For all those of you who are Twitter users and still aren’t using Summize, you’re definitely missing out. Summize is a great tool helping you create some order within the Twitter universe chaos…

On the Summize site you can search for any term or phrase and see all the twitts that include it. You can filter by language, people, attitudes (positive or negative ) and also translate twitts in other languages to English. You can also subscribe to a particular term/phrase’s feed thus saving you the time of having to go to the Summize site. Summize also allows developers to use their API and integrate Summize’s search results with their own apps.

Summize is a great tool for those of us who try to keep track of twitts personally directed at us and allows us to respond promptly without needing to constantly check our Twitter page.

By searching for specific keywords that interest us such as Web 2.0, social media, etc., Summize can also help us find people with similar interests to ours and follow them. I highly recommend it. Especially for the heavy twitterers.

So this morning I get on Facebook and guess what I find? Facebook Chat. Yes it was expected, but it was also a nice suprise.

Since I have I almost 900 friends on Facebook, you can imagine the number of IM’s I’ve been receiving. I find myself spending even MORE hours on Facebook today (if that’s even possible).

This feature will definitely add to the stickiness of the site and also make Facebook a more cohesive community I believe. With chat, its much easier to keep in touch with a larger number of contacts than through private messaging.

The feature is also advantageous for marketers who are looking for constant interaction with individuals in their communities. However marketers should be cautious not to turn chat into yet another spamming tool (like what happened with Super Wall) because this will definitely cause everyone to list themselves as “unavailable”.

I would also advise you to be careful of approaching bloggers in this manner. IM can be quite intrusive to one’s privacy and approaching bloggers through chat, is not a good idea. These approaches should be made by private messaging.

It’s a known fact that many of us already use FaceBook as our main email platform (even though there are many improvements to be made here as well). Now that we have Facebook Chat, seems like Gmail with its chat is becoming even more dispensible.

Anyways, I’d be happy to hear what you guys think about Facebook chat. Love it? Hate it?

I wanted to let you all know that I currently have an unlimited number of invitations to MeeMix. So if anyone would like to receive an invite, please just leave a comment below.

For those of you who don’t yet know MeeMix, it is a personalized internet radio community which aims at identifying individual taste and taste prediction in music using its own behavioral-based algorithm and additional methodologies.  MeeMix takes into account your behavior on the site (for example, which songs you added to your favorites) and uses it to predict what music you might like to listen to in the future. It is one of my favorite Web products and I highly recommend you all to try it out.

Barak Hachamov has written a fascinating post regarding our gradual metamorphosis into digital beings as more and more of our every day activities occur in our virtual worlds. Unfortunately since the post is in Hebrew, many of you will not be able to read it so I wanted to share its key ideas with you.

In the past, the internet used to be only an information source for us. However, in the last few years, and especially since the emergence of Web 2.0, the internet has become more than just an information source. It has become our way of interacting with our friends, expressing our thoughts and interests, and handling our day to day activities. Web 2.0 has turned the internet into something completely different than it used to be. No longer are we the passive viewers. Now we are the active users, creating content and building our virtual worlds with our virtual friends and virtual events. The cold, alienating experience of using the Web has turned into a personalized, customized experience for each of us. Information that we view is gradually becoming more and more targeted to our our immediate needs, our interests, etc. through the usage of personalized tools and the early beginnings of artificial intelligence capabilities.

Social networks such as Facebook allow us to interact virtually in ways that were not possible before. If someone were to describe to you ten years ago that in the recent future you’d be able to hug virtually, throw a sheep at someone virtually, even buy and sell your friends virtually, you’d say he was crazy. With all this interaction and the growing number of online friendships that we build, how does one give each of his friends the attention they deserve? How does one deal with this overwhelming amount of of personal, relevant information that requires his attention?

Just like the telephone, cellular phone, and internet are allowing us all today to do more and meet less, our gradual transformation into digital beings will soon allow us to do more and meet more. Our virtual reality creates more opportunities for us online as well as offline.  How many social events have you gone to thanks to Facebook? How many new people have you met with in real life due to Facebook? Those of us who have been internet freaks for a long time, secluded in our homes from the offline world,  have come out of our shells due to Facebook.

Barak writes that Facebook which we now use mostly to entertain ourselves with lots of silly applications and connect with our friends, is gradually turning into the first human attempt to launch a Human Digital Operating System. As each of us creates a profile, adds applications, schedules events online, etc. he creates the digital self. Whether we realize it or not, we are all participants in this human experiment. We are creating and enhancing the prototype of our own operating system.

Our operating system is working all the time without us even noticing and is digitally mapping our way of thinking, our habits, and our interests. Gradually activities and experiences that were only available to us offline are entering our digital world. One day we will all wake up and see that most of our daily activities happen online. On this day we will know that we have become digital beings. Think about how privileged we are to live in this era where we are able to view this evolution from DOS to HOS, from cold windows to warm, emotional, social platforms.

It is certain that Facebook will invest enormous efforts in improving navigation capabilities between the different applications and information sources it offers as well as the communication and semantic capabilities between them.  These capabilities will improve over time and develop into the first platform which will allow me to create the Digital Me.

Just like in Lego, we will build the digital us out of hundreds of “small applications” which consist of our way of life. As we build the digital us through what seem to be “innocent” actions and games, hidden sophisticated algorithms of artificial intelligence will gradually learn who we are, as well as possible semantics with other applications, and will allow these applications to communicate with each other, draw conclusions, and handle tasks for us automatically. 

The management of my life through my digital world in combination with the collective intelligence of Web 2.0 and artificial intelligence create exciting possibilities for the future. The combination of all these capabilites will allow us to  break through the information barriers and limitations we have today and allow us to better process the overwhelming amount of information we are exposed to. In the future we will be able to handle a few tasks at once without damaging the quality of our actions and without wasting precious time. We will then find it very hard to perform in a world without digital technology. Yet more than this, in the basis of our thoughts there will be virtual terms and underlying digital metaphors, and perhaps we will even feel in a technological format. To many of us this future world may seem quite scary, however ironically, as we become more digital, we will also become more social and emotional with a larger number of people. 

Thanks to Jeff Swearengin for the pic.

Asi Sharabi wrote an an excellent post analyzing the top Facebook applications trends. All of his info is based on the Facebook analytics site Adonomics (previously Appaholic), which provides all sorts of great statistics regarding all Facebook applications.

Here are some stats for example which may blow your mind:

• There are 609,690,058 installs across 9,781 apps on Facebook with over 168,000 developers currently evaluating the platform.
• These applications were used 40,418,045 times in the last 24 hours and have a combined valuation of $524,855,449.
• Facebook has approximately 56 million Unique Active Users in the past 30 days and a valuation of $15 billion.
• This translates to $267 per active user

While analyzing the figures on the most popular applications, Asi “looked for meaningful themes and patterns regarding the social needs as well as the social-communicative roles that take effect with these applications.” This analysis should be quite valuable for users, marketers, and developers in understanding why certain applications are more successful than others.

From his research, Asi concluded that the most successful Facebook applications fall under 3 main categories:

Identity Formation - 43%
Phatic Communication - 37%
Other - 20%

Identity Formation

I’ve already written in this blog about the human need to define one self and interact with others while receiving feedback from our community. The fact that identity formation applications are so popular only emphasizes this point. It is important for us as individuals to define ourselves and at the same time present ourselves to the public in the way that we want to be perceived. 18% of the most popular applications are self-presentation tools. Examples of such applications are: My personality, Likeness and iLike. It would be interesting to find out how many Facebook users actually answer the personality questionnaires truthfully and how many answer with the goal of receiving a certain result which would help them be perceived a certain way by the public. Asi also notes that such “personal” applications intertwined into our public profiles depict the blurring of boundaries between our public and personal selves (you can see my related post here).

24% of the top applications are collective identity formation tools. These are the applications where the user asks his friends to take part in his identity formation. Applications such as Hot or Not or Are You Interested define our social need for flirtatious interaction and the need to be perceived by others as attractive or desired, whereas applications such as Define Me emphasize our personal need for feedback from our network.

We also see that many of these types of applications are what I call extensions of our personal selves. Applications such as (fluff)Friends allow others to express their affection for us by petting or feeding our pet (which symbolizes ourselves). My Aquarium allows others to show their love by sending us fish or feeding them. The constant reassurance of love and affection from the public fills us with joy.

Asi also points out an interesting pattern in the collective identity formation group of applications which are more truth-driven, dangerous, and hence more exciting. This is where the element of reality TV comes into the picture on Facebook. Honesty Box for instance, allows users to send each other anonymous messages, removing any inhibitions they that might have and letting them be completely truthful with you. Another example is the SocialMoth application which shows you anonymous confessions from your friends.  These applications feed our desire for secrets and gossip, as well as the thrill of the unknown (what others TRULY think about us).

Phatic Communication

37% of the most popular applications on Facebook fall under this category. These applications allow us to be in constant connection with our network without exchanging information or ideas.

As Grant writes:

“The phatic messages “stack” nicely, each message presupposing and building on its predecessor.  These messages are:

1. I exist.
2. I’m ok.
3. You exist.
4. You’re ok.
5. The channel is open. 
6. The network exists.
7. The network is active.
8. The network is flowing.

When I use Twitter or Facebook to say that I am entertaining my cat, no one, I’m pretty, sure gives a good God damn that I am entertaining my cat. But they are reminded that they have someone called Grant McCracken exists in their network. 

This is not nothing.  Facebook sustains social knowledge and networks that begin in conferences and then fade almost immediately until a couple of months later we have a hard time attaching a face to that business card still banging around in our briefcase.  A “newsflash” about my cat helps keep the network node called Grant McCracken from blinking out.”

By using these phatic communication tools we remind people that we exist, that the network is live and kickin’, and that communication is flowing. Actions such as poking, updating our status, and sending people gifts or drinks, characterize this sort of communication.  

Other

Social Organization tools make up 3% of the top applications on Facebook. Top Friends (which is the #1 most popular application on Facebook), My Heritage and Circle of Friends allow us to organize our friends and create some sort of hierarchy or relationship tree between them. As we add on more friends, these applications become more useful to us. Since we as individuals can only truly hold close relationships with a limited amount of people, these tools fulfill our need to bond with certain users more than others and present our close relationships to the world.

Communication tools make up 9% of the most popular applications list. Super Wall and FunWall are the #2 and #3 top applications on Facebook (respectively). These applications allow us to better interact with our friends, send them videos we like, and fun messages. Mobile, Instant Messaging and SMS messaging tools fall under this category as well.

Games make up 8% of the top applications list. These include card games, puzzles, and others. Here’s just another way that we interact with others on Facebook without needing to verbally express ourselves. 

Another interesting fact I found is that “Causes” is the #10 most popular application. This definitely shows us the human need to be socially involved and active in causes that we relate to and our desire to increase public awareness and support for such “personal” crusades.

In conclusion, we need to ask ourselves what information can we gather from this data? What do these statistics tell us about user behavior on Facebook, and more importantly, on the Web? How can we create better and more successful applications that will rise “above the noise” of the thousands of applications that already exist?

Asi writes in his post: “…although these top applications have millions of users installs they nevertheless have very few percentages of daily active users. In fact, not more than a quarter of the 100 most popular applications have more than 10% daily active users.” This is fact that we definitely need to look at more closely and examine. It seems like most of the applications that are currently offered are what I call “Vanilla Apps”. They are fun and sweet but not necessarily useful or productive tools for the users. Where will the future lead us? When will we be able to install a hidden application (only visible to us) which shows us our bank balance or allows us to do financial transactions? Do we even want such applications to be available on this platform? 

Food for thought….

Jonathan Keebler has created an amazing bookmarklet that allows you to quickly upload your Flickr photo into your Facebook photo album. 

Follow these instructions: 

1) Log in to the Flickr2Facebook application

2) Save the bookmarklet to your web-browser’s bookmarks. You only have to do this once!

3) Surf to the Flickr page with the image on it you would like to upload.

4) Click the bookmarklet in your web-browser’s bookmarks.

5) Click on the Flickr2Facebook logo that appears over the image. This will popup the upload window!

6) Choose the album you would like to upload the image into.

7) Approve photo for upload

Voila! You’re done!

Most of you have probably heard of Shvoong. Shvoong.com is a world-wide center for abstracts, summaries, reviews, and short essays on a wide variety of topics in 34 different languages. The goal of Shvoong is to serve as a knowledge tool and summarize all that has been written in the areas of literature, scientific research, and popular culture throughout time. All the content is written by users who also earn royalties for their work.

Now Shvoong has come out with a new product - Shvoong Homework. Shvoong Homework lets students write and keep track of their class notes and homework online. They can even share it with classmates and friends. Shvoong Homework is designed to assist students of all ages manage and organize their homework. Instead of using disorganized notebooks, students can use Shvoong Homework to type-up their school work, keep it organized, and then share it with individual or groups of classmates, the entire class, students from other schools, or no one at all.

Some of Shvoong Homework’s key features include:

My Timetable -allows students create a Timetable for their personal class schedules using an intuitive wizard. Students can indicate specific lessons, add exam schedules and attach a teacher’s name.

Each Timetable is linked to Notebooks and allows Students to easily navigate between their Timetable and any particular Notebook they created.

Students can even receive email alerts for upcoming assignments and exams.

My Notebook - lets students write-up their class notes, homework, summaries, and exam preparations. The number of Notebooks students can create and the amount of content in each Notebook is unlimited.

My Notebook features include:

· A text standard editor embedded in the Shvoong Homework interface

· Uploading of Word or TXT documents.

· Sharing functionality: My Friends, My Class, Everyone, Private. Students are alerted whenever any of their classmates/friends finish a homework assignment that is shared.

Shvoong Homework supports 30 languages. These include languages such as Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, and Farsi.

Shvoong Homework is currently holding its first essay writing competition for American high school students in grades 9-12. Students need to write an essay on the topic: “If you were elected President of the United States, which issue would you work on first?” Other students will vote on their favorite essay entries and determine the winner. Ten semi-finalists will be chosen first by the public based on entry ratings and popularity (number of visits). The final three finalists will be chosen by an independent panel of judges, appointed by Shvoong Homework and judged based on creativity, appropriateness for the theme and overall presentation.  Finalists will then be posted on the Contest webpage where visitors may vote for the winners. Cash and other prizes will be awarded to first, second, and third place winners.

Shvoong created this product because it noticed that student-oriented Websites were overlooking many of the “2.0 advancements” that have become so prevalent across social Websites. Eyal Rivlin, the CEO of Shvoong explains: “We spoke to teachers who were frustrated with their students’ lack of dedication to homework. We then spoke to the kids and asked them what would make doing homework more fun. We then took all their feedbacks and created Shvoong Homework… With so many distractions it’s no wonder kids don’t do as much homework as they should. We decided to revolutionize homework and make it fun. The result is Shvoong Homework.”

It is a known fact that educational practices of today need to be revolutionized in order to keep up with the fast changing technological and social evolution we are facing. In today’s age when students are spending a great deal of their time on the net and specifically on social networking sites, Shvoong Homework can definitely serve as a friendlier and more enjoyable platform for students to do their homework.

Below you’ll find Shvoong Homework’s introduction video: