Social Media has really evolved over the last 12 months. 

Arguably it started when facebook opened up their platform to developers.  

The number of applications went from 8 to hundreds within weeks and the level of user engagement increased and accelerated.  

Many other major social media sites followed facebook’s lead and announced plans to open up their platform too… most notably Google’s Open Social announcement near the end of the year which had the promise of portability of applications and widgets across multiple platforms.

Many other sites that were struggling to match the pace of facebook’s growth declared that they would also join Open Social so that collectively they could change the landscape of social media once again (maybe this time in their favour).  

There was just one major barrier 

facebook’s social graph meant that people would not easily or quickly leave facebook for another platform – not after investing so much time and effort into creating networks and connecting to friends, family and colleagues. 

As blogged on this site (see links below), it’s unlikely that consumers will abandon or share their online social media time with facebook until their data assets built within facebook became portable to other sites. 

Enter dataportability.org 

Their philosophy is that you own your own data – so you should have the right to do with it as you see fit…like export or port it to another platform, tool, or application. Check out their mission statement here. 

As of now, the group is no more than a round table of smart people looking for a way to materialize a vision…. but what’s interesting is who has joined the round table discussion.  As of today, key people from LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart, Google, facebook and Twitter have joined the conversation.

If this turns out to be more than a PR stunt, this has the potential to be the biggest story of 2008 as true identity portability means we can take our social equity and use it however we see fit – and where ever.

That’s what I’d call Social Media 2.0

Or Identity 2.0

Whatever you want to call it – this is a significant signal that the digital social media space will continue to evolve at a rapid pace this year and we all stand to benefit from this.  

Need to catch up on the conversation? Here are links to some of my previous articles that referenced portability of identity and identity 2.0:  

• Identity 2.0 – where does it begin?
• Open Social not cause for open celebreation….yet

It’s a silly excercise, but everybody does it.  After a banner year for mobile in Canada, here are 10 outrageous predictions for 2008:  

1. SMS third-party advertising – every SMS you send is 150 characters…most of which is sent as blank space. I predict new services will take advantage of this in 2008 to deliver SMS advertising to off-set mobile costs for the consumer (but only if they opt-in of course)
2. Mobile Web advertising will take a piece of your media buy. We’ve seen it happen with online media…now with more inventory becoming available off-deck, the time is right to test and pilot this channel
3. MMS Common Short Codes will finally arrive and usher us into a new era in Mobile marketing in Canada….or at least catch us up to the rest of the world.
4. Mobile payments (m-Commerce) will start to emerge from text books, blogs, and sales pitches.  Look for pilots from Interac, Visa and at least one of the major banks next year.
5. The iphone will finally arrive in Canada – but it will be the second generation 3G phone that will support higher internet access speeds and cool features like video calling. This will be offered exclusively on the Rogers network – but don’t be surprised if another non-mobile retailer offers them for sale first
6. Fixed or low-cost data plans will be universal across all carriers in Canada. It’s already started with Bell and Rogers now offers an $80 / month plan for 500 megs of data – plenty for most of us. It’s still a long way from other plans around the world that are 4 times cheaper or better, but it’s a start
7. Due to fixed or low-cost data plans, look for the mobile web to catch fire.  Marketing campaigns will start incorporating mobile web strategies as part of their marketing mix
8. A new mobile carrier will be announced. The Canadian government announced the opening of new spectrum and is reserving a piece of it for a new player and with special engagement rules that will make it easier for a new competitor to enter the market.
9. Google will continue its charge towards world mobile domination. Look for their gphone sometime in the 3rd quarter and look for them to either bid on spectrum in the U.S., buy a carrier like Sprint outright to own a piece without having to go through the auction process or leverage their new mobile platform called Android to get direct access to many subscribers across many carriers.
10. Social Networking will make the leap from desktop to Mobile as a primary interface / access point 

Even if only a few of these come to fruition in 2008, it will be a great year for Marketers and a great year for Consumers.

Happy Holidays!

Nearly a month ago I decided to launch a new blog – but this one would be focused on the ski industry. I spend a significant amount of time on snow in the winter – and usually a few weeks in the summer too. I’ve enjoyed writing for this blog so much; I figured it would be double the fun to add a second.

Thanks to the power of the interweb 2.0, it literally only takes about five minutes to setup your own blog through a free service like blogger and wordpress.  Unlike in the old days, sites are now longer built as stand-alone pieces of art. Sites today are built on content management system (CMS) which means that content lives separately from the function and design of your website. This means you can update the “theme” of your website easily and quickly without affecting your content.  Before CMS based websites, you had to update each page seperately offline or by playing with page masters in web developer applications such as dreamweaver. It used to take me hours or days to roll out a new site theme. Now it can take seconds.  

A CMS website also means you can repurpose your content for other purposes – like setting up RSS feeds or creating a mobile version of your site. Want to learn more about this? Check out this classic:

After registering a new domain for my ski blog and auto-installing the blog scripts, all I had to do was pick a theme and I would be ready to add my voice to the ski industry online. I started by doing a google search for “wordpress templates.”

Within 5 minutes of research I forgot about my ski blog and found myself drifting towards a new theme for this blog.

Three weeks, 50 sites, and over 1,000 themes reviewed later, I was thrilled to activate a new theme…for this blog over the weekend.

Although it’s really easy to update your theme, the hard part is finding one that matches your brand and the tone you’ve established with your published articles. It’s taken me nearly a month to land on the current theme…so I hope you like it. 

Now back to that ski blog… 

In the past few months we’ve been watching as Google, AOL, Yahoo, and Nokia have been making moves to extend or enter the mobile advertisting space.

Microsoft has decided to also join the party and has started placing ads on their U.S. MSN mobile page to follow efforts already made in Belgium, France, Spain, Japan, and the U.K.

The Bank of America will be one of the primary buyers of ad space – supporting their innovative mobile banking website and experience at bankofamerica.mobi. Paramount Pictures and Jaguar are the other two primary buyers.

Microsoft also plans to bring new features such as astrology, movie tickets through movietickes.com, ringtones, wallpaper, games and video clips on MSN Mobile via an agreement Microsoft has with Thumbplay.

Although Microsoft is late to the game, the mobile advertising space is still young and relatively small.  This is not like the nineties when Microsoft had to catch and kill Netscape who already dominated the browser market.  

The biggest complaint I had about the facebook Ad / flyer program was the inability to target specific user attributes beyond their subscribed network.  Metrics were weak and performance was well below industry standard for banner ads.

Enter Social Ads. Launched last month, marketers can now target users very specifically – or on pretty much any attribute found in their profile.  Expect clickthrough rates to improve.

Social Ads are also a bit controversial. Your social actions are now fair game.  Now when you create a facebook beacon on blockbuster for example, facebook could serve an Ad that matches your social action. The Ad is published in your newsfeed and therefore will be visible to your entire social network of friends, family, and vague acquaintances.

What makes this controversial is that you now appear to be an advocate or  spokesperson for the brand, product, or service that appears in your newsfeed.

Call it the celebrity effect.

Just as people are influenced by their favorite sports hero or movie actor, facebook assumes that you have your own celebrity status within your social network. It’s like adding spam to word of mouth marketing. I can’t imagine that tasting very good.  This type of non-endorsed sponsorship is bound to turn some facebook users concerned about privacy into badvocates.   

Now here’s a nifty idea – pay your facebook celebrities.  

Treat users like the celebrities that they are within their social network and pay them a nominal fee each time a social ad is served in their newsfeed. It would be just like adding Google ad sense to your blog or website. Its only made Google a few billion dollars – so that model is already proven.

Here’s another nifty idea – instead of paying cash, reward users with points.

Reward facebook users with points for being advocates and spokespeople and allow them to redeem for merchandise from sponsors…or for invitations to special events… or special applications or status within facebook. Or how about redeeming those points for travel? Who needs Air Miles now! 

If the loyalty program is designed correctly, facebook could have the most powerful loyalty program in the world overnight.

I would be an advocate of that program.

Last week Google threw a big party after launching their own developer social networking platform called OpenSocial which effectively competes with facebook’s own API developer platform.

Being the nice company that they are, they also invited all other platforms (including facebook) to join them. Many of them (i.e. LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace, Plaxo, Hi5, Flixster, Salesforce.com) have already excepted the invitation.

This is significant news that is bound to make the social networking space much more interesting in the coming months as developers can now create one application (or widget) and have the ability to easily port them across multiple platforms.  

Before declaring the end of facebook, consider the following:  

1) Portability of applications across multiple sites is a super idea - but what about portability of identities? People would be far more likely to check out (or check back in) to LinkedIn, Friendster, Myspace and other sites if they had one login / identify that worked across the network of sites.  Do the 50 million facebook users really care that applications are now cross-site compatible? Ah no…

2) Although it’s neat that multiple social networking sites have signed up, individual site policies may heavily impact a developer’s ability to be creative and make money. Some (like LinkedIn), will require approval of the application first and then charge the developer a toll or % or revenue. Unlike facebook which is totally open and toll free, developers (and marketers) may find that a common API does not necessarily equal common or consistent access to the network of sites.  Free and open will always trump mostly free and mostly open.

3) Building portable applications will not make Google’s Orkut more popular in English speaking countries or make Canadians switch to MySpace.  Applications can add to the social graph, but they can’t build or enhance what isn’t there. People joined facebook because all their friends were joining. They stayed on facebook because the user experience is simple for all to interact with.  Applications enriched the experience, but it’s not the core reason why 64% of Canadians return to their facebook profile at least once a day for an average of 32 minutes at a time. Facebook is about the community – not whether or not the applications are portable to other platforms.

To actually encourage mass migration from facebook to other platforms, OpenSocial needs to enable a true open social platform where a single user profile and its corresponding social graph can be accessed from anywhere. That’s a party I will RSVP to in a second.

The announcement of Google buying Jaiku is making waves in the industry. Imran Ali at Mobile Messaging 2.0 is calling it the most significant acquisition ever by Google. I’m calling it the continuation of a cold war arms race between Nokia and Google for world domination. Well World Mobile domination (the new WMD?) anyway.

From the East (or near-East… or near-near-East) there is Nokia. They are already world leaders in the mobile device space and have a neat mobile social network called MOSH. With their acquisition of Enpocket they now have a best in class mobile ad-delivery platform. With their acquisition of NAVTEQ they now have a best in class GPS-based mapping system to compete in the location based services (LBS) space.  With the Gartner Group forecasting that GPS based handsets will grow to around 40% by 2011 from 13% in 2007, clearly GPS or LBS could become the next killer mobile application. With all these acquisitions in the social networking / content space, Nokia is starting to look a lot like Google… 

From the West we have Google. They own search world wide and have become a massive advertising power with their Google AdWords platform…. a platform that is now being offered for free for mobile for a limited time.  Some have speculated that a mobile AdWords platform could subsidize carrier costs for the eventual release of a Google phone into the marketplace. Imagine a 3G phone loaded with Google widgets that costs little to nothing for the consumer. The g-phone could be an i-phone killer… or anything Nokia killer.

Combine the Google acquisition of Jaiku with the other recent announcement that Google also purchased Zingku – a mobile social utility tool that is web and SMS based and we have the makings of a mobile social networking platform that will rival all others.  Consider that Google already has a great installed base with Orkut (which is more popular than facebook in some parts of the world), it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that they’ll be playing in the mobile social networking space very soon. With all these acquisitions and developments, Google is starting to look a lot like Nokia…

Who will win this cold war…or will one buy the other eventually? One thing is for sure, following the mobile space is going to be very interesting over the next 18 months!

UPDATE 10/11: Nokia is also going into mobile search – check out this article on mobile semantic search!