Traackr has been on the forefront of advocating for the standardization of users’ social data – see our article from a few weeks ago about this.

The calls for standardization have gotten a lot of traction this week, starting with MySpace announcing on Thursday they will join the DataPortability project and partner with eBay, Yahoo, and Twitter to share user social data.  The next day, Facebook and Digg announce a partnership of their own. Monday, Google will launch of “Friends connect”.

The battle for social data standards has started and the Traackr team couldn’t be happier. Whether Google, Facebook or MySpace manage to impose their standard, or even if we are left with 3 different standards (compared to no standards today), the real winner of this battle has already emerged: the user.

As for Traackr, we have been spending too much time up to this point to collect data in any way shape or form it was made available by the provider, and to normalize the data. As soon as some of these standards become real, we’ll be able to focus more time and attention where it is needed: give the data meaning for our users.

So kudos to Facebook, Twitter, Digg, MySpace, eBay, and Google.  Keep on the good fight!

Special note to our friends at LinkedIn: were you serious when you asked us to mail (with a stamp and all) you a request to participate in your Private Beta API? Read this post: the train is leaving the station and you’re not on it…

I came across this article from Advertising Age that had the promising title “Is Your Consumer Using Social Media?”. I’m thinking that finally the light bulb is on for old school advertising.

Well, I really should have stopped reading right then. The very first sentence of the article is “Nine profiles of who your targets are and where they might be online”. They lost me right there! Nine profiles???!? How do you actually divide several hundred million users into 9 groups?? More importantly, why? Even TV doesn’t dare segmenting at such a macro level.

As it turns out Advertising Age is just quoting the seemingly serious Experian Consumer Research‘s National Consumer Study. They pride themselves with having conducted this study since 1960. It may just be about time for them to drop the typewriter, buy a computer and plug it to their phone jack (yes, that’s how it was done in the 90s) before they talk about new media… I need to add the disclaimer that I couldn’t find the study on Experian’s website to make sure they didn’t get misquoted by Ad Age.

Just for kicks, here is my personal top three of the infamous 9 profiles: the Socially Isolated, the Approval Seekers, and the Divorced. So you to, dear reader, as a member of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or any other social network, I’m sorry to bring you the news but you are an outcast.

In spite of the humoristic value of this study, it saddens me to see that what could have been a step forward for marketers and a call for action will just bring more confusion to the issue.

By Laurent Liscia and Pierre-Loic Assayag

After reading Mark Cuban’s latest angry post about the unavoidable failure of “a la carte” online video, we decided to wait a day before commenting thinking that Mark was probably still upset by the Mavericks getting spanked by New Orleans last week…

But another post in NewTeeVee today by Liz Gannes, reacting to Cuban’s prompted us to not hold back any longer. Liz made some good counter points to Cuban’s post, especially the fact the legacy model where big dollars meet expensive shows can not be the benchmark for the success or failure of online video. Small productions are already catering to niche audiences very successfully and are pushing legacy models upmarket. If you read Clayton Christensen, this is a typical case of disruptive model surreptitiously moving incumbents towards seemingly more profitable customer groups – until the point they marginalize themselves.

A critical point was barely touched on by NewTeeVee though. Cuban, quoting Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research, reinforces the all-too-often-accepted view that there are only 2 ways to create sustainable revenue models for user generated content: pay for content or ads. This very simplistic and bipolar view of a much more diverse and complex issue is subversive as it incites people to only think of solutions inside that box while we should all be thinking about new ways to capture the value in this new market.

The pay-for-content or ad-based models represent 2 extreme and cartoonish perspectives on ways to capture the value of web content. If we believe that value is created by content producers, measuring that value is the first step towards finding ways to monetize it.

Further, the emphasis on monetization per se is bizarre. Isn’t UGC about individual expression vs. business-plan-driven editorial policies? We’re not making a value judgment here, just making an economic point. People are using their content as a way to heighten their profile in the real and offline world – either to advance their careers, make a splash, or create a movement.

Corporations may be fixated on monetization. Marketers, however, are beginning to understand that influence is a valuable intangible.

BTW, this is a very serious trend even venerable government institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia are beginning to try and put a dollar figure on intangible assets. No doubt, a day will come when parental investment in rearing their kids, society’s effort to educate young people, and artistic production that moves people to feel and want a better life will be accounted for.

Similarly, influence will be quantified (and note that quantified does not necessarily mean monetized). This is what we’re doing at Traackr with our buzz, popularity and reach scores, which will soon be translated into play dollars. Look out for Traackr dollars in the third quarter of 2008.

Just returned from the exciting OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) conference in Santa-Clara this week.

It brought together heavy-hitters such as Bea and Oracle (who, amusingly, became one on Tuesday), but also the likes of Nomura Securities, Software AG, various Chinese startups and mighty Uncle Sam via several branches of government. And in case you’re wondering whether the show was Web 2.0-friendly, there were also intriguing startups, such as Peter Brown’s Pensive, a semantic Web app based in Brussels.

It may have looked like a supreme GeekFest on the surface, but what was being discussed was definitely on that ever-elusive cutting edge, and will change our lives in the very near future (if global warming doesn’t catch up to us first): how information can flow seamlessly through the financial system (and maybe help us avert a few foreclosures in the process); how China and Korea are moving forward with putting entire communities online using open standards systems; and even more interestingly to this writer, how Oasis just created a new technical committee to come up with a standard for an online reputation management system.

Let’s look at some of the names on the committee roster, shall we? They include: BEA, IBM, Sun Microsystems, AOL, Booz Allen Hamilton, CA, Cordance, Google, NeuStar, NRI, VeriSign – all stalwarts of the new economy, and all interested in identifying users in a traceable, verifiable way.

What exactly is a reputation management system anyway? It’s a feedback loop. Identities are emerging across a variety of sites: people posting to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and so on. This content defines their identity, and creates an intangible reputation. An open reputation system would allow user “PostCrazy” to circulate from site to site with a verifiable history of their online contributions.

Does this sound like Big Brother? Well, all depending whether you look at reputation as a judicial record, or a sort of dynamic resume. The former use would need to be limited to very specific uses and dovetail with security issues such as single sign-on, protection against identity theft, and B2B applications.

The latter is what Traackr is all about: a way to empower users to leverage their valuable UGC, and establish trust and islands of worth in a market flooded with suspicious or mediocre content.

If an ORMS system does emerge, you’ll know whether a review came straight from the manufacturer, a company toadie, or a genuine user. Conversely the user will be able to prove their worth across the entire breadth of their online production.

We vote yes.