Los Angeles Based Myspace is finally trying to catch back up on the innovation curve by releasing their apps platform today. These apps, much like the Facebook, apps, allow social widgets on your myspace profile. And while Facebook has beaten Myspace by almost a year with this functionality, there are some things to applaud Myspace over. Most of important of which is that they are the first container to go live with the much touted OpenSocial specs.

There are a number of apps that are live today (well over a hundred with more being added every moment). Here are a list of some of the cooler ones I played with:

• Playlist.com
  Social Music Playlist that help you discover new music and broadcast it to your friends on your profile.
• Flixter Movies
  Helps you discover movies by showing you what your friends thought.
• Where I've Traveled
  Create an interactive world map, to show off all of the cities, states, and countries you've traveled to.
  (Incidentally this app is made by San Diego based Travature.com, a travel 2.0 company we'll probably review in the next couple of weeks).
• Twitter Sync
  Sync your myspace mood status or other updates with twitter.
  

Last week one of the bigger web 2.0ish conferences was in Southern California: The Oreilly Graphing Social Patterns, held in San Diego. I had some passing involvement there and after digesting it a bit, one of the things that I came across thinking was that it never ceeses to amaze me how traditional companies are clueless to what the social web is all about.

So many companies are not sure that they "get" social, but are being told by people in the know that they "need" social. What this often means to them seems to be two extremes: either you must be a company knee deep in community by becoming some up and coming niche social networking site (enter pitch for online community of garbage men here) or that social should just be haphazardly bolted onto the top of your existing product (your chair company makes a vampire biting facebook app that eats chairs). But clearly neither extreme is a way to add value to your product/service. And maybe even more importantly, social on its own, doesn't necessarily monitize.

What does add value AND monetizes, is the notion that social is the new and obvious enabler, of existing markets. Most business are not likely to fundamentally change by being social, they just become better at the business of connecting with and between customers. Movie sites like Blockbuster or Netflix are great examples of this. The companies are still fundamentally about movies, but social takes the customer experience to a different level because you can show off the movies you're watching, connect with friends who have similar taste in movies, review what you've seen so you get better suggestions for new movies, etc. Regardless of whether you are on one of their facebook or opensocial apps, or you are in the community section of their own site, the social graph has become a core enabler of movie watching. These activities enhance the entire video business because you now are not just watching the movie, but you also are stay engaged before and after. In this way community doesn't change the business, but instead drastically creates more value to the lifecyle of the business.

In this way as we move forward, social to me becomes less about being the next cornerstone block of a company, and more about being a fundamental component entrenched in nearly all online activity.

Social Vibe, recently closed over $4 Million in their series A funding round last month. They are located in Hollywood and have the two things every good web 2.0 start up needs; 1) a slick looking site and 2) a very interesting idea.

The main premise behind their idea is having users of Myspace and Facebook get their social networking pages sponsored and in return they get a chance to win prizes or give money to charities. You get points according to how active you are on a social network, how popular you are, and how many people you get to join the social vibe community. If you think about this for a second you will see that if you have a very active social vibe community it would be very very viral. Also on the plus side they did a good job of making the ads or "sponsorships" cool looking (ie they are not blinking banners for saying you are the 837,487 customer and have won and new laptop), and as a bonus they allow you to donate your points to charity.

I do reserve some questions for their business model the first being; why entries to win a prize? I get offers to enter contests for free all the time, whether it is dropping my business card in the free lunch bowl or the previously mentioned ad for my chance to win a laptop and I know one thing...I don't go near any of them. I realize that here the odds are better, but I do not like working for a chance to win a prize, I think it would be more motivating if this worked in a fashion where you can exchange your points for definitive prizes even if it would take longer to get to the good prizes. Or maybe an even more novel idea just let the people exchange their points for some cool hard cash (although I do realize this could be difficult to implement legally if minors wanted to use the service).

My next bone to pick is with the charities, people love all sorts of charities for different reasons whether it is Save the Whales or Safe Haven for Donkeys in the Holy Land (click the link I did not make that up). The point here is that people like charities for different reasons, I am sure Socialvibe knows exactly how much a point converts to monetarily so why not just let the user donate to whatever charity they desire. However I will admit that they do have a wide range of quality charities covered.

My overall impression here is that this could be huge, everything Social Vibe does looks slick and I could really see people adding these advertisements, widgets, and videos to their social network pages in order to gain a chance at some prizes. Furthermore if this does catch on and people are not as anti-raffle type contests as me the whole scheme is viral enough to spread all over the most popular social networks in no time at all.

We are not a big fan of Los Angeles based social network king, Myspace.  Sure they helped take the social network world to the mainstream and are now the incumbent player in the space, but in the fast paced tech world, they are (at least from an innovation perspective) constantly being surpassed by upstarts as well as their key competitor: Facebook. But yesterday, Myspace finally made some huge strides to regain some confidence, by releasing their developer API.  

I just ran across a video based social network company called stickam thats based out of LA.  What I found particularly amusing was the contraversy it caused a few months ago.  Stickam launched in 2006 as basicaly another myspace except it has live web cam functionality.   The streaming video is actually pretty cool, and lends itself to the myspace crowd quite well.  In fact particularly, at launch for the high school kids that weren't leaving Myspace for Facebook, there was a decent chunk that were leaving for Stickam.

Los Angeles based Uber.com is yet another social network that tries to bring Myspace's artistic base in to the "uber-cool" web 2.o world.  Uber focuses on using the social graph to make your own website.  Which to me seems like doing nothing more then rewording customized profile page to make you think your getting something special.  

Los Angeles based Userplane, is an application service provider that specializes in web 2.0 chat and video. They were originally founded in 2001 and were purchased by AOL in 2006. Yesterday they announced at CES that they are now supporting the friendster API so Friendster widget developers can add chat support into their own apps. They also have released their own friendster app so users can have another audio and video chat option within the friendster directory.

Los Angeles based Geni (who we profiled here), has moved another step closer to being the Facebook for family social profiles. They essentially took the Facebook concept of the news feed (ya the one with all the controversy) and the Facebook timeline and put it in Geni.  Sure its nothing revolutionary, but it does continue to round out Genis service as a social network for people who aren't looking for a social network.  And although, many continue to think Geni's 100M valuation is high, we should remember that LinkedIn is valued a 250M and Geni is basically doing for family connection what LinkedIn has done with business contacts.  

A Los Angeles based company has just announced the reception of an angel round of funding. TechCrunch reports that the funding is in at right around $750,000. The main idea of the company is to have not only book reviews but to base the book reviews (via social network) around friends.With the main premise that you would find a book review from a friend more useful than from a stranger.

The Good
There premise makes sense, in taking the time to read a book these days I couldn't care less what random people think about it, I would only take advice from friends, family, or just pick a book out of my own choosing. Secondly we all know the possibilities when 2 Stanford Graduates get together on an online project. In all seriousness there are some real good signs for this company; in around one year they have over 600,000 users and 10,000,000 book reviews, they are close to profitable, and best of all they have done all this without any formal funding.

The Bad
GoodReads has some stiff competition in Shelfari and Library Thing, and while I cannot claim that I am a member of any of these book networks I actually think that Shelfari looks a bit sleeker in terms of design. However that could easily be attributed to their association with Amazon and there plethora of funding. Also while I did find Goodreads easy to use I did not like seeing the reviews being pulled directly from a data base and having no personal oversight of this. What I mean by this is that you will have "Old Man and the Sea" reviews separated because some people are reviewing the paperback and others the hardcover even though they are the same book. What I found annoying about this is to get a good number of reviews you have to take the extra step of looking up 2 "different books" even though the story is identical.

The Overall
All in all GoodReads shows a whole lot of promise, they have accomplished more in one year without funding than many companies with years and millions. They are rapidly growing and I believe that if they use their funding wisely they will be in an excellent position to be the dominant book review social networking site.

It's the holiday season, which means family, family and more family.  

Last week the LA Times and Mixx announced an alliance of sorts (Venture Beat), that while not necessarily revolutionary, adds interesting insight into the direction both old and new guard media are headed.  

Buzznet, a social media network, originally founded in 2005, is certainly not a brand new startup, but this 3 year old Los Angeles based company is really beginning to take off. 

At the end of the day though, what makes us have the most faith in Buzznet is the adaptability they've shown.  They've evolved their site from a photo sharing community to a much more diversified social media platform.  If they continue their impressive growth, and management continues to show a pension for flexibility, they may be phased to take on the big boys soon.

Website: http://www.buzznet.com

Screenshot:

San Diego based startup Loopd.com has recently lanched as the "raddest sports social network ever".  Yes the tag line is lame, but we've got a bit of a soft spot for this startup.  Social Network me-toos are popping up everywhere, but Loopd has the potential to carve out a nice little niche.  The action sports industry has been experiencing rapid growth and while southern california may not be the tech powerhouse the valley is, it is the action sports hub.  Loopd is well located to bring in some great clients, and they have already brought in a respectable list that includes: Surfer Mag Hot100, PacSun, Oakley, and Monster Energy Drinks.  

All that said, Loopd will have stiff competition from much bigger social networking platforms like Flux or Ning.  Particularly with the weight of Viacom behind Flux, one has to wonder if building a semi walled garden of action sports social communities, will be enough to keep Loopd's partners from moving to a larger, more general social network platform.  I for one hope not, but I wonder what Loopd will be able to offer it's content partners to keep them onboard.  

At the end of the day, if Loopd can successfully carve out a niche of bringing web 2.0 type social networking capabilities to the rapidly growing action sports industry, they might be one of those startups that end up being in the right place at the right time.

Website:

http://www.loopd.com