CoolNerd

  Big news for the folks on Myspace, the gaming world is about to about to join in on the social network frenzy on Myspace. News Corp. announced today that Myspace.com has partnered with Oberon Media, a platform for casual games. Oberon Media has experience in PC, online, mobile and interactive TV categories. They also have a nice list of heavy-hitting partners that they currently work with, and the largest social network, Myspace.com is about to join in on the fun.

The Myspace games, powered by Oberon is scheduled to launch in January. The timing of this move is huge for Myspace since the online gaming (now with its own acronym OLG) is growing faster than any other online activity, and will reach 4 billion in revenue by the end of 2008. Looks like Myspace is positioning itself with the help of Oberon to be a part of the booming trend online.

The fairly new social network site MyLifeBrand recently received $750,000 from an undisclosed party - pretty hefty amount for a small start-up out of Utah (by the way my home state). MyLifeBrand launched earlier this year with some big claims about their social platform. I heard about the social network several months ago, but not until recently did I decide to give it a try. So here are my impressions:

• The graphics of the site are pretty cool, but the bright colored navigation buttons on the site are a bit distracting to me, in fact I avoided clicking on them for a good while because I thought they were paid banner ads or something.

• I am a bit confused with the Community -I can’t seem to figure out how to change from the Global community, but I imagine we’ll see more from this as time goes on.
• They have a nifty little way of allowing users to aggregrate other social networks although when I tried this with my Facebook account and it displayed Facebook in a frame - personally not a fan. Not sure how else they could achieve this, but my thoughts on this would be to minimize the MyLifeBrand navigation menus it would allow for a more appealing user experience.

• I tried to import my friends from my Facebook & Myspace accounts and it neither of them worked. Oh well, they are in Bet.
• I like the Jazzbots.com site that is running as a MyLifeBrand social community, and I can see this feature being a potentially high revenue platform if they do this right. If they prove a solid solution for the NBA Jazz it could open some doors for them.

It will be interesting to see what the $750k will do for MyLifeBrand, I would like to see more with the Community idea and the social aggregation.

My first thought when I saw Fmail, a recent Facebook app was why not wait until Google buys Facebook and then we can get the real Gmail app integrated. And what about hotmail? Are we going to see FotMail or FaceMail pop up soon - especially with the talks between Microsoft and Facebook? (j/k)

I decided to add the Fmail app and it actually is really clean and quite functional if you don’t mind the iframe and a small window at that. Not only that but the biggest flaw of all is the inability for the auto-complete of the email address in the “To:” section when composing new mail.

The interesting this about so many of the applications that are flying onto Facebook is that I wonder if the developers actually sit back and figure out if their app will actually make sense to have it on the social platform. I use Facebook every day and I have several applications that I use and many, many that I have tried and discarded. The best apps on Facebooks are the ones that easily fit into the Social Activity Stream and that can tap into the Facebook social graph. If the app doesn’t, well it just doesn’t make much sense to put in to the game.

This particular app to me looks more like an experiment, something the developers can pat themselves on the back with and say “we did it guys.” Nonetheless, and not to be too harsh on the Fmail dev team, this is a good attempt at integrating Gmail into the Facebook social network.

Cruising the Internet this evening I came across Rsizr.com, a really cool image re-sizer.   It uses a method called “retarget” where certain brush strokes are removed when shrinking the image and when enlarging it the brush strokes are added.  I can see a lot of potential for this site and the software behind it.  All-in-all, Rsizr.com is pretty cool.

Here is a screenshot of Rzisr reading the brush strokes with the retarget mode:

Big talks going on in the social network arena.  Microsoft and Facebook are in talks about a big deal wherein Mircosoft may consider investing $300 million to $500 million into Facebook for a 5 percent stake in the company.  Not only that but Google is also expressing interest in the booming social network according to New York Times.

This is the crazy part as noted in the by DealBook editor, Andrew Ross Sorkin:

“The amount, the publication noted, would amount to more than $200 per Facebook user — well above the $70 that Google put on YouTube’s individual eyeballs or $50 that Ebay paid for each of Skype’s earlobes. “

The sandbox of Social Networks is getting pretty hot in the noon day sun, and with this recent deal with Facebook and Microsoft one is left to wonder how News Corp is feeling about this news since MySpace is still the number one social network on the world wide web.  It makes sense that this is a positive note for MySpace since they are still leading the pack in the Social Networking world.  Sorkin points out:

“MySpace is clearly bigger than Facebook. It had about 68 million unique visitors to its site last month, according to comScore. That is about twice the number that stopped by Facebook during the same period. “

If one recalls the big deal with MySpace of $580 million that thought went around that the social networking industry had hit a peak because MySpace is the giant.  That point aside, I ask the question, why Microsoft?  I am sure there are several reasons, but Forrester analyst Charlene Li sums up a very valid point in the Reuters coverage of this story:

“If you are building a business around building a platform there is one company that has done it better than anybody else — and that is Microsoft,” she said. “People have been just assuming that Google would be the best partner and that is not necessarily the case.”

Whether you believe this point or not, there is some undeniable truth to it - look at the numbers.  Any way you look at thi, Mark Zuckerberg, will be a happy man whether Microsoft or Google put a stake into Facebook.  A Microsoft could do a lot with a partnership with Facebook.

One thing that can clearly be derived from this recent news…the game ain’t over yet.  MySpace is not immune to competition and that leaves the opportunities wide open for anyone.

Okay first of all, I am a big fan of iTunes and the convenience of getting individual songs rather than having to buy the whole CD. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I bought a CD. With the latest news about Amazon’s Mp3 digital store I am quite intrigued by this for a couple of reasons:

1. Amazon has variable pricing 89 - 99 cents per download. Why would they want to vary the price? Well listening to National Public Radio this morning the Amazon spokes person mentioned that because of the record companies certain albums have different costs and therefore they pass that savings on to the customer downloading the mp3. Good move? Not clear yet, but Steve Jobs’ comment about their customers liking the 99 cent download because it’s less confusing might be true to some extent. However, for someone who downloads a thousand songs a year they’d save $100 bucks if the price were 89 cents.
2. The format! This is the biggest thing in my mind. I love Apple! But the AAC locked format that iTunes uses is ridiculous. I can’t tell you how many times I have wanted to simply place a purchased iTunes song in my personal home video of my kids and get the message that it cannot be done. Ya I know there are hacks and work arounds to get past the locked format, but come one…I am buying the music. As long as I am not reselling or pushing it all out through a p2p network I should be able to have some more flexibility on what devices I can play it on. Every Amazon mp3 will come without the DRM software - this is good news for all music players out there, including the iPod.

According to NPR, Amazon might be the first player in the online music world to compete with Apply iTunes, well, we will have to wait and see.

Google has released a new application called Presentation in the Google Docs. Most of us expected this to arrived sometime as Google is gradually encroaching on the MS Office territory. Personally I think this is a great move by Google and we can all expect to see a lot more functionality of Presentation to come soon.

One of the best aspects of Presentation is the abielity to import Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, and the process is very smooth. I decided once the app came out to try importing one of my ppt files. It took just a minute, but the file imported with out any problem.

The collaboration capabilities makes Presentation extremely handy. Just the other day at work we had a company branding meeting wherein we had several MS PowerPoint files to review. The problem we had though was that four people were calling in from remote areas. The files were large so email was tedious so after a loss of 15 minutes or so of trying to get everyone the files via instant messaging or email we were able to begin the meeting. Now with Google Presentation this process will be so much easier.

Here’s a great video I found on the Official Google Blog site:

I look forward to more amazing products from Google. One app that I would really like to see from Google is a personal finance application.