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Over the last year or so I have grown very fond of the strategy of opening up and API to your social media applications. There are three reasons for doing this:
- quickly generate new features that utilize your core functionality
- generate new users which you can subsequently monetize
- quickly scale your application and platform

The fact is, no matter how big your dev team is, there is more resource and creativity outside of your organization than there is within it.

There is a great article here about box.net and its API…

Box.Net provides a very open API for developers. You can access file sharing and Box’s services directly from SOAP, XML POST, or REST API’s. That means we can use them right from Expression Blend’s XML data source giving Blend WPF and Silverlight instant access to online files and sharing. This opens up a whole new realm of functionality to Blend RIA developers..
Box.net is (rightly) getting a lot of acclaim for makin an API vaialable to developers.

Top Video and Movie Sites, Viewers and Advertisers. A deeper look at most popular video and movie sites, exploring viewer demographics as well as advertisers and types of ads.
Some great stats and table are here.

This article was sent to me by my frieds Jolyon Hart, it originates from Jere Doyle on Performance Insider which also have a heap of other interesting stuff. I’ve reproduced it here in its entirety…

We’ve talked before about how the Internet has dramatically changed the way in which brand marketers acquire customers. Nearly 50 % of adults now have broadband Internet access, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, using the Internet for a wide range of activities — health information research, product research, gaming, travel research and reservations and more.

It’s past time for brand marketers to embrace the online world as a channel to reach prospects and create deep relationships with customers. From “Everyday Moms,” millions of whom use the Internet to manage finances, plan travel and do household shopping, to professional women who welcome targeted email newsletters with relevant information, to health-conscious consumers researching symptoms and cures, the Internet is a powerful presence in everyday life. As part of a multichannel strategy to promote a brand, it’s indispensable.

Two groups that bookend the typical Internet browser/shopper demographic wield a great deal of clout. We’ll look at these groups — teens and boomers — and provide some suggestions for brand marketers who may still be on the fence when considering the Internet as a channel to reach and convince these consumers.

Tweens, Teens, Boomers and disposable income
It’s not a surprise to learn that teens have emerged as a powerful force online for brand marketers. After all, an estimated 89 % have email addresses they check regularly. As a group they are more willing to share information about themselves online. For this group, surfing, IM, email and social networking sites are prime destinations online — 55% of teens age 12-17 visit them regularly. Yet it may not be clear to brand managers how this group can be reached and motivated with marketing messages.

For another prime age group, retirees, the path is more direct. Today’s typical retiree is a tech-savvy baby boomer who relies on the Internet for a range of informational and commercial purposes. These retirees, nearly 30 % of who made a purchase on the Internet in 2006, represent an immediate opportunity for brand managers.

Demographic trends such as those published in a recent The Media Audit report can help brand marketers develop targeted customer acquisition campaigns for the teen and retiree demographic groups. Building these brand relationships online with trusted, valuable information is a sound brand strategy.

Let’s look at the teen and retiree online audiences and explore approaches that brand marketers can employ to attract their attention, inform and educate, and add them to the growing community of satisfied online customers.

Tweens/Teens
Tweens (12-14) and teens control a growing chunk of the family discretionary budget. According to a recent report from consumer intelligence expert Mintel, the estimated spending power of teens age 12 -17 in 2006 approached $190 billion. At just under 10% of the US population, teens work and tend to spend their earnings on themselves, with teen boys pushing a surprising $2 billion plus in the health and beauty category in 2006 alone. (Alloy Media + Marketing ).

Although teens exert significant influence over family spending — estimates suggest they will influence $150 billion of purchases in 2007 — reaching them with advertising is increasingly difficult. Studies suggest that teens skip as many as 70 % of TV ads; those who watch are likely to be multitasking, chatting with friends via IM or playing online games. As the costs of ad spots increase and viewership declines, marketers are well advised to look to new, online media channels to reach these budding consumers.

Online targeting strategies to reach cash-flush teens include:
Don’t ignore tweens, the 12- to 14-year-olds who frequent social networking sites like Club Penguin and Whyville. Although Club Penguin doesn’t accept advertising, other sites allow corporate sponsorships with “virtual” product placement opportunities.

Teens are open to receiving informative emails that include relevant, timely information - on a sale, or mail that includes a coupon — so don’t neglect them in your lead generation/customer acquisition campaigns.

Look beyond MySpace and Facebook for targeted, niche sites that appeal to teen interests.

Encourage teens to interact with your marketing outreach, and invite them to include their friends. Teens are strong influencers of their peers.

Boomer/Retirees
Health, fitness, travel and finances lead the topics that draw retirees to Web sites when searching for information online. As the ranks of affluent retirees swell, online purchasing activity grows, with nearly 30% buying online at least once, and 15% making five or more online purchases annually (The Media Audit).

The opportunity for brand managers here is huge; retirees are more brand-loyal and more likely to seek information from online sources than are other age groups.

One touch point for retirees is health. Prospectiv’s 2007 Pharmaceutical Marketing Consumer Preference Index (CPI) poll indicates that 75% of consumers begin the search for health-related information online, rather than turning to magazines or broadcast media. There are tried-and-true online methods to reach these boomer information seekers:

Microsites that focus on health-specific issues, such as Healthier.com and WebMD give brand marketers a platform to disseminate health news, tips and recipes, paired with relevant offers for fitness, pharmaceutical or beauty offers.

Use interactive calculators, quizzes and polls that test a retiree’s knowledge — what exercise burns the most calories, which foods are higher in fat, how to calculate optimal weight through a Body Mass Index — and you’ll also be able to reach your audience with relevant offers while building trust.

Use travel microsites to combine information on destinations with offers, promotions and valuable travel tips of interest to this demographic.

Choose your method to reach prospects, but don’t neglect the Internet, where increasingly members of all demographics turn for first-line information about health, travel, cooking, finance and more. Brand marketers who are savvy about the Internet will reduce customer acquisition costs, strengthen the brand relationship and boost conversion rates, while gathering valuable information about prospects.

Bebo is partnering with Microsoft in order to use its Windows Live instant messaging service throughout the Bebo network. This marks the first time Microsoft has partnered with a social network to provide IM tools.

Full article on Mashable here.

What’s interesting is that Bebo, with all its developer might is choosing to outsource this technology. I think its smart and its a strategy I’ve been talking about for a long while: why re-invent the wheel? If you can deploy quicker and better with a partner product, especially if it already has mass user adoption, it adds value to your core. It makes perfect sense.

A report from M:Metrics indicates that mobile social networks are growing worldwide, with MySpace taking the biggest chunk of mobile users in the US and the UK.

Old-school software developers are turning in their graves at the thought of opening up APIs into their code so that others can write new apps that use their data and processes. Its a scary notion, but it makes perfect sense for consumer web apps in the web 2.0 world.

Consider this, if you are developing and running an enterprise app, something that runs your business, something that your staff use in their daily processes to conduct your business, the story is very different. Often your data is considered a component of your competitive advantage so why would you want to open that up to possible competitors? You probably wouldn’t, and that’s how many MIS managers minds are still thinking.

But, in the world of the read/write web, where apps are written for consumers to use, and given to them for free its a different story. We monetize our businesses based on large numbers of user using our services over our competitors, and that is achieved by being competitive and being well known - opening up an API is a neat way to do this. Why? It’s well explained here (except from Wikinomics by Don Tapscott) with the aid of an example, Technorati:

“Perhaps the most powerful characteristic of the programmable web is that it invites collaboration by design with open standards and open application programming interfaces (API) that allow separate websites to intermingle. Startups like Flickr, 43 Things, del.icio.us, Technorati [DI> and Facebook, Yelp, Google Maps, Microsoft Maps, etc, etc] for example opened up their APIs as a way to crank out new features, attract users, and scale up their businesses quickly.

Lets just reinforce that point can we, this is a strategy to:
• crank out new features
• attract users
• scale up your businesses quickly.

If you are operating in today’s web space aren’t these the things you are trying to achieve?

“It comes down to a question of limited time and, frankly, limited creativity” says Tantek Celik, Chief Technologist at Technorati. “No matter how smart you are, and no matter how hard you work, three or four people in a start-up – or even small companies with thirty people – can only come up with so many great ideas.”

Its all based on a principle the new generation of Web start-ups learned from the open-source software community: There are always more smart people outside your enterprise boundaries than there are inside. By opening up their APIs companies create an environment for low-risk experimentation where anybody who wants to develop on top of their platforms can do so. Celik says there are potentially millions of developers who might just have the right combination of skills and insight to create something really valuable. “No need to send you a formal request,” says Celik. “They can just take those APIs and innovate. Then, if someone builds a great new service or capability, we’ll work out a commercial licensing agreement so that everybody makes money.”

Other posts from me about API and Mashups

The push towards openness continues. Local reviews site Yelp rolled out an API at the start of August, allowing other developers to build apps upon and mashup Yelp local search data.

Functions include the ability to retrieve reviews and ratings, display review info, track reviews for a certain business, display images of high-rated local businesses and look up business ratings using the business’ phone number, among other things. Examples include a map-based search for sushi restaurant reviews embedded on your site.

One of the first to mke use of this is a new app for the iPhone called iPhocal it uses the Yelp API to offer you local search on your iPhone.

The search tool works as you would expect. Type in a search term and enter a city, and you’ll receive a list of search results. Choosing one of these results will lead you to a detail page that shows the pertinent information, like address and phone number. You’ll also be able to read the comments of Yelp users that have reviewed the particular venue or location you’re looking up.

Original article at Mashable

Pew Internet & American Life Project’s survey of US teenagers confirms that more than half (57%) of online teens are what the project calls “content creators”. That amounts to half of all teens aged 12 to 17, or about 12m youth in the US alone, and this number looks set to grow year after year. These content creators report having engaged in myriad activities, including creating blog or personal web page; sharing original content such as artwork, photos, stories, or videos; or remixing content found online into a new creation.

The current generation of young people has grown and is growing up collaborating online, and they are habitually bringing a new ethic of openness, participation, and interraction to workplaces, communities, and markets. They are the demographic generation of collaboration and they are the reason why this behavior is not a flash in the pan but a persistent trend that will gather force as they mature.

This group was born between 1977 and 1996 inclusive, and there are over 2 billion of them - the first generation to grow up in the digital age.

For the older generation (and at 38 I must unfortunately count myself in that definition) it can be hard to really appreciate the difference in behavior, habits, and outlook from our own. Yet appreciate them we must. The trend of internet users increasingly creating, sharing, collaboration, building, commenting, authenticating, scrutinizing, organizing, and questionning is unstoppable. There will come a time when 90% or more of all internet users will be creators - its a natural behavior that will be accelerated by more, better, and easier to use software and augmented by more, better, easier to use, and more accessible technology devices.

I credit Don Tapscot’s brilliant book Wikinomics for some of the info and phrases used in this post.

Credit to my friend James Warren who posted these… (and he credits someone else )

And I quote James directly:

Astounded by some of the stats swimming around about Facebook, Shel Israel decided to get the info straight from the horse’s mouth. Here’s what Facebook told him:
* Over 150,000 registrants daily. That’s 1 million a week since January.
* 35 million users today. Of course that number will be off a million one week from today.
* Half of users are outside college. That number was zero in Sept. 2006.
* 0ver 40 billion page views in May 2007
* The average visitor stays 20 minutes
* Most growth is among people over age 25
* 47,000 Facebook groups.
* #1 photo sharing app on the web. 2.7 billion photos on site.
* More than 2,000 applications. The Top 10 are: Top Friends, Video, Graffiti, MyQuestions, iLike, FreeGifts, X Me, Superpoke!, Fortune Cookie & Horoscopes. The smallest of these has over 4.5 million users.

From Richard Wray, communications editor, Guardian Unlimited, June 13, 2007

Almost 300 million people worldwide are now accessing the internet using fast broadband connections, fuelling the growth of social networking services like MySpace and generating thousands of hours of video through websites such as YouTube.

There are more than 1.1 billion of the world’s estimated 6.6 billion people online and almost a third of those are now accessing the internet on high speed lines.

According to internet consultancy Point Topic, 298 million people had broadband at the end of March and that is already estimated to have shot over 300 million. The statistics, however, paint a picture of a divided digital world.

In terms of total broadband users, the US leads the pack with over 60 million broadband subscribers. But second-placed China is fast closing the gap. From 41 million broadband users a year ago, China now has more than 56 million and based on its current growth looks set to over-take America as the world’s largest broadband market later this year.

“What amazed me when compiling these figures, is that China has leapt ahead and actually had more people sign up to broadband in the first three months of this year than in any other earlier quarter,”

, Katja Mueller, research director at Point Topic.

China’s rampant growth is a result of economic changes and government intervention. The country’s economic boom has helped create an affluent urban middle class clamouring for the social aspects of internet access like chat rooms, while the government has been driving the roll-out of internet access in rural areas. Next year’s Olympics, to be held in Beijing, has already provided a fillip to the market with the government demanding that every household in the capital has high-speed internet access in time for the games.

Japan ranked third in the report, with 26.5 million broadband users as at the end of March this year, while Germany is fourth at more than 16 million. France scored the highest growth - 9% - in take-up among the top 10 broadband nations to leapfrog South Korea - at 14.1 million - to take the fifth spot with 15.3 million.

The UK came in sixth with just under 14 million broadband users at the end of March, up 6.4%. Demand in the UK market has been driven by fierce competition from satellite broadcaster Sky, which launched its broadband service last year, and the introduction of ‘free’ broadband offers from companies such as TalkTalk.

But in terms of broadband usage as a percentage of households, the UK’s position in the global rankings slips to number 17, with 55.5% of households connecting to the internet at high speed.

Based on broadband penetration, South Korea is by far the world’s top broadband user with nearly 90% of households online. Several small, economically vibrant and densely populated states are also high on the list such as Hong Kong, Monaco and Macau. The US - with broadband penetration at just under 53% - is in 24th place. Penetration in China, meanwhile, is 14.35% while in India - often mentioned in the same breath as China in discussions of emerging markets - broadband penetration stands at just 1.15% of the country’s estimated 200 million households.

Penetration levels in Eastern Europe, meanwhile, may be low, but the region scored the highest overall level of growth in take-up, becoming the only geographic area to show growth of over 10%. The region’s economic rehabilitation, in part thanks to the inclusion of several states in an expanded EU, is driving take-up, according to Point Topic. Poland saw growth in new broadband connections of 9% in the first quarter, with Hungary at 10.38%, Bulgaria at 10.94%, Ukraine at nearly 15% and Croatia at a staggering 25%.

“Penetration of broadband in Eastern Europe was really low, but it is starting to catch up with Europe and we expect Eastern Europe to continue to grow,”

said Ms Mueller.

Full article is here : http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2102304,00.html