In early March, the specialized
O'Reilly Graphing Social Patterns conference was held in San Diego on the trends of the social networking market on the Internet. Now on the site
files of key presentations that were held during this event are posted. On the presentation of Charlene Lee on the theme "The Future of Social Networks" (
PPT ), we have already
told . Now let's see what is interesting can be found among the other materials.
MonetizationA group of venture capitalists (Charles River Ventures Foundation) and Internet entrepreneurs (startups SocialMedia.com, Lookery, VideoEgg and Peanut Labs) prepared a presentation on the monetization of social networks (
PPT ). It is clear that for a modern startup the main thing is to attract a large audience, and the money, they say, will come. The problem is how to convert users into capital most accurately and efficiently.
For social networks it is proposed to use a special advertising model. Interactive advertising can be integrated with the functionality of the site. For example, an interactive banner with a shopping list can be integrated into the private messaging system on the site: candies, flowers, etc. A girl can mark her status and indicate in which gifts she is interested. Even without knowing her exact address, you can order a gift for the girl. For example, Facebook already has a similar widget that analyzes all transactions.

In addition, in social networks you can place media advertising of almost any format, conduct paid marketing research (with payment to users for filling out a questionnaire), etc.
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Distributed social networkRepresentatives of Citizen Agency spoke about their project called
DiSo - this is a distributed social network based on the WordPress engine (
PDF presentation). The infamous Chris Messina (organizer of the microformats movement) and Steve Ivey had a hand in its creation. To integrate the global blogosphere into a single communication environment, the existing blogger software is used, as well as the standards OpenID, OAuth, XRDS-Simple, Atom, XMPP, XFN, and other microformats.

The main idea of DiSo is to move from a system-oriented design of social networks (shown in the diagram above) to a user-oriented architecture. That is, the user has a unique ID, and all social services are converted into ancillary services, such additional modules that the user can connect to his ID.
OpenSocial Apps & ContainersGoogle representatives talked about their OpenSocial platform (
PDF ). As you know, it involves the creation of a single technological environment on top of existing social networks.
MyBlogLog and Facebook MarketingTwo more presentations were devoted to Yahoo's universal social networking interface MyBlogLog (
PPT ) and Facebook marketing issues (
PDF ).