What does it do? It allows you to sign in super easy with your name and Facebook password, and then leave a comment. Facebook automatically includes a pic from Facebook as an avatar as well as your name, linked to your Facebook profile.

What’s the implications of this?

If your a commenter and blogger:

…like me I’d be weary.

I want people to come to my blog, not my Facebook profile. Facebook is after all designed and best used with real friends.

Secondly, I’ll loose the chance of scoring a bit of Google juice via the link to my blog. The Facebook comment’s links have nofollow attributes (I guess implemented on the Techcrunch side), meaning they can’t pass on PageRank, not to your blog and not even to your Facebook profile.

If your Facebook:

I’d be pretty dissapointed that were not getting all that PageRank form all those comments with links. Still, its an opportunity to cement Facebook as an identity repository standard.

If your a Facebook user: (Like me)

Well the downside is your much more likely to be found by people that find you interesting and that you don’t know. If your egotistical and accept all those invitations, in no time your Facebook experience will be boring. Facebook works best with real friends.

But it also an opportunity to show your friends how clever you are with no extra effort. Your comments go straight to your Friendfeed. They also might just think your an opinionated twirp, or really not interested what you think of the Springbok rugby team.

If your Techcrunch (or an implementing site):

Excellent. This is great marketing. All the people leaving comments are effectively word of mouth marketeers for your blog. The comments will appear in hundreds of Friendfeeds. A marketing dream come true. And you don’t loose any Pagerank to pages you don’t want to. Bonus.

Sam Leith is fired, pending appeal.

On Facebook I was greeted by a stream of disbelief from other fiends. One pointed us to to an official confirmation.

On this blog I have written a lot about the shake up of traditional media by new media like Facebook. Now new media (social media) is beating old media with the most authentic news of old media’s own demise.

Sam is a gifted journalist and was the Telegraph’s literary editor. He once wrote about Facebook and its News feed:

“Then there’s the “News Feed”. Facebook is the Reuters of irrelevance, the AFP of inanity. Look at it now. The “top news line”, as we call it in the trade, is that at 10:51, Larushka Ivan-Zadeh became “undecided”. Just three minutes before that, Toby Young added Rio Bravo to his list of favourite movies. Mo Kanneh, I discover, became “chill” at 11:59pm, 3:01am, and 5:04am. Presumably he now resembles a fish-finger after a big night out in Aberdeen. Update! 11:11am: Ben Price removed Dirty Harry from his list of favourite movies.”

Just earlier this week Facebook’s newsfeed was deadly serious.

If you read the English press you might be aware that there’s some bad things going down in South Africa (yes again).

An old school friend updated his feed just this week. It read:

“A J…is sad. His best friend was shot dead in a robbery last night :(.”

The Financial Times recently reported a surge in sales. In times of crisis people turn to quality reads. Social Media is no different.

Update: Sam on being made redundant.

It had very little by way of – wait for it – user generated content (UGC) besides user’s online resumes.

Then, a bit more than a year ago they added the questions and answer section which really upped the value of LinkedIn. The answers on LinkedIn if often very good and detailed. (I wonder why LinkedIn do not open these to the web to be indexed by search engines? But I digress.

Still, LinkedIn was lacking a bit of exposure to activity that would matter to you.

You were often not aware when one of your contacts asked or answered a question, or updated their profile. In short it needed a Personal newsfeed like Facebook had, so you could share ‘in the wisdom of your crowd‘ as Jeff Jarvis put it.

But now it has a personal feed as well, complete with a status updating tool a la Facebook and Twitter.

And this morning I noticed a new feature. Applications!

You can add applications like Slideshare or Wordpress, that notifies your contacts via their feeds if you have updated your blog post or have uploaded a new slide show. Cool!

This video explains how it works with Wordpress.

And cool is not a word I would have associated with LinkedIn before.

PS: The app platform is a Google OpenSocial-based application platform called InApps.

But according to Technorati’s latest State of the Blogosphere report 2008 blogs have more visitors than Facebook or MySpace in the US. (MySpace is still considerably larger than Facebook in the US.)

Citing comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008):

* Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
* Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million

Would this be true internationally? It certainly seems that way.

According to Universal McCann (March 2008) 346 million people word wide read blogs. Although I’m not sure if this is a per monthly figure.

Globally Facebook is bigger than MySpace. Facebook had 123.9 million unique visitors and 50.6 billion page views worldwide in May 2008, according to the research firm ComScore. MySpace, meanwhile, had 114.6 million unique visitors and 45.4 billion page views.

An important question. How do advertisers reach all those thousands of users on thousands of blogs? The web is still not shaping up to be like traditional media (where everybody uses a few media channels), and it probably never will.

1. Networking;
2. Social;
3. Identity; and
   
4. Sharing

Now, by looking at four well know examples, I will illustrate how different emphasis on these functions differentiate Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Second Life.

Second Life

Second Life is in fact a weak example of a Social Networking media property.

• This is primarily because it lacks Networking functionality (You have no friend or contact lists, where you can create ties or nodes and track their movements or interactions);
• It is however very big on Identity formation features (although this identity does not have to map to a real identity);
• It can be very social and users can build real & warm relationships;
• It also does have ’sharing’ functionality. (Just by being on Second Life you in fact become content! Everything you build is user generated content and therefore sharing.)

But because it tries to recreate reality and its users can not create ties or links (a buddy list) that allows them to associate, track or interact with contacts it’s a social networking site without the networking.

What are the user behavior of Second Life users like? They tend to spend hours on SL, they tend not to use their own identity, but a fictional one. They tend to meet strangers and befriend these stranger’s fictional identities. They can just be or play or build stuff in Second Life. But what they do there tends not to have much of a bearing on what they do outside of SL.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn can be described as a very functional Social Networking site that’s lite on social functionality because:

• Is a Networking site in the business sense of the word, where people create ties to achieve a goal; (It has built its networking features strongly on so-called weak tie theory.)
• Does not contain much Social functions (Users not enabled to show their personality and build deeper personal relationships);
• Has basic and core Identity functions: A user’s real (but laundered to the extent that they can be sanitized of personality) identity is crucial;
• Little by way of ‘Sharing’ functionality (Although they have recently added Question and Answer functionality, which generates fantastic content);

LinkIn’s user behavior is quite different form SL.

“We focus on a few but high value moments” Reid Hoffman, LinkIn’s founder.

And thats exactly what happens. Many users only visit it when they are job hunting – once every few years. The users real identities are crucial, but they are stripped of any depth. It’s a corporate identity, an online resume of your career status and achievements. There’s little evidence of socialising on LinkIn and little functionality that encourages it. ‘Sharing’ is limited to gaining access of contact’s contacts (weak ties) and asking professional Questions and getting Answers.

MySpace

MySpace combines the 4 functions more equally that Second Life or LinkIn.

• It has very strong Social functionality that allows users to interact in a personal way;
• But it has Networking functions as well, that allows users to create friends or contacts through ties;
• User identity formation and expression, real or made up (and therefore often comprised of groups of people like bands), is extremely important, a user can completely customize a page to reflect who they are and associate with whom they want;
• ‘Sharing’ things like songs, pictures, videos and blog entries is key;

MySpace’s users come back to the site often and spend a reasonable amount of time on it. It has become very popular with bands and artists as a promotional tool. Anybody can see who your ‘friends’ are, and some users have thousands of them – so weak tie theory applies.

“Andy Warhol said everybody is famous for 15 minutes. Social Networking changed that to everyone is famous for 15 people. If you have a million friends, your broadcasting. You’re an entertainer” – Tom Anderson (MySpace)

Facebook

Like MySpace Facebook applies the 4 core functionalities associated with social networking more evenly. It has:

• Very strong Networking functions, without ‘Friends’ you literally have nothing to read, see or interact with. Facebook is built on strong interpersonal ties;
• It has allot of functionality that makes it very Social and allows personalities to to be on display. Poke!
• User Identity functionality is paramount, made up identities are virtually useless (pun intended);
• ‘Sharing’ is crucial (Users can share almost everything, their every Facebook move is UGC. UGC that is delivered to their ‘friends’ via a personalised feed);

Facebook’s user behavior is very interesting. Most users visit the site at least daily, but often for less than one minute. Besides the importance of real Identities and Facebooks strong and deep ties (versus MySpace’s weak ties), the main difference between Facebook and MySpace is in the clever exposure given to ‘sharing‘ via its Personal Newsfeed function.

“You can’t create communities, you can just find them” – Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

All this explains why Facebook has been so successful. As Jeff Jarviss said, it harnesses “the wisdom of your crowd“. But it’s not suitable for all Social Networking needs, because it militates against discovering new people and therefore new things. It’s also doubtful whether it would have bee so successful without it’s revolutionary Personal Newsfeed.

Conclusion

Facebook and MySpace share almost all their key features, and LinkedIn shares some with them, but the differing implementation of the 4 elements has yielded very different user behavior.

So when planning a Social Networking site ask yourself:

• To what extent should the users form relationships or ties?;
• Should they be weak or strong?
• To what extent should the site allow socializing?; and
• To what extent should users be able to express their identity; and
• Should this identity be real?
• What content do you want your users to generate?
• And how do users find out of new UGC content that might interest them?

Notes:

Ties

One can not have Social Networking site without two-way ties built into the architecture. The ability to communicate and interact is not enough (See Second Life), although users can still build ad hoc relationships without this functionality.

Building ties into the architecture requires permissioning functionality. Even when one does have permissioning to create ties, how one implements the use of ties leads to wildly divergent outcomes. (See the huge difference between LinkedIn and MySpace.)

Weak ties

Interpersonal ties, generally, come in three varieties: strong, weak, or absent. Weak social ties, it is argued, are responsible for the majority of the embeddedness and structure of social networks in society as well as the transmission of information through these networks. Specifically, more novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties. Because our close friends tend to move in the same circles that we do, the information they receive overlaps considerably with what we already know. Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information from them.