Recently, three companies have begun to explore the value of a social network. The big questions is, who cares?

Well, I think I might if it get’s me free shit.

Our friends over at Freedom & Partners just launched PushKart, a new software platform that analyzes your social network and assigns you a social net worth.

They claim to have a custom algorithm that works behind the scenes to look at various elements of your online social life – sounds like voodoo to me. But I like magic, so read on.

To determine your value, PushKart looks at the size of your social network, the types of conversations you have and how active you are. The software even analyzes what conversations are most relevant to your social network —I guess the idea being that if the chatter in your network slants to technology, tech brands would be most relevant to you and your network?

Eventually, PushKart will likely enable brands to ask you to be advocates for them. In return you will get access to a special deal or an enhanced deal. PushKart’s premise is: you tell friends --> unlock deals --> enjoy rewards.  It’s simple and pretty cool  – it’s still very much in beta and they are looking for help and ideas.

Another company we have partnered with recently is Vitrue. They have launched the social page evaluator.  It attempts to measure ROI for brands who have created a facebook fan page.  I ran the Travelocity page through and it stacked up pretty well against other brands.

Virtue’s evaluator includes a couple interesting bits of functionality. Like ‘fan-tasize,’ which is a configuration tool that lets you see what your page could be worth. Plus, a compare tool that lets you look at how a brand stacks up against other brands.  There is also a nice tips section for creating and managing a brand page. Social Evaluator 

Yet another cool product is being developed here in our back yard, Argyle Social.  I attended a VC event the other week and caught wind of their offering – a way to measure social media effectiveness.  Argyle received a grant from NC IDEA in January this year to start developing their social platform.  Hopefully they will be stopping by at the agency next week so we can exchange ideas.

Now is trend time for these types of tools as people grasp for new ways to deliver and measure social media campaigns.  There are plenty of expensive Rolls Royce platforms that claim to measure all this stuff but I expect to see the innovation and new products come from smaller more progressive companies.

What do you think? Can you place a value on a social network?

a few weeks back facebook announced the release of the graph API that essentially replaces the facebook connect service.  so what does this mean?

facebook says that the graph API will make it easier to access all of the features of a facebook page, while also enabling a more personalized web experience.  looking forward this could mean that facebook.com as a destination becomes obsolete since all of the features that you now access on your facebook page will travel around the web with you.  facebook wants to become the hidden platform that powers the social web.  if every site you visited had facebook features customized to the site experience why would one ever go to facebook.com.

behind the API are two new modules, open graph and social plugins.  think of open graph as a big repository of data that you have shared via facebook directly or any third party site that you accessed via your facebook ID.  it could be the hobbies listed on your profile page or it could be an artist that you 'liked' when you were logged into pandora via your facebook ID.  open graph will allow third party sites and apps to share this information with each other - so that the next time you login to amazon.com it knows that you 'liked' an artist and immediately hits you with related recommendations.  at some point soon amazon will also use the same info to further personalize and customize the email offers it sends to you.

the like button seems to be one stand out feature right now.  every article, image, just about any piece of content where it makes sense could have a simple like option that feeds back into open graph and provides rich data about you that is available to brands, companies, just about anyone who you give access to.  imagine how companies like yelp, citysearch, amazon, netflix, pandora, ebay and so on could all collect and use this data together.

this is but one small example of what facebook means when it discusses customizing and personalizing your web experience - facebook's vision is that everything online is linked and that they are the glue that holds it all together.  it is a real interesting proposition that has hugely positive implications if it is used in the right way, but lets face it even if the word 'open' is used in the name of this platform, it's not meant in the conventional 'open source' sort of way....facebook is a business, a big business and is out to own this thing and i'm not sure how i feel about that.

how about for you?  is the benefit of a personalized web experience worth the trade off of sharing all this data with facebook?  is facebook.com becoming a thing of the past with this announcement?

For a long time now I have been the type of person that sits with my laptop in front of me while I watch my TV.  Sometimes I am working, other times I am browsing, and more often than not I am keeping an eye on what friends and foes are saying.  I generally have tweet deck open in the background just in case someone happens to post an interesting 140 word reference that I want to explore in greater depth.

I somehow manage to do all this and keep up with the storyline of whatever program I am watching on TV.  

When my show goes to an ad break I tend to mute the TV and switch my entire focus to my laptop for two minutes.  In fact I normally have a bunch of things lined up for the ad breaks that require more attention than I can give while watching my program – during this time I probably also un-mute my laptop and let Pandora suggest to me a random song or two.  In that two minutes, every now and again Pandora comes across a gem that I haven’t heard before that makes my new selections list on iTunes.

Sometimes I’ll see a reference on my program (and occasionally on an ad) that requires immediately goggling because if I don’t do it right now I’ll forget and never do it.

But I never interact with my TV program via my laptop – I am never asked to offer my opinion or to join the live conversation on Larry King via streaming IM.  No TV producer has asked me to vote real-time via Facebook on who the next pop idol should be.  No one has asked me to check in to the shows that I am watching so that my friends can share in this experience.  Saturday Night Live hasn’t even asked me to contribute to a choose your own adventure skit via twitter – it probably would be funnier if they did.  And Neilsen still isn’t using live social media chatter to determine what is popular and what is not.

This is where co-viewing comes in and it is coming big time with the iPad.  All the usual suspects (Apple, Sony, Google and even MTV) are playing with apps and technologies that use the iPad to leverage people like me, a ‘viewing multi-tasker’ is what I think they call me.  Catchy right?

It goes without saying that I will quickly swap my laptop for my iPad, and that I will take it from room to room as I move around, and that opens up a world of new ways that I can engage with what I am watching.  

I am pretty sure that I am not the only ‘viewing multi-tasker’  – so my question is how will the iPad change how you engage (or not) with TV?  You never know, your idea might be a game changer.

it was tough to pick just 5 but here they are.

1. Charly Coombes & The New Breed  britpop rock, great melodic guitar and keyboard- reminds me of years gone by listening to Oasis, Supergrass, and others.

2. Gordon Gano & the Ryans

3. Kat Edmundson  the most unique singing voice i heard @ the festival.  beautiful jazzy vocals mixed with a little Bjork.  a fantasic band too.

4. Sarah Jarosz another austin local and she was part of the best night i had in austin, @ momo's.  she's young, just about to graduate but don't let that fool you.  bluegrass, folkish, and an amazing vocal talent.....she was also nominated for a hatful of awards at this years grammys, take a listen.

5. Cedric Burnside & Lightnin’ Malcolm - listen to juke joint duo album.  deep southern mix of blues, rock, and hiphop influences. i don't remember an awful lot about where i saw these guys but i know i loved what i heard.

en-route back from SXSW today, and while sitting at the airport in Dallas I thought I would use the time to share some thoughts on one of my favorite sessions.  

the session was titled the same as this post - 'the fight for your TV' and consisted of a panel with Mark Cuban, owner of HDNet, and Avner Ronen, owner of Boxee.  if you are not familiar with boxee's proposition then read more here.

the two come at the future of TV from very different perspectives and pretty much disagreed about everything.  Cuban believes the current cable model is here to stay for the foreeseeable future while Ronen believes the internet is changing how people access TV and that in essence content should be available to people online, FREE.  the debate was incredibly lively with Cuban repeatedly enquiring as to how much revenue the one million subs of boxee generate.  the answer he already knew, was zero.

whatever their individual opinions are of what the future holds for this medium it left me with no doubt that TV is NOT dead.  sure the format maybe changing and the ability to watch TV on the go via mobile or new devices like the iPad is bringing about a different way that we access content, but the idea of receiving long form content sponsored by brands is here to stay for some time.  content owners and publishers have no reason to change that.  propositions like hulu, boxee, and YouTube have a long way to go to develop profitable business models.  in fact rumor has it that hulu is moving towards a subscription based model themselves as they are unable to generating enough revenue from their advertising model.

interactive TV has been something that has be bandied about as the future of TV for as long as i can remember.  using your remote control to interact, BUT true interactive TV is just that – imagine mixing the voting element of POP Idol with a show like 24.  the technology is here today that can enable this capability.

Cuban can be a bit annoying at times, but he does have a point - he has made a ton of money building and selling businesses and the other guys haven’t.  i'd love to here other opinions on this subject - i'd imagine there would be polar perspectives out there. 

since the debate both of the panelists have followed up with posts on their respective blogs which you can read here:

Mark Cuban - Don't waste the Internet on TV - Protect the Future of the Internet

Avner Ronen - The future of TV

The number of years to reach 50 million users:

• Radio – 38 years
• TV – 13 years
• Internet – 4 years
• Ipod – 3 years

Facebook added 100million users in less than 9 months
iPhone app downloads reached 1 billion in 9 months

I wonder if this says more about a growing appetite for media consumption or a new found ease of accessing the media?

A bunch of us are here in Austin, Tx for SXSW this year and it's been invigorating so far.  The people, the sessions, and Austin itself are all very diverse.  It’s great to see all these creative people milling around together, discussing how technology and creative can be used in new and interesting ways.  I’ve been lucky to catch up with new and old friends from BBH, GSD&M, and Modernista.  It’s funny but we are all experiencing the same challenges – all of us are trying to figure out the best way to get to great digital work.  Be it process, or budgets, or team structures no one has cracked the code entirely.  That’s part of what makes what we do so interesting and exciting.

The sand under our feet is shifting quickly.  I attended a book reading given by Erik Qualman, author of the great Socialnomics book.  He created a promotional video for his book that has a bunch of really interesting facts related to what he terms ‘The Social Media Revolution’.  It made me realize just why figuring this stuff out is so difficult.  And social is only one of the things we are trying to crack.  If you haven’t already seen this video you should watch it.

When Erik made the video Facebook really was equal in size to the world's fourth largest county, within 3 months that stat was out of date with Facebook moving up to third.

I already want to book my ticket for next year. 

An interesting talk here @ SXSW on Saturday - it was called 'Re-Inventing the Wheel: Sketching your own IA process'.

Technology is changing how and where we as consumers interact - experiences are becoming increasingly complex and frequently happen outside of the browser.  But as Chris Fahey from Behavior Design points out the tools and the processes we use today are no longer cutting mustard.

A lot of us are using very linear processes to build non-linear digital experencies.  Here at McKinney for instance we have process that tends to work for the most part.  It goes somewhat like this:

• Research
• Briefing
• Site Strategy
• Personas
• Wireframing/ Sitemaps
• User flows
• Clickable prototypes

As illustrated below there are a lot of different steps and tasks that can go into the IA process.  If you work in the industry there is a good chance that you use some or all of these steps in your journey to creating great digital work.

                                                                                          Source: Jeffery Callender

However it is becoming increasingly important to look at the how we get to great digital work.  For instance how does the process above work for creating game experiences, or Digital Out of Home (DOOH) installations that use motion or gesture based interactions- quite simply it doesn't. 

In his talk Chris suggests thinking about using some or all of the following steps:

The blank canvas

before any work has begun get the entire team together (including your client team) and ask everyone to describe what the final product is going to be- it will be interesting to see how varied peoples ideas are at this stage. if it's a website consider asking:

• how many pages is it going to be?
• will it be Flash or HTML?
• how many users are we expecting to visit the site?

The least wanted technique

again before any work has begun ask the entire team what they least want to see in the site.  this will help you prioritize features.

User persona flash mob

instead of creating a fixed number of personas get the team together and brainstorm all types of users- create micro personas on the back of a card.  Then as a team find patterns amongst the personas and group them.  this will help you define much tighter more focused personas.

Product personality

create a personality for your product.  imagine your product as a person and ask yourself what is the voice of your product. 

Design themes

create keywords that describe your site.  then use visual mood boards that represent each one of the keywords and share these with the client to help pick a design inspired direction.

Sketching

designers more than anyone are often shy to share rough skecthes.  but often these are the quickest way to illustrate a foundational direction for design before anyone has even opened up photoshop.  however rough think about integrating skecthes into your process, even go as far as sharing with your client.  you might be surprised how much this step will quicken the process.

it is almost 50 years since the first computer mouse was born.

1964.  Douglas Engelbart and Bill English invent the mouse. stylish and simple.  i would imagine fairly robust too....

that's all

most of us fly right?  generally it's not a great experience.

to me without a doubt one industry crying out to be next in line to reinvent itself is the airline industry.  big industries are reinventing themselves all the time- either by choice or being forced to.

consider for a moment :

how companies like skype are reinventing the telco industry, you could argue that apple is too

how television is being reinvented as we speak, just look at hulu, boxee, chumby, mobitv

that radio is being attacked from all sides by the likes of pandora, sirius, and itunes

the gas car tank is being taken down by water and electric models

these new companies are creating seismic waves in the traditional business models that their far larger and older rivals have long enjoyed.  sure at the core they have new technologies and interesting products but each and every one of them is also changing how much customers pay for their product or in some cases don't pay for their product.

i can see airlines making some effort to innovate - low cost providers, mobile reservations, wireless on planes, but it's not going to be enough.

so what's the airline industry to do.  well i don't have all the answers but it sure would be fun to work out what a 21st century airline looks like, help it to make money, AND improve the over all experience.