Launched in 2006 in the basement of a small house in Malal village, Yedda is a knowledge community whose mission is to connect people who are looking for knowledge with the people who have the knowledge. The company was acquired by AOL in 2007, but has stuck to its basement in Malal, renovating the space to accommodate the company’s growth.

On Yedda, all questions and users are organized by tags, so if you’re looking for a specific answer or someone who’s knowledgeable in a particular field, you can easily find either. The service is completely free of charge and is all about users helping fellow users. By specifying their tags of interest, users only receive questions that are based on their interests and are not bothered with questions about topics that don’t really relate to them. Answers themselves are ranked and each user receives an overall ranking based on the quality of his or her responses. In this manner, each user can demonstrate their level of knowledge to peers.

As part of their mission, Yedda also helps promote knowledge communities throughout the net and has partnered up with services such as ePals, the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, and ArticlesBase. Each of these sites has Yedda widgets integrated into them and thus enables the services to tap into the global Yedda community and benefit from the accumulated content in the Yedda network. The company also offers several very useful widgets for site owners, such as the Ask & Answer Widget.

Yedda is proactive in getting users’ questions answered, either through emails sent to users who mention they are interested in a question topic or by allowing anyone to subscribe to an RSS feed. In addition, Yedda has integrated its service with Twitter and created a Facebook application.

Yedda is expanding rapidly with a recently launched Partnership Program, announcing their first 100 partners worldwide. In the future you will also see Yedda integration within AOL properties.

See my interview with Yedda below.

This post was originally posted June 17th on Mashable.com

If you, like many others, have moved most of your social and professional connections to Facebook, you’ll find Socialistics to be a very useful tool. Socialistics is a social insight tool. It provides you with integrated data analysis of your friends and networks and allows you to understand more about them and about who you are within the network you operate. You can slice and dice the data in many interesting ways.

Here are some of the things you can do with Socialistics:

1) My Clouds - create detailed tag clouds that are a reflection of you and your relationships with people in your networks.

The Popularity Cloud for example shows the most popular and relevant people in my network. The bigger the name, the more popular.

You can also create birth year or cities clouds which show which people share location or age characteristics with you.

2) The PictureWall  - shows the most popular people within my network, but represents this data through the use of their profile picture. The larger their picture, the more popular they are within my network.

3) My stats  - show me statistics regarding my network’s: Gender split, political views, religious beliefs, country, education, companies, etc.

4) Basic Groups - allows you to type in the name of a friend and see what friends you have in common:

When you add the application you’ll see that there are still a few features that haven’t been integrated yet but are coming soon. Another important point I’d like to add: When you add the application, make sure you let all the modules load before you start using it. Otherwise it won’t work properly.

As Rodney Rumford from FaceReviews.com writes:

“I really like that this application helps me to visualize data and connections about my friends network. Oh yea… Imagine how well you could serve me data (ads, news, content, etc.). Social Graph in action baby. Are the readers of this blog waking up to the potential long term value of facebook and applications? Facebook knows more about me than Google does. Can you say marketers dream here?”

I highly recommend this application to anyone who cares to know more details about his connections on Facebook and his place within his network. 

Good news! Gilad, MeeMix’s CEO has given me 4 more invites for their private beta and of course I’d like to give it to you guys. First 4 people who comment back and say they want one, will receive them.

MeeMix, a new Israeli startup, has launched its beta program yesterday. MeeMix can best be described as a personalized internet radio community. It aims at identifying individual taste and taste prediction in media using its own behavioral-based algorithm and additional methodologies, created in-house.

MeeMix’s idea is similar to Pandora or Last.fm but it uses a different (and better) prediction method in identifying the user’s taste. As my friend Roi writes in his post on TechCrunch:

“Typically, there are two ways to perform such predictions:

1. “Nature” (Pandora) – Decision making is based upon the compatibility between one song and another—personal taste not being part of the equation.
2. “Nurture” (Last.fm) – Decision making is based upon environmental factors—song compatibility not being part of the equation”

Gilad Shlang, CEO of MeeMix tells me: “We see personal preference as the right balance between NATURE and NURTURE. MeeMix believes that your genetic disposition, combined with your present and past experience, defines who you are today. By heeding to both nature and nurture, we are able to offer accurate and better results. For clarification, Nature is based solely on song classification - prepared by our top group of musicologists who analyzed hundreds of musical values- and Nurture is an individual’s own characteristics, combined with his or her interactions in our virtual surroundings. The MeeMix algorithm is a taste prediction tool that not only points out similar songs but also takes geographical, sociological, behavioral and physiological characteristics into account.”

MeeMix is also a social network allowing members to connect based on similar musical tastes, shared passions, or even by reading each other thoughts, journals, reviews, dreams, and secrets (the last available for their Mee friends only). A MeeMix member can broadcast his personal radio station to other members and share his tastes with the entire community. The broadcaster (or Mee’J) can always see his audience and communicate with them. The more listeners you have, the more popular you are, and the more prominent you will be on the site. For those of you who are really into self branding, you can even print out t-shirts with your channel name and number of subscribers.

The first page you will see in MeeMix is the MeePlayer which is, you guessed it, their player. This page is the entertainment system of the site; allowing the member to create multiple (personalized) stations, change the present “mood” of every station (its average beat rate,
level of surprise), and control the interactive features related to the currently playing track, such as adding to favorites, commenting, song rating, and more. The right hand side of the MeePlayer, named “YOU” or “Meet People”, is a living, talking and moving line of communication with other members. You will see YOU throughout the site, in the same place, ready for action.

The MeeMix world includes 4 main content sections:
1. Mee Style – the member’s personal corner in MeeMix. In Mee Style you can:
a. Check who is listening to your stations and contact your fans
b. Get updated on invitations you sent to friends
c. Update or edit your own profile
d. Receive messages from other members

2. Mee People – the MeeMix community. This will be your main meeting place, where you can:
a. Browse through other members’ thoughts
b. Search for people by:
i. Their personal musical style
ii. Member characteristics such as: age, location, sex and more
c. Check out who is listening to whom in MeeMix

3. Music – a section all about music, both in and out of the MeeMix world. If you are looking to browse through members’ stations or check out who is listening to whom, this is the place. In Music, you’ll find:
a. Radio station search by genre
b. Rising Star stations, which are stations with the highest fan growth
c. Most popular stations
d. The newest stations in MeeMix
e. Top 100 Songs in MeeMix
f. New Releases

4. The Source – Website owners and bloggers, this is the place you will find MeeMix widgets and other goodies that you can add to your site. Choose from widgets that present your favorite artists, Music style, Mee friends, and more.

I received an invite from Gilad for the MeeMix private beta and have been playing around with the application in the last two days. Apart from it being an amazing and unique product, MeeMix has one of the nicest and most user-friendly interfaces that I have ever seen. 

Gilad was nice enough to give me 4 more invites. The first 4 people who comment back and say they want one, will get them.

Matt Danzico, a reporter, has recently announced that he is going to travel around America 2.0 style. He has created this website and is asking all the people watching his video to spread his message:

“Around the America in 2.0 is an Internet-based film project created to explore trust and connectivity. The primary objective of the project is to rely solely on users of video sharing websites, such as YouTube, for food, shelter, and transportation during a trip around the United States.”

On July 16th of 2007, a brief video clip was spread throughout the Internet community asking viewers to transport Matt Danzico from one online user to the next across the entire country within a period of 80 days. During the trip, which begins September 15th of 2007, Matt will create a weekly online television program documenting both his experiences as well as those of the volunteers participating in the experiment.

The purpose of this trip, as Matt says:

“We also hope to disprove the notion of a lack of trustworthiness amongst America’s Internet community. We here at Around America in 2.0 strongly feel that the news media’s insistent concentration on negative aspects of American society has had a substantial affect on Americans’ perceptions of each other, not to mention the rest of the world’s perception of Americans.”

This has got to be one of the most original 2.0 ideas I have heard in a while. It plays on extending online relationships to offline ones and seeing how much these online relationships are actually worth in reality and what online communities really mean to us, the users. 

I wish you much luck Matt!

Here’s Matt’s video:

Many people have recently mentioned that they no longer see the value in being members of LinkedIn now that they have Facebook.

Jeff Pulver writes:

“This morning I made the decision to focus all of my professional business social networking contacts to be on Facebook. That means that I am no longer going to accept new LinkedIn requests. After spending the past few months using Facebook, I no longer see the value of LinkedIn. Why use a static site where the fun stops at the profile when there is a wealth of opportunity for vibrant interaction between users and groups of users on Facebook?”

So I asked myself, do I still see the value in LinkedIn? My answer is yes. I see LinkedIn as my professional network. I connect with members there on a professional basis. Through LinkedIn members can see a lot more information concerning my professional experience and background.

Here are three things LinkedIn does better than Facebook according to Chris Brogan:

“Sorting Contacts- I found myself needing to find someone in NYC to offer a couch for a friend. In Facebook, I searched around the Friends tab and couldn’t find a way to sort. Turns out, the way to sort friends is you go out to the main page, to the search bar, click Advanced Search, and then search your network and friends by the criteria you want.

In LinkedIN, you go to Contacts, click Advanced Search, and click sort by location. Done.

Passing Through Mail- Facebook sends my email account a message that says, “Rod Begbie has sent you a message.” And then I have to go log into Facebook to read it. LinkedIN sends me the whole thing, and then I can go log in and respond later. And Facebook doesn’t have FORWARD. I can’t send mail elsewhere. It’s not that I really want to use the in-system mail platform. It’s a little redundant. But if you’re going to give it to me, make it full-featured.

In LinkedIN, you get the straight email sent to your inbox, and you CHOOSE to go to LinkedIN to respond.

Reputation Management - If I’m using Facebook to manage my social network, there’s nothing there that tells a new visitor to my profile page if I’m worth engaging in a conversation. You can read my Wall (where people leave messages). You can view my friends. But that’s it.

In LinkedIN, there’s a recommendation system with a good sense of detail and authority.”

I agree. I think that professionals see LinkedIn as a far better channel to find potential business partners and employees. It may not be as exciting as Facebook, but it accomplishes its purpose.

Through Facebook I have also made some great professional contacts however the interaction process was  very different. To me Facebook is a social platform where I connect with people on a much more personal basis. I share my thoughts with them, my favorite applications, and my causes. Members get to know more about me as a person rather than only view me on a professional level.

I do think that LinkedIn is probably well aware of this situation and will try to do everything in its power to maintain its exisiting users by offering perhaps a more dynamic platform in the future. What surprises me, as Jeff also pointed out, is that someone hasn’t already created an application for Facebook that offers users LinkedIn-like functionality. Then LinkedIn would probably really freak out

I am one of the officers of a group called The Grasshoppers on Facebook. This group was built by Chris Brogan and its purpose is to create a meaningful network of people willing to be helpful.

Know of available jobs? Want to offer your services? Want to sell your old computer? Want to promote a cause? Want to give advice on fun places to visit in your area? Post it all on the discussion board. You can add whatever you think will be helpful for others. Even if you have nothing to add yet, Grasshoppers provides you with a wonderful network of colleagues for future collaboration.

So far we have 720 helpful members from all over the world. This group is basically a tool that can be helpful on many levels. As I’ve figured out (and probably you have as well), Facebook is not just another social network. It provides a platform for you to create a vibrant network of colleagues, use the tools provided by adding different applications, and do something meaningful such as creating a group like this one or recruiting people to support a relevant cause such as helping to stop global warming. I recommend to you all: Visit the group’s page and consider joining. Someone who needs your help today may help you in the future. Helping others comes back in good ways to everyone involved.

Technorati tags: grasshoppers, facebook, chris brogan, help, jobs, causes, advice, network, collaboration, social network, tool, global warming

As a follow up to my earlier post entitled “what does community mean to you?”, it is interesting to see how social networking sites and blogs helped the Virginia Tech community communicate during the shootings. InformationWeek reported that day: “Virginia Tech students and staff reported on what appeared to be the deadliest shooting on a U.S. college campus as it unfolded, using blogs, social networking sites, podcasts, and cell phones to do it…A student captured the sound of several gunshots on campus.”

You can see some of the blog entries posted during the time of the shooting on CollegeMedia.com, the website of the publisher of Virginia Tech’s campus newspaper. Cybersoc.com has rounded up a few shocking first hand accounts from bloggers on the traumatic events, as well as Boing Boing which also has a roundup of first-hand coverage that includes Flickr photos of police cars on the scene.

Dan Gillmor from Center for Citizen Media Blog writes: “More and more major news stories will be amplified in this way. Spot news will be, in part, a citizen-captured phenomenon, and there’s no going back.”

I think that news events being covered by citizens in this format is definitely the wave of the future and this will allow us all to further understand the power of these social tools and to record events in a more truthful and accurate manner.

Thanks to Kevin Cupp for the pic.

Technorati tags: blogs, cell phones, virginia tech, shootings, community, social networking, informationweek, podcasts, collegemedia, cybersoc, boingboing, flickr, dan gillmor, center for citizen media, news

Since it was Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, I found myself thinking: Would the holocaust be possible in a time like today when we have the internet, online communities, and blogs? In an age of endless networking and community building, what do these communities really mean to us? How do we define a community today?

If a mass killing were to happen now, how would we all react? Would we reach out to those from our online communities who need our help? Would we take care of each other and write about it in our blogs, asking governments to take action? Would we digg and delicious our posts, giving them a common tag on technorati in hope that they reach the widest possible audience? Would we open a flickr account so we could share photos and upload a video to YouTube? In a social networking age like today, how would we deal?

When you enter an online community. you start building your profile, uploading videos and pictures, blogging, adding your favorite sites and widgets. You share little bits and pieces of yourself with your community hoping that members will be interested enough to go through the pieces, and also share a couple of their own. In any such network, you will probably make some connections. Certain people like to explore and learn about others before making them contacts, while others simply add contacts randomly. Some approve every request for a connection whereas others have certain criteria for approving a contact. Everyone’s behavioral patterns are different.

You may start chatting, skyping, emailing, perhaps even meeting your connections in person. But how close do you feel to your online connections? If they need you, will you be there? What meaning do these connections take on for you? Given the large number of contacts that we each have in the various communities, is it even possible to form personal connections with everyone? Probably not, Just like in real life, you will most often make deeper connections with certain members than others. Are these connections that we can depend on?

I’d like to believe that community and sharing have not become empty words in our lexicon and that we’re not using the word community only to define a business model that prevents churn. I can only hope that in an age where open communication has been made so easy, horrible tragedies like the Holocaust could not happen again. Hopefully we will never need to find out.

I would like to thank John Suler for the brilliant pic.

Technorati tags: holocaust, community, internet, blogs, digg, delicious, technorati, flickr, youtube, social networking, contacts, skyping, sharing, John Suler

Subvert and Profit which label themselves as “a new kind of black market” pay social network users to digg stories for advertisers who want to be spotted on Digg’s homepage.

Digg users can now sign up and receive $0.50 for every digg they make. Advertisers pay $1 per Digg vote. Other services like Spike the Vote (which is now offline) and User/Submitter (which is still online but allegedly ceased operation), have tried this model before. Since this sort of manipulation of digg votes in exchange for money is in clear violation of Digg’s terms and conditions, many of the users who were involved in these activities were banned from Digg. Subvert and Profit are pretty sure that they have programmed some terrific algorithms that will prevent their users from being tracked. Spike the Vote also believed that they had a bulletproof mechanism to cheat Digg, but in the end, their model didn’t work, users got banned, and their domain name was sold on ebay for $1275 and donated to digg. It’s nice to see that digg users are trying to fight back.

I find it quite sad that these blackmarket companies try to abuse the wonderful new age of Web 2.0 where democratization of content rules and users are able to share and recommend services and products which they actually like and enjoy. It is one thing to promote a product you use, like, and think can be useful to your community. It is another thing to digg a story for a product you don’t even know just to get hard cold cash. If companies such as Subvert and Profit succeed in their mission, all such social networks will turn into “spam networks” which will eventually cause real users to lose interest and stop participating. What good will this bring the advertisers when such sites are only filled with paid users trying to make a fast buck and not even interested in the actual content?

We must remember that sites like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon, are not just sites. They are communities made up of people who feel secure enough to bond and share their favorites with one another. Once we lose this security, such networks will inevitably be subverted. Not by Subvert and Profit but by the real users themselves.

I posted a comment expressing my feelings on the matter on TechCrunch, and Ragnar Danneskjold, co-founder of Subvert and Profit replied the following:

“You’re forgetting two things:

- The majority of people are stupid. Thus, “democracy” propagates dumb content.

- Democratic web 2.0 sites are already rigged to a large extent, and most people don’t care

We’re not going to ruin anything.”

I am glad that Mr. Danneskjold has such high regard for people. It is good to know that as a marketer, Mr. Danneskjold thinks of his target audience as stupid.

Will we as members of these social networks let Mr. Danneskjold and his legions overtake our communities?

Technorati tags: subvertandprofit, digg, socialnetworks, crowdsourcing, advertising, spikethevote, usersubmitter, cheating, ebay, phill midwinter, web 2.0, web, content, sharing, community, delicious, stumbleupon, network, techcrunch, ragnardanneskjold, marketing