NYTimes has a comprehensive article (req. free registration :() on the rise and fall of Friendster, and what may have gone wrong.  The author Gary Rivlin was able to get first-hand points of view from many of the early players in online social networking, including Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman, who are dealing with different versions of the Friendster story at their own companies, while companies like MySpace, Bebo and Facebook are counting nine zeros in their valuation discussions. 

It’s interesting to see how you can have all the right ingredients and still fail (or fall behind competition).  The article supports my belief that creating a business is as much art as it is science.

Knowledge@Wharton has an article confirming what we, at SelectMinds, knew, but had a hard time quantifying with empirical data.

“Contrary to the view that companies lose something when a worker
leaves, the study found that they stood to gain. Specifically, firms
that lost an employee to another firm were 8% more likely to cite that
firm than other equivalent firms, Rosenkopf says. The reverse flow of
knowledge was particularly pronounced when the employee moved to
another region. Then the old firm was 22% more likely to cite the new
firm.”

Via David Teten.

Big news over the weekend was YouTube’s $1.6 billion, all-stock acquisition by Google.  There’s much debate on whether this was a good deal for Google, or not.

I think Google paid a reasonable price for YouTube.  In addition to its future cash flows, Google must have looked at the potential of someone else (Yahoo!?!) buying YouTube, and what that would have meant for video search and video-related ad syndication, which will both undoubtedly be critical for Google.  Combined with YouTube, Google will now carry about 60% of all video traffic on the internet.

Baris looks at it from a "purchasing searches" perspective, which I also agree with.

UPDATE: No one’s doubting that YouTube and its investors got a good deal, though. 🙂

…should be for "intelligence", right? In this case, it may be "idiocy".  Caterina Fake is a founder of Flickr and Facebook will not let her create an account with her name.  Hilarious. 🙂

An intelligent article from Knowledge@Wharton looks at the recent valuation discussions surrounding MySpace and Facebook, by taking Google as the yardstick.  The punchline?

The $15 billion MySpace figure "would imply that a lot more people will be on MySpace than are currently on it."

I came across SportsMates (via Can Karasikli). I had written about sports social networking before. I continue to think that, like music (think MySpace’s early days), sports fandom is another universal bonding agent. SportMates seems to follow the blogging-community-as-the-network model.

It looks like Joga has failed to maintain traction after the world cup. Alexa reports that NBX is ahead of SportsMates. I remain curious to see how this will play out.

Fred Stutzman has a good analysis of revenues generated by online social networks, building on to the models discussed at FOOCampBarCampNYC.  He first comments on the five models:

1) Ads – or, the interestingness problem
2) Product affiliation groups – or, the non-scalability of affiliation
3) Partnership Opportunities – or, limitations of partnership
4) Micropayments – or, the selling of value
5) User payments/gatekeeping fees – or, the virtual country club

He then goes on to discuss additional models:

1) Exogenous or alternative markets
2) Brokering of trust
3) The negotiation of community

The entire post is worth reading.

In my opinion, the successful revenue models on social networks will end up being the ones that exploit the inherent qualities of the connected media model.  Traditional web advertising neglects to take advantage of these qualities.  The product affiliations, micropayments and secondary markets are where my bets would be.

Seth Goldstein has a post about values he has set for himself.  They are a bit personal, and might not overlap 100% with others’, but I found that they do with mine (save #11).  (Thanks, Tahir.)

Christine Herron has an amusing and thoughtful post on David Hornik‘s opinions on viral marketing.  In many cases, metaphors work in only a few points, but we grant license for their use liberally.  In Hornik’s case, the list is nice and long.

Rafat Ali writes about the first major music move by Nokia. I find it exciting, because unlike Sony Ericsson, they seem to be paying much more attention to the content side.

I have contended for a while that there may be close to 100 million iPods sold, but this year alone, multiples of that will be sold in mp3 capable mobile handsets just this year.  iPod resembles a platform, but the true digital music revolution will take place over mobiles.  It looks like this may be the beginning.