John Battelle’s Searchblog has a post today discussing the new social site Fanpop.  He summarizes the service as:

Fanpop may standout, however, by picking the best qualities from a number of leading social sites and bringing them together in a neat integration. As they say, "We’re a little bit of Digg, MySpace, Yahoo! Groups, del.icio.us and Yelp all mixed into one."
…
There are many social sites out there, too much to all survive, but aggregating the best features from specialized social sites may help this start-up rise to face the the largest player(s).

To me, this brings the question, ¨if you continue to aggregate features from various services, where do you stop¨, to mind.  In other words, why will there not be a next service which integrates all of the services in Fanpop, along with a few other/newer services?  Can it crate a vicious, redundant cycle of unnecessary innovation.

This is a question that the team at GROU.PS needs to keep in mind.

I had previously commented on the American Apparel store opening on Second Life, the online 3D digital world, which is imagined, created and owned by the residents.  Now, Duran Duran, the post-punk new-wave rockers enjoying a comeback, are establishing a virtual presence on SL.

With the pressures on music revenues, it’s inspiring to see some bands make bold moves.  However, the critical side of this piece of news is how significant SL has become, with close to 400K members.

To developers, that is. Marc’s Voice reports that the second most closed (after a small world) of all SNS’s now has a full API open to developers.  There are, in typical Facebook style, plenty of requirements for anyone developing on the platform, but nevertheless, this is a bold move from the smart player we know Facebook to be.  Tons of developers will be stumbling over each other to innovate.

Such a contrast to the wall-raising going on at MySpace.

As a believer in open networks, I think this move will catapult Facebook in terms of innovation and quality of user experience.

Paul Graham has a great essay advising early-stage ventures on critical factors when presenting to potential investors.  One of our portfolio companies, Grou.ps, is going on a quasi-road show to meet with a group of potential funders, so this is timely for us.

The bullet points are:

1. Explain what you’re doing.
2. Get rapidly to demo.
3. Better a narrow description than a vague one.
4. Don’t talk and drive.
5. Don’t talk about secondary matters at length.
6. Don’t get too deeply into business models.
7. Talk slowly and clearly at the audience.
8. Have one person talk.
9. Seem confident.
10. Don’t try to seem more than you are.
11. Don’t put too many words on slides.
12. Specific numbers are good.
13. Tell stories about users.
14. Make a soundbite stick in their heads.

The entire article is well worth reading.

I had touched on this subject before.  And, while I was away on a boat, the news broke that Google has signed a $900 million deal with News Corp that makes Google the default search provider, and the exclusive provider of
text-based and keyword ads on all Fox Interactive Media properties, including MySpace.

Given the traffic numbers, this is of course about MySpace’s current dominance in online media.

The most exciting part of this deal is that it should answer all outstanding questions around value of attention, the monetization opportunities in social networking sites, and most dramatically, whether Murdoch had overpaid for MySpace.

Om Malik, as usual, has a good analysis of the deal.

Seth Goldstein has kicked off a new edition of his Media Futures series.  The first few installments are up.  Anyone interested in new media should give his writing serious thought.

The War for Attention: Summer 2006
1/5 Automata (1)
1/5 Automata (2)
1/5 Automata (3)

Paul Graham brought up the issue of media companies censoring or not covering content that (positively) relate to each other.

Twice now, stories that
linked to reddit have gone out in Digg’s rss feed as frontpage stories,  only to disappear from the frontpage.
…
Digg’s whole point
is supposed to be that users decide what’s interesting.  Does that
merely mean, in  practice, that users get to vote among choices that
Digg approves?

We witnessed a similarly biased coverage in Turkey recently.  My friend Orhan Gorbon competed in the Vakko Cannes Istanbul off-shore sailing race, on a boat sponsored by Sabah, a leading Turkish newspaper.  I don’t read Sabah regularly, and the dailies I read, owned by the competitor Dogan Media Group, while covering the race (because one of their papers, Milliyet, also sponsored a boat), did not mention a word of Orhan’s boat.  Just like Digg, Milliyet was doing a disservice to its readers, who, arguably, are as interested in the Sabah boat as they are in the Milliyet boat.  By the way, Sabah did exactly the same.

I can accept this reporting bias in newspapers – after all, we choose our newspapers partly for their editorial biases.  However, I find it unacceptable in the case of Digg and reddit, since their whole point is a "Wisdom of Crowds-like" filtering of content.

NB. In the photo above, this blog proves its unbiased approach 🙂

Another fair warning is being yelled at the TV industry – I wonder if they are hearing it.  Om Malik reports again that the Skype founders are steadily moving on with their next venture aimed at disrupting traditional TV, much like they shattered some pretty solid walls in the voice world.

What Zennstrom and Friis are exactly up to is almost irrelevant.  They are so many different ways that TV can be attacked, if one is armed with the right arsenal.  TiVo proved that the audience is keen to adopt new technology.  MySpace and YouTube proved that the appetite for microchunked content is voracious.

The Skype team have the credentials and the cash to take it on seriously.  I look forward to the news coming from their direction.