GigaOM

Strands, a Corvallis, Ore.-based startup that has shown success in the music social recommendation space, is relaunching Strands.com into a private beta online activity aggregation service. The company hopes to take the lifestreaming features offered by Web 2.0 darling FriendFeed a step further by adding the ability to build a “taste profile” based on your social media usage patterns.Through the taste profile, Strands intends to battle the information overload from services such as Twitter and FriendFeed by using your online social circle to filter out relevant content you will find pertinent. “Hot Posts” will show you which online media items, such as news stories and videos, are currently popular among your friends to help you discover new things.

The company recently raised $55 million in capital and reports sales of $12 million in 2007. When I asked Jason Herskowitz, Strands’ VP of Social Media, how the company plans to monetize its new offering, he said Strands is merely looking for eyeballs to drive sales of its other offerings, such as Strands Social Player and Strands Business Solution.

I’m skeptical about how successful the new Strands.com service will be — it’s yet another service to sign up for and adopt. However, if implemented correctly, the service stands to bring the signal-to-noise ratio of lifestreams down to a tolerable level.

I spent most of the day digging up more information on Twitter and its new round of funding that I reported last night. The update is that Twitter reached an agreement with investors today to raise $15 million in funding at around $80 million pre-money valuation. A new investor is leading the round with existing investor Union Square Ventures also participating. With this round, the company will have raised a little over $20 million in VC backing thus far.

Official news of the deal is eventually going to percolate out, and hopefully I will be able to nail down the specifics on who is the lead investor. Valleywag and Silicon Alley Insider had mentioned Spark Capital as a potential investor. Meanwhile, I am told that Charles River Ventures, after fighting a bit, is now out of the race. The news of new funding comes at a time when Twitter is dealing with a whole slew of scaling and infrastructure issues. Today, the folks there almost threw their proverbial hands up in despair.

Update: Twitter the great facilitator of e-narcissism also can’t keep secrets. As Michael Arrington points out, two tweets from two parties add fuel to the rumors of Spark being the mystery investor in the San Francisco company.

Networking has always been a high art in business. Just ask Susan Roane, my mentor and author of the seminal tome, “How to Work a Room.” (I know a handful of VCs and startup kings on Sand Hill Road who have her book tucked into a drawer.) I’ve been showcasing Roane’s lessons for founders in my Found|READ series, “What They Don’t Teach You At Stanford Business School.”

By now it’s time to address the latest, and arguably the most powerful, networking tool in any founders’ arsenal: Twitter. It’s simple. If you’re not “tweeting,” you’re missing half the conversation. Just ask Sarah Lacy. (How different Lacy’s now-infamous SXSW interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg might have been had she been plugged into the tweets flying around the conference room floor!) Don’t know how to use Twitter? No sweat. Here are my 8 Tips for How to Work a Twitter Party.
(Photo credit: News.com. SXSW Tweeters celebrating before the ill-fated Zuckerberg interview.) Continue »

MySpace today launched announced a data availability initiative that will allow users to opt in to sharing their MySpace information on a variety of partner sites. While not exactly complete data portability (the social networking company also said it was joining the Data Portability Project), it’s a start.

MySpace is launching its data availability efforts with Yahoo, eBay, Twitter and Photobucket some time within the next several weeks. Steve Pearman, SVP of product strategy at MySpace, says other partners will be able to join “in a few weeks,” after agreeing to some basic terms and conditions aimed at preventing user data from being abused. I asked if someone could port their MySpace info onto their Facebook page if Facebook asked to join, to which Pearman responded by saying he wouldn’t want to tell anyone where they could or could not port their data. Continue »

This is the age of Celebrity 2.0. If you have more that 200 Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Yelp friends, you’re a celeb, too! After watching too many big shots ‘step in it’ again and again this week (first at Y Combinator’s Startup School, and I’m sure Web2.0 Expo is do different), I decided to prepare for the rest of you my list of what not to do, when ‘working the room.’ . Here goes:

Top 15 Web Celeb Mistakes & Missteps:

1. Not having party humor ready. A Web 2.0 celeb-on-the-ebb is someone who has zero self-deprecating jokes in the chamber. A tier-1 star-on-the-rise says stuff like, “Hey I’m just trying to enjoy my 15 minutes here. Let me enjoy this moment.” Or, my favorite: “You know me?! Goodness, I just might be something yet!”

2. Photo pose without eye contact. If someone wants their picture with you, take two seconds and focus without eye scanning the room. Rising star will pull out their camera and say, “Ooo! Take one with mine too”. Clooney works the room like an extra on Roseanne vs. The Oscar winner he is.

3. Premature interaction withdrawal . Yeah the person just talking to you just turned and walked away. A Web 2.0 celeb who is dropping like a rock is a blatant and rude social climber in that they’ll leave a conversation mid-stream for something better. Yikes! You may be a killer coder, and you can leave an IM conversation abruptly — but in a real room, you can’t.

4. Don’t eye-scan the room. The Weakest new Web celebs are always eyeballing for the hitters they think they need to talk to, so they “shoulder surf” while talking to new people. Stop eye-scanning and be in the moment with your new admirers.

5. Love the ones who love you. Weak celebs snub fans all the time because they’re embarassed as to who loves them. Ugly fans can buzz, click, talk, email, IM and sms, too. And if you offend, they’re more likely to do so than your more “adorable” fans.

6. Not showing up in spirit for the event. If you’re not feeling it, maybe you should get some rest and rally yourself. And even if you just “stop by” an event, thank your host before you jet out the foodservice entrance.

7. Always be rising. It’s dangerous to not know if you are still peaking, or if you’ve peaked. But here is one good way to tell: As a Web 2.0 celeb, if you’re not actively promoting, you can be sure your star is falling. Every event is a chance to pump up your stock and standing.

8. Big pitfall is speaking to your trolls (i.e critics). Your fans ignore the trolls so you should too when you’re addressing the audience.

9. Don’t Assume the Room Knows You. It doesn’t matter if you’ve marquee billing, just got done with a keynote or even if your face is on the movie poster. Don’t assume

everyone at the party in your honor knows you. Assuming makes and a you-know-what outta you, and you.

10. If you’re not magnetizing, you’re repelling. You are competing for people’s attention. Charm them, someone else will. If you’re not charming them, you might as well be outright rejecting their core being. Bring them closer to you, or push them closer to others. One raises your celebrity, the other drops your star-rating.

10. Don’t be a Jerk. What we have here is a failure to reciprocate. Here is My Reciprocity Algorithm: ask at least 2 questions of people that come up to you to say hello.

11. Don’t fail to build a constituency in the room. Rooms have tipping points. Once a group of people thinks you’re an ass, you’re done. Conversely, you could be the stale breeze that blew in from Champaign, Illinois, but if people love you, they’ll promote you.

13. Inability to turn a couple of Frenemies a year into a friend.

Work a room with the idea that maybe someone who currently dislikes you will like you with a lil man-charm.

14. Don’t forget to engage your entourage Celebs who forget to introduce their entourage can’t switch outta guest mode or effen host. If you brought ‘em, introduce ‘em.

15. Let the Alpha be alpha. (Psst!: The host is always alpha.) If there’s an alpha celeb, “confront and kiss the ring” vs “dodge and bad mouth.” You are only allowed to badmouth when you’re 80+ yards away from the party venue. (Hey celeb 2.0 you’re the beta at funerals and weddings, too, because, you can’t be the corpse or the bride.)

CONTEST: Add your #1 Web 2.0 Celeb Misstep. Best submission gets first crack at my Web 2.0 Expo schwag bag. Find me in the Blogtropolis room following up my Ad-tech conference leads http://blogtropolus.eventbrite.com at Moscone until the Coca Cola and granola treats run out.

Larry Chiang is the founder of duck9 and a frequent contributor to Found|READ. His most popular posts include: How to Work The Room; and 9 VCs You’re Gonna Want To Avoid, and 9 Things Stanford B-School Won’t Teach You which he is turning into a book. Most recently, Larry wrote: 9 People You Meet at Y Combinator (and what you can learn from them).

I went to Y Combinator’s Startup School on Saturday (that’s YC-founder Paul Graham, in case you don’t know) even though most people in Silicon Valley see the material there as “too basic.” My goal is to perpetually learn and apply and to learn as much from the audience as from the killer line-up of speakers Y Combinator recruited.

What I learned I posted to Twitter. My notes are in my facebook album.

Anyway, these are The 9 YC-Types that I met that day — and a fewof the things you can learn from them:

1. Mr. Never Woken Up Before Noon. Codes and compiles well into the early morning. Only wakes up at 9AM for killer content. Fresh in from Europe. Is full of wonderment that 12 zip codes in Northern California contain 90% of venture money. Doesn’t know about the 9 VCs you’ll want to avoid meeting, but gosh darn they have great accents.

2. Mr. Silver Bullet Detector. A.K.A, a VC. Wants to find the next Google, Myspace, Yahoo!,

and get his carry (you-know-what) popped with the this 3rd fund.

3. Mr. DDSS Founder Presenting. DDSS stands for Dumb-Down-Sandbag-for-Success. During AM presentation said stuff like, “money matters with how many people you hire. The more money you have the more you can hire.” No where near as dumb as the things he says — even though he pretends he didn’t present during lunch. Continue »

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur outlines 20 reasons why his company bought Twhirl, an Adobe AIR-based Twitter client that is preferred by the self-obsessed net-set (including yours truly). Some see it as a future-of-the-web move. The Valley echo chamber seems to agree.

I’m stingy with such compliments. In my opinion, the 21st (and real) reason why Loic bought this little client: users. Twhirl is very popular these days; it accounts for 7 percent of the traffic on Twitter, putting it in a good position to help Seesmic — whenever it comes out of alpha/beta/gamma testing — attract new users to its service very quickly. (Of course, Twitter fame can be fleeting, forgotten the minute the net-set discovers the next new shiny shiny.)

Seesmic, in simple terms, is a video Twitter-type service, but I have grappled with two questions: What is Seesmic’s utility, and what pain point is it trying to solve? The company showed off its service at our NewTeeVee Live conference and Loic was recently on The GigaOM Show trying to explain the service, but I still don’t quite get it. Perhaps, Alan Patrick over on BroadStuff puts it best,

Videoblogging has a limited runway compared to text blogging (today at any rate) and this is a way for Seesmic to shift its focus from video to overall ‘microblogging.’