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Websites that change to fit the cognitive style of the user could be more effective at selling products online.

These days, we are deluged with data, and as a result we’re confusing noise with information, and information with useful information. But what many companies fail to realize is that what matters is what you do with that data — and as a result, they are missing out on a tremendous opportunity.

Today at Graphing Social Patterns, executives from hi5, AOL, MySpace and imeem provided updates on their OpenSocial platform usage. Patrick Chanezon from Google opened by explaining that Chinese service OpenPNE out of China and StudiVZ out of Germany are the two newest OpenSocial providers. He also shared some updated stats:

– 19 days in production
– 275 million users
– 66 million installs
– 2,000 applications built on OpenSocial
– 20,000 developers
– 10 million daily app users

AOL

The AOL OpenSocial discussion was brief as the panel was almost out of time but the discussion focused on the third-party and advertising aspects.

imeem

imeem focused on music and showed off some basic OpenSocial goodies you could build on imeem. Apparently you can access the entire music library on imeem using OpenSocial.

MySpace

MySpace came out of the gate boasting how large they are and noted they are twice as large as the nearest competitor (without naming Facebook). The pitch was simple, "want to reach the largest OpenSocial community? Build on MySpace." Staggering stat: 12% of all Internet minutes are spent on MySpace! The MySpace guy wouldn’t answer my question about the costs associated with being a "featured app" - said something about being a developer and not a business guy. I don’t buy it for a minute mister!

hi5

For some reason, the hi5 guy decided to open by putting on a gray shirt - he said that all business people wear blue shirts and khaki pants (luckily he didn’t take his pants off!) - the stunt didn’t seem to get much of a reaction from the audience. It felt like hi5 was the little engine that could from his presentation. They do have very strong adoption of the OpenSocial apps by their community.

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Document sharing service Docstoc is out with a potentially major upgrade today. The new functionality is called OneClick and allows you to share documents via email no matter how large the files are. I’ve embedded a video that describes the service below. OneClick is a simple desktop widget that you select when you have large documents to share. After the documents are uploaded to Docstoc, the OneClick application opens your default email application and puts the links directly into the email. It’s really simple to use.

Adam Ostrow notes that this new utility will help drive user adoption of Docstoc and I completely agree - this is why I noted that it’s a major upgrade above. Not only will this drive user adoption, it will also help Docstoc to increase their keyword rich content index. While it appears that documents uploaded with OneClick show as private by default, Docstoc would be smart to push users to change the privacy settings on their next login.

The only filetypes that are supported with Docstoc’s OneClick are .doc, .pdf, .xls, .ppt. This may limit the tool’s functionality as other large file email replacement tools like YouSendIt allow you to send any file type. Will the casual user know when to use DocStoc and when not to? Mark Hendrickson has the same concerns regarding file type. Frankly they should allow any file type to be uploaded and just show the files as a list rather than showing them in the Docstoc player. That’d be hot.

The document sharing battle between Scribd and Docstoc is great to watch as it’s forcing both to continue to innovate and that’s a good thing for all of us. Check out our interview with Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar.

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This time, I’m talking with Beth Massi of the Visual Basic Dev Center (http://msdn.com/vbasic/) and (http://msdn.com/vsto/) at Microsoft.  You can also find Beth’s blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi/.  In case you can’t see it, the beer in her hand is a Victoria Bitter (get it?  VB!)

1. Where are you from?
I was born in San Pedro, CA (Southern California) but moved up to Northern California for college. I’ve been living primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area ever since.

2. Who do you work for? Give me the 10 second pitch on them. Why would I want to buy their product?
I’ve been working for Microsoft for a little over a year on Visual Studio. If I have to pitch VS to you then we’re in trouble

3. What brought you to your current employer?
Microsoft approached me to help revamp Visual Basic online content and community especially on our Developer Centers. Previously I was an Architect MVP working for an ISV in the HealthCare industry. I’ve been in and out of the consulting and HealthCare business for a long time and my favorite part of the job was always building app frameworks and mentoring people on programming best practices. I’ve always have had passion for the business application developer and this was a chance to really mentor people at a large scale. I couldn’t pass it up.

4. I’ve known you from your blogs for years, but that’s just one side of you. What’s something the world doesn’t know about you?
I think most people know I have a FoxPro background but they may not know that I was a Program Manager on the VFP 8.0 product and designed two of the IDE features; the Toolbox and the Task Pane Manager, back in 2002. That was the first time I worked for Microsoft but I was a contractor back then. Another (less boring) thing about me is that I love sports, especially baseball. I have Oakland season tickets — Go A’s!!

5. You went to TechEd2008 (Developers) this year. Was it your first time, and what did you think? Worth going back again?
It was my first time and I had a blast. Definitely worth going back again. I blogged about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi/archive/2008/06/09/i-survived-teched.aspx

6. Lots of folks find equal or greater value in the networking, rather than the sessions. Would you agree?  Did you have a favorite session or event?
Working the booth was definitely my favorite. The most fun I always have is talking to people about what they work on, then trying to understand their business challenges and hearing what technology decisions they’ve made. But I also had a great time at the parties too

7. I followed a lot of folks on Twitter during TechEd, and it seems like the way to go when out of town. What’s your take on Twitter?
I actually am on Facebook so I update status once in a while. I keep saying I should join Twitter but I don’t know if I have time to neglect another social app right now. I like Facebook because you can pick your “friends” (you define who they are) and you can use it as a very low maintenance way to keep in touch with friends/acquaintances. Twitter’s a much bigger pool and seems more of a way to keep tabs on what and who is going on in the industry.

8. Any non-technical hobbies? What are they and why?
Sports – okay more like watching Sports Center and going to baseball/football games in Oakland
Painting with acrylics – I needed some paintings in the house and thought “I can do that!”
Hiking / mountain biking – too many mountains around here, too little time
Racing /modifying cars – must get this one from my dad, last modification was bigger 300cc injectors and re-tune
Weight lifting – I’d like to be strong one day

9. Last of all, any tattoos?
Of course, I designed them myself. I leave it up to the imagination as to where they are.

List of search engines for searching source code of various applications and Books. Can be quite handy in finding out how to use different components and also in understanding algorithm for Standard operations .

There is no dearth of online personalized news aggregators, the most prominent ones being My Yahoo and start pages like iGoogle which allow you to add different widgets and view customized content in one page. The motive of DailyMe is the same - to deliver you latest content and news from various sources in a […]

comScore is ouit today with a new report regarding U.S. online advertising within the quick-serve restaurants category for March 2008. The report leads with McDonalds online advertising numbers which lead the pack at 295 million online display ads for the month. Quiznos came in second (huh?) followed by KFC, PapaJohns and Subway. In fact, McDonalds nearly tripled the online ad impressions that Quiznos ran.

With the stupid Subway campaigns for $5 footlongs, I would have imagined Subway ranking higher in impressions than Quiznos.

While 295 million impressions might seem like a lot, comScore ranks McDonalds at #113 on their list of total ad impressions for March 2008.

This news comes after TNS Media Intelligence reported that online advertising spend was up 8.5% for the 1st quarter 2008.

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One of my colleagues in the office told me about a website statistics service named Woopra (he knows I love quantitative data). I had not heard about it prior, so I went a did a little research around the Internet about it. Apparently, it launched on/around May 30 2008, as it’s relatively new, but had a nice little writeup on TechCrunch. I did some Tweet tracking and saw that a healthy early adapter audience was using it.

What is Woopra you ask? Very simply: MyBlogLog meets Google Analytics and has a baby, and then morphs into a Bloomberg Terminal of the next century. Very, very interesting, at least to me it is. I’ve taken some screenshots of my Woopra Terminal and put them below for you to see:

What I like about Woopra is that it gives me information in near real-time and tells me where my audience is going and where they have been on my website. Generally, all of the data exists on server logs, but I like the advanced graphical representation of my data. In the screenshots above, you can see the ticker on the bottom of the page that scrolls with data from the server.

Woopra is going to run into some issues when large publishers start signing up. They are in beta right now which is very smart and limiting their service to publishers who are less than 10,000 page views. I’m speculating that the reason for this is because the amount of resources it takes to crunch all of the data is fairly intensive and that they want to work out all of the kinks before they start charing. I’m interested to learn how their infrastructure is built - are they using Amazon’s EC2?

What I’d like to see is Woopra share network data information.  Meaning, if I track a view on my site and rename them, I’d like to see that “renamed” person across the entire Woopra network.  There is a lot of information in the larger “network” - lets see if Woopra pools that data.

I also give them credit for the slick interface.

Darren Herman is a digital media enthusiast and serial entrepreneur. Herman writes about technology, entrepreneurship and digital media at his blog, http://www.darrenherman.com.

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In February Nokia launched their mobile ad network.  Today Nokia is announcing the Nokia Advertising Alliance which will attempt to make mobile advertising easier for brand advertisers. The alliance brings together the many phases of mobile advertising: planning, executing, and tracking.

Perhaps this is one way that Nokia can compete with Apple - mobile advertising. If they can win over brands and their advertising money, will they want to push Nokia devices so consumers and their customer base can view and interact with their advertising messaging? 

The Advertising Alliance is made up of two parts (from the release):

• The Nokia Media Network which gives reach to millions of mobile consumers through advertising on more than 100 blue-chip mobile publishers, operator partners and Nokia properties. 
• Nokia Interactive Solutions that creates end-to-end, high performance mobile campaigns for brands from banner ads, mobile internet sites and location finders to mobile coupons, click-to-call and other advanced mobile mechanics.

Four companies have been announced as launch members of the Alliance: i-movo, Mobile Acuity, Mobiqa, and uLocate. More will be named soon.

Nokia - go own mobile advertising - Apple certainly isn’t thinking about it.

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