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Notes about Spotify creator features

Spotify often gets bashed by top creators. The service pays just $0.00397 per stream, but with 108 million users listening to an average of 25 hours per month, those streams can add up for creators who can get the listener’s attention.

Spotify verifies artists who then get additional benefits on the platform. Some artists find success the traditional route, some optimize their work for the system, others work the system…and some really work it.

Relevance to other network/aggregation platforms: tiny payments add up, and given a platform, creators will find a way to get and maximize value from it. The critical component is customers.

Could BuddyPress Go The Distance?

Facebook and MySpace are trying to turn themselves into application platforms (how else will they monetize their audience?). Google is pushing OpenSocial to compete with it. But no matter what features they offer their users, they user still orbits the site.

Scot Hacker talks of BuddyPress changing the game, turning “social networks” from destination websites, to features you’ll find on every website. And the “social network” is the internet, with all those sites sharing information meaningfully.

Some might say this is little more than overgrown XFN, but Tris Hussey thinks Ning is on the ropes and Facebook should be worried.

At least the design shows all the right stuff.

SWIFT: Another Ham Handed Attempt At Social Networking

All yesterday and this morning I’ve been seeing tweets about SWIFT, so I finally googled it to see what it was about. The service promises to help organize conferences in some new 2.0 way, but it looks to be about as preposterous a social network as WalMart’s aborted 2006 attempt at copying MySpace. There are […] » about 300 words

BuddyPress: The WordPress Of Social Networks?

Andy Peatling, who developed a WordPress MU-based social network and then released the code as BuddyPress has just joined Automattic, where they seem to have big plans for it. I’d been predicting something like this since Automattic acquired Gravatar:

It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.

Is Facebook Really The Point?

A post to Web4lib alerted me to this U Mich survey about libraries in social networks (blog post) that finds 77% of students don’t care for or want libraries in Facebook or MySpace. the biggest reason being that they feel the current methods (in-person, email, IM) are more than sufficient. 14% said no because they […] » about 500 words

Twitter Twitter Anti-Twitter

My own feelings about Twitter have gone back and forth across indecision street for a while, and despite a moment of excitement it’s still not part of my life-kit. So I was amused to see Blyberg pointing out Kathy Sierra’s poo-poo-ing of Twitter. Ironically, services like Twitter are simultaneously leaving some people with a feeling […] » about 200 words

The Wealth of Networks

Wendy Seltzer gave a shout-out for Yochai Nenkler‘s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, describing it as… …an economic history of information production. We’re moving from the age of industrial information production to one of social information production. Ever-faster computers on our desks let us individually produce what would have […] » about 200 words

Identity Management In Social Spaces

(note: the following is cross-posted at Identity Future.) Being that good software — the social software that’s nearly synonymous with Web 2.0 — is stuff that gets you laid, where does that leave IdM? Danah Boyd might not have been thinking about it in exactly those terms, but her approach is uniquely social-centered. She proposes […] » about 400 words

This Is What Social Software Can Do

The <a href="http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2006/03/this_is_what_fl.html" title="FlickrBlog">FlickrBlog</a> reports this message from <a href="http://www.flickr.com/people/yeimaya/">Gale</a>: <blockquote>People have been submitting good humpback whale fluke shots to a group called <a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/humpbackflukes">Humpback whale flukes</a>. I volunteer at <a href="http://www.coa.edu/alliedwhale">Allied Whale</a> which holds the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog and I was able to make a very exciting match with one of the whales that was posted on the group by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/25212853@N00/88329014/in/pool-humpbackflukes/">GeorgeK</a>. George saw this whale in Newfoundland in the summer of 2005. It <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/25212853@N00/88329014/#comment72057594077150312">matched with</a> HWC#2943 in the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catolog ..... this whale was seen only once before in March 1984!!! on Silver Bank (the breeding grounds North of the Dominican Republic). This is what flickr has the power to do.</blockquote> » about 300 words

Yahoo! Rocks The Web

No, I don’t mean that they’re disrupting it, I mean they’re getting it. And in saying that, I don’t mean they’re figured it our first, but they they’re making some damn good acquisitions to get it right.

Mostly, I’m speaking of they’re purchase of Flickr last year and their acquisition of del.icio.us Friday. But in a somewhat lesser way I’m also speaking of their announcement Monday that they’ll be offering blogs as well.

Yeah, Google rocked this picture a good long while ago with their purchase of Blogger long before most people could understand what value it offered, and even Microsoft beat Yahoo! to this. But the better way to read this is as the final piece to a rather impressive array of social software.

And where perhaps only ten percent of internet users will likely ever be regular bloggers, it’s a safe assumption that nearly 100 percent of internet users will create bookmarks and almost as many will have reason to post a photo online. And with Yahoo! controlling the leading services for both, it sort of rearranges the picture.