The Social

Let's hope Yahoo has finally learned that the maxim "If you build it, they will come" simply does not apply to a social network.

The Silicon Valley mainstay and onetime Microsoft shopping-spree target is quietly shutting down Yahoo Mash, its latest foray into creating a general-interest social network like a Facebook or MySpace.

It's the latest social-networking failure for Yahoo, which was unable to get its earlier "Yahoo 360" network off the ground, and once attempted to purchase Facebook, only to have its billion-dollar offer turned down.

Mash was cute, with a slick interface, and Yahoo already had the advantage of millions of registered users to roll right into it. But its failure to catch on is indicative of a bigger truth in the social-networking world: a new player in this saturated market has to offer something legitimately new and useful.

Yes, really. And let it be a lesson to any other would-be Facebook killers.

Critics of social networks say they're nothing but gimmicky fads, pointing to the popularity of silly Facebook applications and the flashy glitter text that adorns many teenagers' MySpace profiles. That just isn't true: if you look at the two biggest social-networking success stories, Facebook and MySpace, each one has served a distinct utility since its debut.

People initially signed up for MySpace because it offered unprecedented tools for independent bands to spread the word about their music--and ways for fans to keep track of those bands. Facebook gained popularity because, in its infancy, it was the digital version of a college directory.

Other broad-reaching social networks that have seen decent growth have either targeted a large demographic--Bebo and under-25s, for example--or have achieved localized success in regions of the world that hadn't yet caught the social-networking bug, like Hi5 in Latin America.

Even still, they have to differentiate themselves: Bebo, which has been acquired by AOL, touts its library of original video programming. Hi5 recently launched a mobile site that it hopes will make it appealing to consumers who don't regularly use a personal computer.

In the days of AOL People Connection, the novelty factor of creating a profile and giving yourself an identity online was enough. But a decade later, filling out an online profile is about as interesting as filing tax forms.

If Yahoo, or any other aspiring Facebook rival, wants to take social networking seriously, it has to give its millions of users a reason to create profiles and connect with friends. Virtual pets that your friends can "snorgle" are not a reason. Neither are drag-and-drop widgets--that's something that could draw people to a personal home page service, not a social network.

Here's a thought: Yahoo would've done better in the social-networking market to introduce a friends list and news feed option to its members' Yahoo.com home pages rather than attempting to create a standalone service. That way, it wouldn't have to change existing members' browsing habits one bit.

There are plenty of compelling properties at Yahoo's fingertips: imagine if a feed on Yahoo's home page told you which of your contacts were uploading Flickr photos, RSVPing to events on Upcoming, or voting up news stories on Yahoo Buzz.

Look at Google: its social network, Orkut, is big in Brazil and India but not globally. Instead of trying to push Orkut into markets that are already saturated by competing social networks, Google has quietly been tying together existing properties into a more social experience.

Just this week, Google announced the addition of a "following" feature to blog platform Blogger, and it invited users to import the list of Blogger-hosted blogs they subscribe into its Google Reader RSS software so that they can read them alongside other blogs. Google Calendar's collaborative datebooks have been tied into the Gmail client. And when developer applications became the craze du jour, Google developed standards like OpenSocial and the forthcoming Friend Connect for other social networks to deploy.

To be fair, Google has had its share of social-networking blunders: it acquired mobile where-you-at service Dodgeball and failed to find a niche for it within the company, instead letting it wither on the vine. It's also still unclear as to what Google will do with Jaiku, the Twitter-like start-up that it acquired last year, and the likes of OpenSocial and Friend Connect are still too early-stage to deem them surefire successes.

Regardless, what's important is that Google seems to understand that there isn't room in the market to debut and promote a mass-appeal social network. With the demise of Mash, perhaps Yahoo gets the point now too. But while Mash likely wasn't a resource or cash drain in the end, Yahoo is now on the PR defensive.

And, goodness knows, it doesn't need any more of that.

If an anonymous source is correct, the confirmed screenplay-in-the-works about Facebook's origins by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin is tied to a forthcoming book about the social network by Bringing Down The House author Ben Mezrich.

Independent Harvard alumni publication 02138 reported on Friday that the film rights to Mezrich's book had been acquired by Sony Pictures Entertainment and producer Scott Rubin, who have been confirmed as the backers of Sorkin's screenplay.

Here's the backstory: A partial book proposal from Mezrich, who has come under scrutiny for allegedly exaggerating details in his nonfiction works, leaked to a gossip blog this spring.

With a working title of Face Off, the plot concerns Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's soured relationship with early Facebook executive Eduardo Saverin, who appears to have been in close contact with Mezrich for the book, while they were both undergraduates at Harvard. The proposal described Zuckerberg and Saverin getting caught up in Silicon Valley excess, partying like celebrities all over the world, until a showdown between them turned ugly.

Sources close to Zuckerberg's Harvard days have indicated to CNET News that the scant detail available in the book proposal is of questionable veracity; one went so far as to say the content contained "some real bull****." At the time, it wasn't even clear that the book proposal was legitimate, since neither Mezrich nor his publisher, Doubleday, are willing to confirm it, but sources who spoke to 02138 seem to indicate that it's a done deal.

02138 has occasionally faced off with Facebook: last year, the magazine published a scathing piece about Zuckerberg that exposed extensive personal details about the young founder's life, leading to a brief legal spat.

In other news, readers of gossip blog Valleywag seem to agree that Mark Zuckerberg should be played onscreen by Arrested Development star Michael Cera.

Follow that blog!

(Credit: Google)

With blog platforms Movable Type and WordPress adding social-networking features to their software, it was only a matter of time before Google's Blogger did the same.

A post on the official Blogger blog earlier this week announced that users would soon be able to display their "followers"--other Blogger members who have subscribed to them.

The optional feature--along with a notification on blog owners' "dashboards" of how many people have subscribed to their blogs through Blogger--will be rolled out in the next few weeks. A new tab on the dashboard, called "Blogs I'm Following," lets Blogger users keep track of updates to the blogs on their subscription list.

The problem with these sorts of features is that they're inherently limited to readers whose "following" is directly tied to the Blogger software and its members, so it will reflect only a slice of readers. A follower widget (or gadget, as Google calls them) claiming 21 followers only refers to Blogger members, not to the overall number of people reading the blog, which could make the owners of smaller blogs get a bit image-conscious.

But with its Google ownership, Blogger is tying the new following feature into some of its other properties, like Google Reader and the forthcoming Google Friend Connect. The "Blogs I'm Following" tab, for example, can be imported into Google Reader.

My Yahoo Mash profile, soon to get euthanized.

(Credit: Yahoo)

File this one under the "ouch" category. Yahoo is shutting down its social-networking experiment, Yahoo Mash, after only a year in business.

An e-mail to Mash members from Yahoo community manager Matt Warburton read, "Thank you for trying out our Mash Beta service. We hope you had fun with it. Please note that we will shut down Mash on September 29, 2008. As a result, your current profile on Mash will no longer be available."

Mash didn't really offer anything new, other than the fact that instead of inviting friends you created profiles for them and then invited them to customize and change them. You could also add "modules," a sort of rudimentary version of social-network apps. It was designed as a quirky, cute step up from Yahoo 360, the social network that Yahoo had based off its millions of pre-existing user accounts; if Yahoo 360 was analogous to AOL profiles, Mash was more like Facebook.

But Mash never caught on, and its parent company has now deemed it worth closing.

This is not the first time that Yahoo has launched an experimental social network only to yank it. Last year, Yahoo shut down a Dodgeball- or Brightkite-like mobile social site called "Mixd" that had only been in operation for a few months.

BuzzCity, a mobile networking and advertising start-up based in Singapore, on Thursday announced a $10 million investment by South African media company Naspers.

BuzzCity has developed a mobile social-networking product called MyGamma, but it's not hoping to take on Facebook. MyGamma is geared toward "unwired" customers--those who have a mobile device but lack access to either a PC or a reliable broadband connection. That's probably why it attracted the attention of Naspers--market research firm Point Topic estimated late in 2007 that there were fewer than 300,000 broadband Internet subscriptions in South Africa out of a population of 47 million. South Africa also happens to be one of the fastest-growing markets for BuzzCity's software.

"The growth opportunity for off-deck services continues to grow globally. We've seen phenomenal growth in markets in South Asia and Africa and in the coming year, we expect to see this growth to include markets in Europe and (the U.S.)," CEO K.F. Lai said in a release. "The past year for us has also been marked by partnerships with some of the world's leading WAP publishers and mobile digital agencies. BuzzCity has been on an aggressive development programme and secured overwhelming interest from businesses to be part of our growth plans."

BuzzCity is not alone in targeting this market. Medium-sized social network Hi5, with a strong foothold in the Latin American market, recently launched a mobile site designed with the same "unwired" consumers in mind.

Digg has always made its message clear: it's not social news, it's democracy.

The company's executive team--founder Kevin Rose, and CEO Jay Adelson--thumbed their noses at the DMCA complaint they received when users "dugg" a crack code for the now-defunct HD DVD technology. They also decided to connect with their users through "town hall" events Webcast live four times a year. So it's perhaps fitting that for the company's third quarterly town hall, Rose and Adelson set up shop in the "Big Tent" new-media hall at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. (Digg is a "Big Tent" sponsor.)

It'll be following up with an event held in partnership with MySpace at the Republican National Convention. The company also kicked off a "Digg Dialogg" event series, in which executives ask users' questions to prominent guests. Adelson, who called it a "perfect alignment of Digg and elections," interviewed House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the inaugural interview, in partnership with CNN's iReport.

"They're your raw questions," Rose said, his characteristic mop-top haircut forsaken in favor of a buzz cut. "They were completely unfiltered."

To be fair, Digg owes a lot to politics--its energetic base of news hounds loves election coverage, and the national elections inevitably pull a lot of traffic to the site.

The questions were largely technical ones that dealt with the minutiae of Digg culture: Adelson said that the "shout" communication system will be tweaked to limit spamming and a private message system is on the way, better technology to flag duplicate stories ("I hate this!" Rose said on the problem with duplicate story submissions) is coming this fall, and Digg is working on a way to let members flag stories as "not safe for work."

Most of Rose and Adelson's answers, which they breezed through more quickly than with previous town halls due to time constraints on the Denver stage, fell into the niche of "good suggestion, and we're working on it."

One question asked if Digg could institute a forum for members. That was a more contentious point for the company executives. "We do want to have forums for our users to communicate and support each other," Adelson said, but added that he's working on matching up the authentication system so that it uses the same credentials as Digg itself rather than an external forum system.

Rose was less enthusiastic. "Everyone has forums and it's always the same crap," he said. "It doesn't necessarily mean that they're helping elevate the good questions and helping the conversation come through."

A few genuinely good ideas came up: one question suggested "geotagging" for stories to group them into local news stories, something that could make the site legitimately compete with sites like Outside.in and city blog networks like Gothamist. "Yes," Rose said. "We've thought about this as well and it would be really cool if we could start to group different events around you." Adelson added that Digg has "a few projects on the way...think 2009, realistically, for some of this stuff."

Despite the somewhat dull nature of many technical questions about recommendation engines and comment improvement, Adelson and Rose insisted that those are the questions they want to hear because it's where Digg users can really make a difference in shaping the site's direction. "It's really important to know what you guys are thinking. It keeps us honest," Adelson said.

The next Digg town hall will be held on November 6--two days after the U.S. presidential election. Its next meetup, however, will be off American shores: Rose will be taping his Diggnation podcast live from London on October 10.

(Credit: Facebook)

If a recently created group on Facebook is to be believed, entertainment stalwart Aaron Sorkin--creator of The West Wing and A Few Good Men--is working on penning a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about the origins of Facebook. Someone claiming to be Sorkin's researcher created the group so that he can learn more about the site, and several hundred Facebook members have already joined.

So maybe it's real and maybe it isn't real. But let's start asking the really important questions: which young actor should play founder Mark Zuckerberg?

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg

(Credit: SXSWi)

I say Jason Schwartzman. He's slight and prone to geeky roles, he's already played Ringo Starr and Louis XIV, and it can't be that hard for him to dye his hair blond and wax philosophical about the "social graph." Alternate: Arrested Development star Michael Cera, who already has the blond hair and can play geeks like nobody's business. (Thanks to Elliot Schimel for that suggestion.)

Give me a few more hours and I'll think of some hunky hottie who could play both Winklevoss twins, Parent Trap-style.

This does not appear to be related to Face Off, a rumored forthcoming novel from Bringing Down The House author Ben Mezrich that he and his publisher still refuse to confirm. That book, known only by a few pages of a proposal that leaked to gossip blog Gawker, is reportedly a juicy tell-all that doesn't exactly paint Zuckerberg in the fairest of colors.

The guys who created Lonelygirl15--the scripted Web series that fooled many viewers into thinking it was the real video diary of a cute 16-year-old girl--are back with a new project.

The re-branded "LG15" production company Eqal, helmed by Greg Goodfried and Miles Beckett, unveiled LG15: The Resistance, a spin-off of the original Lonelygirl15 suspense-drama. It's their third series, after Lonelygirl15 and British derivative KateModern, which found a home on social network Bebo. The Resistance will have its "home" and surrounding community discussions at LG15.com, but it will be syndicated on MySpaceTV, Veoh, Hulu, YouTube, and Imeem.

Fans of Eqal's shows have already been speculating over a Resistancepreview video on the Web for some time now. It'll be premiering on September 20, and features several of the supporting characters from Lonelygirl15 in lead roles. The title refers to the fight against an evil cult called The Order, which also factored into Lonelygirl15 and eventually led to the fictional protagonist's death.

Beckett and Goodfried hope to capitalize on the sort of cult following that surrounded Lonelygirl15, but this time around they acknowledge they'll have to make some tweaks for mainstream audiences. "We've basically taken a ton of lessons that we've learned from Lonelygirl15 and KateModern, and we're applying it to this new series, trying to make it more accessible to a passive audience," Goodfried said in an interview. First off, he said, is to make one longer weekly episode instead of daily videos that can be tough to catch up on.

There will still be daily content, Goodfried explained. "During the week, rather than it being five videos that are these posts that the characters are making leading up to this episode, it's going to be a text blog, maybe a photo post. It's not all going to be video content."

One of their chief inspirations, Beckett said, is geek hero and Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon. "I love Buffy and I'm a big Joss Whedon fan," he said in an interview. The original Lonelygirl15 appealed to Whedon fans, too, he explained. "Some of the commenters on our forum were on the original Buffy forum back in the day. They were calling (the world of LG15) originally the 'Breenaverse'," he said, using a fan-created portmanteau of "Buffyverse" and Lonelygirl15 protagonist Bree, played by actress Jessica Rose.

As for Rose--the face that launched a thousand YouTube comments--she'll be starring in Sorority Forever, a new Web series produced by Warner Bros. for its forthcoming TheWB.com video hub.

Beckett and Goodfried said they haven't seen Sorority Forever. But they don't have a problem with big media capitalizing on the marketing and production tactics that small companies like Eqal conceived. "In general it's certainly great to have the big traditional people and new media companies producing content for this space," Beckett said. "It helps consolidate the medium, it makes advertisers feel more comfortable, and it just makes the market bigger."

The Resistance, like its predecessor, will rely on brand integration as well as advertising. It's a shaky line to tread, because it can easily look tacky or as though the ad dollars are altering the storyline. "I would say for the most part we've had pretty good feedback," Beckett said of brand integration. "We've worked with a ton of brands at this point...(and) all but a couple of the integrations we've done went over really well."

Technorati Media, parent company of blog search site Technorati, has acquired Blogcritics.org. The newly purchased site is a user-fueled "online magazine" for bloggers that was already a member of the newish Technorati Media ad network.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Technorati has said that it plans to keep Blogcritics an intact, separate property.

With the acquisition, Technorati says it hopes to help Blogcritics contributors make some money, as well as scale the property to give it more reach. "As part of Technorati Media, we'll be able to grow the community and further improve our platform to attract new audiences," Blogcritics founder Eric Olsen said in a release. "Technorati's mission to help bloggers and people who read blogs is the ideal complement for us."

Acquiring content properties, however, likely won't change the fact that Technorati has been losing ground to Mountain View, Calif.-powered Google Blog Search and (to an extent) the search feature that Twitter built into its technology when it bought Summize. Technorati founder David Sifry has long since left the company, and he's now at the helm of a new start-up called Offbeat Guides.

After social news site Reddit went open-source in June, this was a logical next step: letting members take the code and import it to their own sites, creating social-news hubs of their own. That's the company's latest announcement, per a blog post on Tuesday.

"Today is the day Reddit fully becomes a platform for building link sharing sites," a post on the company blog explained. Technically, developers could already do this. But now the site is making it easier for them to do so, and letting them customize the design of the voting system to fit their own sites; more importantly, they can import them off the Reddit domain.

Reddit Bacon.

The site's humor-inclined team referred to the site update as "somewhere between when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly and when six hydrogen nuclei combine to form helium and (eventually) life as we know it." More likely, it'll make the news-voting system proliferate on sites that wouldn't otherwise have it; Reddit's team brought up the example of an entire Reddit voting system devoted to people who love bacon, for example.

Though Reddit, which was acquired by Conde Nast's Wired Digital division in 2006, is much smaller than rival Digg and the fast-growing Yahoo Buzz, this could make some waves. Plenty of sites have tried to build third-party social news systems in-house, and Reddit's open-source alternative could make it easier to integrate this sort of thing.

Plus, the company is hosting a contest to see who can create the best "custom Reddit" from scratch (i.e., fewer than 250 subscribers) in a month. The winner gets a MacBook Air laptop, a $1,500 Apple gift card, and a bucketload of free Reddit gear. Go, bacon guys, go!