Social Media Mavens / Experts

Community recommendations are becoming all the rage these days. While, Twitter and FriendFeed are popular ways to get recommendations within your personal networks and within a community, they don’t specifically cater to finding the most popular content within. Here are four great sites that give great recommendations of popular content within your own personal community and more!

BlogRize

BlogRize organizes communities around sites instead of the usual organization method based on friends. Unfortunately, because BlogRize is in “beta”, a site must reach a certain amount of members before it can become an open community. There are currently 4 site communities that are open: Louis Gray, Read/Write Web, Techcrunch, and Lifehacker. However, you can add your list of sites that you’d like to see a community built around and pray that others like it just as much as you do.

Within each community’s page, you’ll see popular shared items by other fans of the site and what the ratings for each article are. BlogRize sports a rather unique ratings system that users will benefit from. You’re not rating on a scale of 1-5. Instead, you rate whether an article is interesting, funny, insightful, lame, disagree, or facts wrong. You may find this more helpful then the lame 1-5 stars.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these BlogRize Reviews: BlogRize Builds A Community Around Your Blog and its Readers, BlogRize: Social News Gets Personal

LinkRiver

Last month, I called LinkRiver my personal Techmeme (Corvida on LinkRiver). I still stand by that statement.

LinkRiver goes the by the standards by allowing you to see what’s popular amongst those that you are following based on how many people have shared an item through their Google Reader linkblog and also the LinkRiver bookmarklet. However, it does an even better job of showing what’s popular amongst the entire LinkRiver community! On the LinkRiver Popular page, you’ll find more than enough popular content to get you through the week.

For more in-depth coverage, check out my LinkRiver review “LinkRiver Is My Personal Techmeme“.

Social Median

A new comer to content recommendation, Social Median gives you the hottest content from all across the tech community. Recommendations are based on the number of “clip its” an item has received. You can “clip” an item using Social Median’s “Clip it” bookmarklet.

There are various popular networks you can join to get better news recommendations sent to you. Also, if you don’t have time to check into the service, you can have Social Median email you the most popular content of the day or at a particular time.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these articles on Social Median: Former Jobster CEO’s Social|Median Incubating in Alpha, Social|median: Personalized News Filter - 1000 Invites

Blern

Blern is another new comer to the content recommendation niche. The difference between Blern and the others services is that Blern attempts to learn your reading habits in order to better serve you, instead of basing recommendations entirely off of the community like the others.

You can help Blern learn your reading habits by importing your feeds from services such as StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc, and by visiting your recommendations page often to give feedback on recommended content.

When you run out of content, Blern also features buzzword and feeds pages so that you can get the latest items from your feeds and also find popular content from buzzwords of your choice.

For more in-depth coverage, check out these articles on Blern: Blern Makes A Mistake From The Early Nineties, Blern.com - Blogs and Articles Recommended to You

The Power Of “You” And “Community”

In this day and age, finding content really is a simple as putting in a keyword on Google. With plenty of filters going around, nothing seems to be the filtering effects of yourself and a great community. All of these services can help to filter and provide you with better content, better sites, and even better people.

Social bookmarking tool Yoono has been in the works for quite some time now, and it’s finally emerging from private beta. With over 1 million users, Yoono isn’t really much of a secret, but now you have a chance to play with this player that’s making itself known in the social bookmarking and aggregation space.

You may recall that Yoono acts as a browser add-on that lets you chat and share items with friends instantly, while offering recommendations as you browse the web and also enabling you to update your status across various networks and bookmark items for personal use as well.

So even though Yoono claims to be everything Flock should have been, how does it actually stack up to the competition? Let’s compare Yoono to some of its rivals, including Flock, the recently launched Vysr, Digsby and Minggl.

Ease of Use

Yoono and its competitors are all downloadable applications, but beyond that, how easy is it to use Yoono? So far, Yoono isn’t quite ready for IE support, but Firefox is good to go. Flock is its own browser, while Vysr supports all major browsers. Digsby is a standalone application that sits on your desktop and Minggl isn’t available for Firefox just yet.

When it comes to basic use scenarios, Yoono is no-intrusive until you begin interacting with it. The screen will gray in order to view images and video content overlaid on your browser window. Flock takes more setup time in order to get all your supporting accounts set up, while Vysr is a very quick 1-step process. Digsby is a longer download and setup process and I’ve had some trouble with some of its recent updates crashing the service, while Minggl takes a bit of education for consumers in order to us the service optimally.

Status Updates and Lifestreams

Microblogging is central to web activity, so having a central location to update your status across multiple sites is a requirement. All of the services except Vysr has this option at the moment. As an aggregator for your friends’ lifestreams, Vysr is missing this as well.

Yoono has a very handy filter capability that allows you to dig down into your friends’ content across networks and stream content, though this can still be a slightly disparate process with Yoono. Digsby is probably the next runner up in this particular category, as it integrates life-streaming and email messaging capabilities, with direct interaction for all your updating processes.

Shareability

Yoono is also a chat tool that lets you share items from the web immediately with your friends. Drag and drop items from the web into your Yoono sidebar tool, whether it be a selected piece of text, videos and images, and it will become immediately available to your friends, depending on what chat tool they’re currently using.

As Yoono supports chat for AOL and MSN, amongst others, you’re likely to capture all your friends for the chat tool. Digsby also supports chat, including the recently launched Facebook chat tool, though it’s lacking the drag’n’drop simplicity of an in-browser tool. Flock also has drag’n’drop sharing capabilities, and all of the comparable services support or are planning to support personal bookmarking tools.

Differentiating factors

While Yoono, Flock, Vysr, Digsby and Minggl all dabble in personal data aggregation of some sort, each service also branches over into a couple of different areas.

Yoono has an interesting combination of personal aggregation of life-streaming and bookmarking, as well as chat.

Flock, as a browser, also has the capabilities of presenting its tool as a platform for future development for other social tools, though it often finds itself looking to natively integrate the best aspects of browser add-ons we see for Firefox.

Vysr, though it has chat, does not particularly act as a profile aggregation tool. It’s major point of comparison for this article, however, is its potential as a “personal startpage” as a browser add-on. Both Yoono and Vysr both take some of the social features that startpages like Netvibes are trying to do with initiatives like Ginger. Click here to see a video intro of Vysr from my meeting with founder Guda Venkatesh at the Web 2.0 Expo last week.

Digsby has an interesting desktop application that is highly interactive, minimizing the necessity of trekking across various social networks. As we’ve seen with the success of Twhirl, such integrated desktop apps currently have a lot of promise.

Minggl’s personalization tools allow for complete control of the presentation of your social networking profil, enabling you to create separate interfaces for various audiences, on top of its browser plug-in.

Most social media websites give you an individual profile page alongside the option of befriending other site users. The adding of someone as a ‘friend’ on a social media website is not just an empty gesture. Usually when you add someone as a friend, you’re giving them greater access to you through the social media channel.

For example, some Digg users set their message inbox as ‘friends only’, so you can only ’shout’ or communicate with other users through the site when they have added you as a friend. Only when someone on Twitter ‘follows’ or adds you, will you have the ability to send them private messages or view his/her updates, if they are protected.

In sites like Facebook, adding someone as a friend allows them to see more of your profile (depending on your settings). Befriending users on Youtube allows you to follow their rating and favoriting on videos, while also allowing you to more easily share content with one another.

In general, when someone adds you as a friend on a social media service, you gain some or all of the following benefits:

1. Access to more data. You get to view more data on the user, some of which may be intentionally obscured from the public or other non-friend users. This allows you to network with the specific user in a more intimate and personal setting.
2. Greater communication options. Depending on the social site, when someone adds you as a friend, they open up more avenues of communication. This adds a greater level of interactivity: you can connect with the person who added you through private/direct messages, instead of the highly visible public channel.
3. Recommended content. When someone adds you as a friend (and vice versa), your activity or actions on the site may be recommended or ‘pushed’ towards the other person in some part of their admin panel or profile. This means that you’ll get greater visibility automatically whenever you use the social website.
4. Greater Social Proof. An auxiliary advantage of having many fans on social media websites is social proof, especially when the social site itself ranks the users according to the no. of followers/subscribers they have. Popular and visible users tend to accumulate friends more easily than unknown users.

Basically, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain when someone adds you as a friend on any social media website. They are giving you permission to share messages with them while bestowing attention on your recommendations/actions within the social site.

If you’re trying to get maximum visibility for your message, develop a popular social profile that has a large amount of fans in order to take advantage of the innate advantage that comes from communicating with a large number of people at once through a specific action.

You can see this most easily in highly subscribed Youtube channels. A video can easily rack up over 10,000 views in one day if it is released by a highly subscribed channel owner. Similarly, marketers or web personalities enjoy increasing their Twitter fanbase because they benefit from the influence they derive from consistently wielding a large amount of attention.

Are There Benefits to Having Mutual Friends on Social Websites?

Image Credit: mario party

Depending on their level of particpation, some of these users will become part of your inner circle: the people you interact with the most on the social site. You’ll notice that you’re often talking to the same people on Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook. More erratic or non-regular users will connect with you less, only when they use the site.

This brings to mind something that is rarely discussed by social media marketers. Are there benefits to mutual friendship on social media websites? Should you only befriend people who befriend you and make sure that you only have mutual friends?

There’s no simple answer for this question because it depends on two things: The infrastructure of the social media site and your goals or how you want to use the site.

Let’s use StumbleUpon as an example. Some have suggested that it’s important to only have mutual friends on StumbleUpon since there’s a friend limit of 200 users. I think that’s just a really limited perspective on how to develop popularity on StumbleUpon.

I don’t recommend this strategy because the only feature-based benefit that you’ll get from a mutual SU friendship is the use of the send-to feature on the toolbar. This option is not used by most active users, does not help to increase traffic significantly and is liable to be abused by spammers who send you multiple pages of content irrelevant to your interests every day.

Who you befriend on Stumbleupon influences what pages you see when you click the stumble button: this means you should try to add users who often stumble content within your field of interest, in order to improve your user-experience, regardless if they are friends or not.

What one needs to understand is that friend networks serve different purposes on each social media site so the value of mutual friendships will differ. This is something you’ll instinctively realize when you spend a lot of time on using each specific social channel.

Next week, I may talk about some friend network building strategies you can use. Feel free to leave a comment and pose any questions you may have!