Similar to Google Groups, users can also create closed groups, allowing only a select few of their friends to gain access to the group.

The stage of evolution after Web 2.0 is (as said before) the integration and interaction between all the web tools that made Web 2.0 leaders a success. Levubu is setting the stage for this kind of development, and I’m sure new sites of similar nature are soon to follow!

I my self realized this yesterday when researching the social network space. What is different about the MySpace Wall is it is more expressive. Users have the option of using text/voice/images/video and so the younger crowd find this more natural to adopt. I am not sure of the user segments in MySpace vs facebook, but I feel that users may start young with more expressive and open mediums like MySpace and over age move on to other forums like FaceBook/LinkedIn etc.

The user and a person with interests generally changing with age/demography/social changes has to be considered to understand adoption .

Like any other wave, there will be players that are here to stay and more that will fade away.

But as existing users may opt out there is the new generation of users that will start joining and participating in groups . Like a moving window.

Cheers Chandan

http://media-monopoly.blogspot.com/

Social networks are ripe ground for businesses to directly market and sell their products and services to people and other businesses. While many may say that is already true today the difference is enabling businesses to have a direct vs. indirect presence within networks.

To enable businesses to connect with other businesses and to have their presence seen directly rather than only through people in a network that just happen to work for a particular business.

Enabling businesses to have and manage their own profiles within networks and to exchange goods and services may in fact be the process that further ignites the medium to be more than a “social network”. Many business spend thousands of dollars to attend and have a presence at trade shows and conventions throughout any given year. Social networks represent a medium for a 24/7 trade show at a fraction of the cost of “physical trade shows and conventions”.

Footnote: Since launching 48 hours ago Business 3.0 has over 400 Business registering their profiles and learning how to use the application. In addition the Business 3.0 application is now able to integrate with your personal profile, see my profile on Facebook.

Just think about the possibilities.

One of the aspects is social networks can facilitate communication at the business level eg Terrys Business Network and not just in MySpace aimed at the younger generation.

Nigel

Noah

E-mail – video & text with some amazing features Instant messenger – Video & Text Live Web Casting Bloging Podcasting Store all of your Music, Photos and videos

ALL IN ONE PLACE! And it’s all web based all you need is a webcam.

I also agree with you that video is where we are heading because if you notice all of the new lap tops have cameras built in them already!

http://www.VMdirect.com/MarthaB http://www.helloworld.com http://www.myspace.com/enterhelloworld

lots of nifty stuff. i can imagine future integration with all sorts of stuff that will put a dent in evite and others. integration with google docs. integration with google calendar, gmail, maps, etc.

the biggest thing for me, though, is mailing list integration. how huge is that for small businesses and such? i’m guessing i could soon use the Google Data API to create a new mailing list for each new small group that is created on my social networking-type website. this functionality is, in fact, what i’ve needed for months, now ( http://www.socster.com/ ), but haven’t yet implemented b/c of the potential effort required. now, i just need to learn the Google Data API and get busy. this is a big deal. before, I might have to send out 300 emails to my users – now i can send out one message to my new google group (myprivateusergroup@googlegroups.com), and i’m done. i and then of thousands of other folks are on shared hosting providers where we start getting charged for over ‘x’ number of emails sent. google groups could help alleviate our cost concerns. not to mention, we’d have some spam protection, less configuration, etc.

i imagine a place like Dogster.com would have groups of users organized around any number of different things – one of them, perhaps, being the dog park they frequent most. what if Dogster could programmatically create a new group/email list on the fly whenever someone registered a new dog park? interested users join the group – all through the Dogster interface, of course, and they’re automatically in the loop.

i guess it’s not a pure email list, but it just seems like there are a lot of things you can do with the group. maybe it’s not even so completely different than the previous versions of ‘groups’ – be they Google or Yahoo or whatever – but the new UI made me want to give it another look, and sure enough, after a couple of days of bug fixing, things are looking up.

oh yeah, you can, of course, fill-out your own profile with avatar and contact info and all that. so, it’s kind of like PeopleAggregator, but at least Google has shown that they will not hand over your data to Uncle Sam without at least a minimal court fight – unlike People Aggregator’s stated intentions.

also, it keeps revisions of your WYSIWYG web pages (a la wiki), one-click to revert to a previous version, and you can ‘discuss’ each page (a la wiki).

all in all – it seems pretty slick.