RockMelt, The Browser With Social In Mind

Okay, so I've stepped into line for the RockMelt Beta Test which formally opened yesterday. I'm not quite sure what to expect, I've already got 5 browsers installed on pc. So why do I need RockMelt? Well, for one thing I'm a software tester now and I'd better see how it plays with our service, though I'm almost certain that's not what RockMelt is all about. Seems as if this browser is mostly focused on being Social, which also intrigues me, and as such it is getting a fair amount of press this morning. I'll give it a go as soon as I get my e-mail invite and let you know what I think but in the mean while check out this promo video:

$250 million Venture Capital Fund Established For Investment In Social Web

Venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers along with Facebook, Amazon, and Zynga, are establishing a $250 million fund (the sFund) to aid the development of a new generation of social web offerings. 

"There's going to be an opportunity over the next five years or so to pick any industry and rethink it in a social way," said Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. "We think that every industry is going to be fundamentally re-thought and designed around people."

With KPCB putting up most of the money, the others are offering assistance in various ways. Amazon will provide it's web services platform for one year to selected companies and Facebook providing access to it's platform team and beta APIs.

The big focus of the fund will be social start-ups from all industries but no money will be provided to direct competitors of Facebook, Amazon, or Zynga (so there's the hook!).

"Think of it as a quarter-billion-dollar party. The third great wave of the internet is mobile and social together. It's going to be tectonic," said KPCB partner John Doerr.

Source: BBC 

Exploding Or Eroding Your Brand Via Social Networking

Social media savvy can come in handy while trying to market your business, brand, product, or service; however the Globe and Mail has compiled a list of anecdotal evidence and they've spoken with the "experts" who warn that the opposite can also be true. The truth of the matter is that exploiting social media is like a wild fire rather than a controlled burn, and just as you might hope the winds are in your favour, they'll sometimes turn on you and you'll get burned!

"...where potential returns come with risk, summarized in this warning from Della Smith, the principal of Q Workshops: With social media, “you can do a lot of brand damage very easily.”"

Check out Timothy Taylor's "Are Twitter and Facebook evil?" a short, but interesting read.

Employer Blocking Social Networking Sites? There's Always A Way...

A recent survey conducted of 270 Chief Information Officers in companies across Canada showed that fifty-eight percent of them blocked access to social networking sites. This is not being looked kindly upon by young employees who have grown up with the sites and don't view them as time wasters. These employees are resourceful though, and using their mobile devices or connecting through proxy servers they are finding their ways to update their online status.

The Globe and Mail has the cat and mouse story here.

Google Opens To Limited Public Trial

Google Wave, which combines IM, email, and wiki-style editing goes on public trial today with 100,000 invitees, each of whom can nominate five more people to "join the Wave".

"It struck us that e-mail is still the main communication tool on the web, which seemed remarkable given that it is 20-year-old technology," said Lars Rasmussen, who, alongside his brother Jens, was the brains behind Google Maps. "We found we could build a flexible tool with a surprising amount of functionality," Mr Rasmussen told BBC News.

Watch the looooong video you'll understand why I'm so excited about Wave.

User Generated Hyper Local News Ala Fwix

One year old startup Fwix is releasing an iPhone app later this week to assist would be reporters in capturing the news. “We believe we are the real-time local newswire,” said Darian Shirazi, Fwix’s 22-year-old founder. With local news no longer covering local stories like they once did, Fwix hopes to fill the void with user generated content about car accidents, fires, and grand openings provided by an army of unpaid locals armed with iPhones. According to the New York Times "Mr. Shirazi said Fwix would offer more relevant updates. Its software ranks items based on whether other users submit articles that mention similar events and locations and if the person was at the scene, information it gleans from the iPhone’s GPS location data."

Social Networking Activities Jump

If you are spending more time on social networking sites these days, you are not alone. According to this Globe and Mail article "Nielsen Online, which measures web traffic, said the number of minutes on social networks in the United States rose 83 per cent in April from the same month a year ago..."

The total number of minutes spent on Facebook alone went from 1.7 billion a year ago to 13.9 billion in April of this year, a 700% increase. As for site popularity Facebook was no. 1, followed by MySpace, Blogger, Tagged.com, and Twitter.com, in that order. Not surprising to me, Twitter saw the greatest growth with a 3,712 per cent increase in April as compared to a year ago.

Google's Virtual World - Lively.com

Niniane Wang an Engineering Manager at Google announced on the Official Google Blog yesterday the release of lively.com, a 3 dimensional social web project that was undertaken through Google's 20% program that encourages employees to spend 20% of their working time developing ideas. Here is a quote from the blog post "If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator's interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar's look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions. In our user research, we’ve been amazed at how much more poignant it is to receive an animated hug than seeing the text “[[hug]]”." It seems a little like an embedded 2nd life, I've not yet downloaded the client but intend to play around with it, you just might see a greatbiggeek room popping up soon. I'll let you know...