GigaOM

What makes social networks successful is precisely the thing that makes them vulnerable to hackers: Trusting and sharing with others, sometimes even strangers. Now that they’re under attack from worms and malware, operators are trying to patch security loopholes. But it’s hard to fix the DNA without altering the nature of the organism.

Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have all come under attack in recent days. In Twitter’s case, hackers whose pages contained malware started following people; by checking out their profile, those followed were compromised. With Facebook, it was a worm that spread itself through profiles. “Most web sites will, at some point, need to deal with patching a security hole,” Facebook head of security Max Kelly noted on the site’s blog last night.

What if it’s a hole social sites can’t patch?

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Startups selling virtual goods and offering virtual experiences are raking in the venture capital these days. Perhaps it’s the fact that virtual gifting hit the mainstream in 2007 or because people are worried about the impact of business travel on the environment, but the virtual world is beginning to get its share of real dollars.

In the first half of 2008, virtual worlds raised $345 million in venture investment, according to data from Virtual Worlds Management, a media company that covers the industry. And while it may be easy to dismiss the virtual economy as frivolous or scoff at the idea of attending a virtual trade show as useless, deriding the intangible misses a crucial point about today’s culture: A lot of it is happening online. Continue »

With an undisclosed investment in Social Gaming Network by his personal fund, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is proving Om right. Back in May, when Bezos invested in Kongregate, another casual gaming site, Om thought it might be the first of many. May is also when SGN raised a $15 million round from Greylock Partners and the Founders Fund.

SGN makes games for social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and has titles that include WarBook and Superlatives. Now that casual gaming has exploded onto the web, the business case isn’t too far-fetched. Revenue comes from ads, selling virtual goods, subscriptions or some mix of those options, with advertising being most prevalent but least effective for casual games.

Gaming has made money, but monetizing social networks is still a struggle, which makes SGN worth watching. Succeeding with advertising depends on getting large numbers of users, which Social Gaming Network — with its 1.1 million daily users — has. It’s facing a Facebook crackdown on spammy applications, which could hinder growth on that site, but is still growing on MySpace and Hi5, which have recently opened up their sites to outside apps. In order to really make money, it needs to push the sale of virtual goods. That might make it the most likely Bezos investment to succeed.

MySpace launched a social networking experience designed for the iPhone (available free at the App Store) today that will take advantage of the touch interface. As part of the launch, they sent out a fact sheet detailing some mobile stats that I found pretty compelling, notably that of MySpace’s 115 million members, up to 5 million are expected to use the mobile site by the end of the year, with 3.1 million using it now. And most of those users come through MySpace’s mobile web site rather than through an on-deck, carrier-supplied link.

This highlights two trends for mobile: One, the waning influence of carriers and the subsequent need for an on-deck application; and two, the rise of social networking on mobile phones. Continue »

Like an aging matron sporting Juicy tracksuits, eBay’s announcement today that it’s partially opening up its developer’s platform by allowing programmers to build their applications directly inside the site is unlikely to change the fact that the auction site is no longer the hot new thing.

The move is reminiscent of ones made earlier this year by social network MySpace as it tries to keep rival Facebook at bay. However, eBay’s efforts are a bit more limited and even less likely to change things for its developers, or its perception with buyers and sellers.

For starters, eBay is only opening up its Selling Manager program, which has 700,000 members. Across its 39 markets, eBay has about 84 million active users. Max Mancini, senior director of platform and disruptive innovation at eBay, said the move to open up the site to developers is in the early stage, but he wouldn’t say how far it would go, nor how revenue might be shared between the company and third-party developers selling their software on the site. Continue »

In thinking about the desktop/web hybrid platforms that have launched or are about to be launched, I’ve decided that even if last year they were overhyped, this year we’re going to see real adoption and applications. But that presents an interesting problem for developers and eventually, for users. The vast array of options and functionalities not only makes the web experience different for different users, but it makes developing sites more complicated, much like the rise of different browsers and the proliferation of Flash has in the past.

I’ve written about MySpace using Google Gears for email, but apparently WordPress is going to take advantage of Gears in its next version, too. Twhirl uses Adobe Air to bring Twitter to the desktop and a fun program called Snackr pulls random bits from your RSS feeds to stream across the desktop. We’re still waiting for Prism from Mozilla, and yesterday Yahoo launched BrowserPlus. Again, the sheer number of these presents its own set of problems. Continue »