Last week, nothing very thrilling in the technologic sphere of social networks. Instead, it looks like social networks are coming a little deeper into our lives.
- SCHOOL NETWORKS: French magazine Elle reviews parental social networks (#3328, 09-oct-09, p.208) ; here, not a technical review of social networking platforms (hopefully), but a short explanation of parental network animation with www.cmonecole.fr and www.ma-residence.fr. Nothing thrilling for those who already know about those two sites, but the paper may lead parents to check those platforms.
- PROXIMITY FRENCH SOCIAL NETWORK: That reminds me of the public launch of french proximity social network Ma-Résidence. I did a very quick test in the few first days and, frankly, I found it quite frustrating. I hope to publish a more in-depth review soon (here on this blog). This is the first french-government sponsored initiative towards social networks, though I’m very surprised that Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet didn’t talk about it.
- BUSINESS MODELS: By the way, Ma Résidence provides an interesting (though confusing and quite hidden) social network business model. We’ll check that in our in-depth review of the site. Long story short, they try to keep the site free for end-users but try to let your building syndicate (not sure of the english word, sorry) pay for you. Heck, hope mine will never pay for such a service you can have for free in other places — but that’s another point.
- RETWEET API IN TWITTER: Back to a more technical part ! Twitter is still on its way to implement a retweet API. This API will allow twitter clients to track and manage retweets (remember those are tracked usually via ‘RT’ mentions in a tweet — but not only, hence the difficulty). Egocentric twitters will be able to find precisely who retweeted them. And the twitter homepage will be changed to include retweets from your friends. Not a revolution, but twitter is so simple that any new feature added is an event by itself! No date of availability, though.
- TWITTER BUSINESS MODEL: Techcrunch’s Nik Cubrilovic gives to twitter the advice to publish a Twitter server version for enterprises to make money. Basically, it’s a name-spaced decentralized twitter running inside a company. And that’s merely the project I’m working on right now ;) « A decentralized Twitter would suck the air out of the idea that Twitter needs a decentralized competitor. » — I hope to give you more on that very soon.
- TWITTER FUTURE: And, last but not least, if you’ve not already did it, please read the Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, interview for CBS. He plans, among other things, a reputation system (uh oh, no more equality among tweeters, the end of an era?), a location display of tweets (when « globally » also means « proximity »), grouping of users and tweets (clean-up this mess ; oh well, that’s what seesmic already does very well, isn’t it?) and a mysterious improving of searchability and organization of tweets (what does that mean?). No deadline. Of course.
