.
This is how Facebook compares to Google News as an upstream source of traffic to news sites:
Facebook, in a blog last week, extolled the virtues of its news-distribution abilities, pointing to what it considers the best filter for you: Your friends.
In this era of social news, information is more ubiquitous than ever before and the rate at which we consume and share news has never been quicker. Your friends on Facebook help you cut through the clutter so you can read what’s most relevant to you, discover new items and carry on thoughtful discussions.
It’s clear that Facebook can deliver the traffic, but can it help publishers monetize on the social media site itself? Right now, distributing on Facebook creates two problems for publishers:
First, you’re further fragmenting the conversation by splitting comments (although this can be avoided in some degree through Facebook Connect). Second, there’s no meaningful way for you to advertise and target your news consumers on Facebook.
Despite the traffic it sends, many more people are reading and interacting with news content directly on Facebook. Most users don’t care where the news comes from, as long as it is deemed credible and accurate. So what can be done to monetize that user base?
For Facebook to succeed, it needs a deeper engagement with publishers who will have to start counting beans at some point. What do users do after they read your article on Facebook? How many people do they recommend it to? How many of their friends follow through by clicking on the link? And why aren’t there keyword ads?
Distribution and dialogue are great. But at some point, you’ll still have to monetize it.
(Photo: U.S. Navy, Sailors at Naval Air Station, Beaufort, South Carolina, listen to a radio broadcast of news of Japan’s surrender, 14 August 1945.)
Odd ending: Friendster sold to Malaysia’s MOL
Friendster’s long and colorful history just got a little more interesting.
The company, one of the grand-daddys of the social media revolution, has been bought by Malaysia’s MOL Global, a unit of online payment provider MOL AccessPortal. There was no mention of price, but a Reuters report previously put the number at more than $100 million.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Friendster was eventually bought by an Asian company since the region represents 90 percent of the firm’s 115-million member user base.
The question is: what in the world does MOL plan to do with Friendster? The press release accompanying the announcement had a hint:
“The new combined entity will now build upon that initial set of products to deliver a content distribution network and e-commerce platform, enabling a wide array of content to be distributed to Friendster’s community and monetize via micro-transactions using MOL’s payment platform. MOL will use the leverage of its physical distribution networks to localize and extend the online reach of social networking in Southeast Asia to the physical world through Tan Sri Vincent Tan’s substantial assets across Malaysia and the region, including retail franchises in Malaysia and across Southeast Asia such as Starbucks, 7-Eleven, Borders, Krispy Kreme, Wendy’s and Papa John’s Pizza, just to name a few.”
I’m cynical, but doesn’t that sound like a plan to distribute pre-paid micropayment cards off the counter?
If that’s the primary plan, well, good luck. MOL’s reach needs to go deeper and further than just Malaysia — and that won’t come fast enough to save Friendster from devastation brought on by Facebook in key markets like Indonesia.
MSN’s new home page: Two steps in the right direction
I have never been a fan of the MSN home page. Too cluttered and too many stories that don’t matter to me, such as “The Fight to Save a Man-Eating Shark.” Really?
But this one caught my eye.
MSN today previewed their new home page. And it’s great.
I’m not one to gush about Microsoft (disclosure: I work for Yahoo!). But this is what MSN is doing right in its first major redesign in about five years:
1. It’s clean. No more silly module boxes around the page. It’s now feels “free.” Microsoft also cut the number of links by 50 percent. That’s a lot to give up. And the number of ads on the page: two.
2. Facebook and Twitter integration. This one is big. I’ve often argued that social status updates will be the biggest single commodity for advertisers in the next two years — and the most sought-after feature by users, now. MSN got it right (although one blog disagrees with the execution) — put popular social media networks right on the front page. It’s nice to see MSN getting past the ‘we-don’t-feature-rivals’ mentality that has drained so many sites. Facebook integration (via Facebook Connect) works nicely for me and delivers the 2-way integration that we all want.
Now, if we can just improve on MSN’s choice of stories.
