Google knows your friends, and your friends’ friends.

Google, today launched a new API, something that could be a revolutionary new tool for social apps and the social media in general — The Social Graph.

This latest API from google will allow developers of social apps grab what is normally the essential-most piece of a social-startup’s puzzle from the public web and that is the information of who knows whom. One way this can be used, according to google, is, for example if a new user signs up with your cool new social network — your network, thanks to the API, already knows whom that person knows and to how. So, all the friends of this new user who are already on your network, can automatically be in his/her buddy list there. Pretty cool huh?

I almost forgot to mention the most interesting part, All this, thanks to those ‘rel’ tags made oh so famous because of nofollow, in web links.

“Here’s how it works: we crawl the Web to find publicly declared relationships between people’s accounts, just like Google crawls the Web for links between pages. But instead of returning links to HTML documents, the API returns JSON data structures representing the social relationships we discovered from all the XFN and FOAF. When a user signs up for your app, you can use the API to remind them who they’ve said they’re friends with on other sites and ask them if they want to be friends on your new site. “

Come to think of it, google has been, since the beginning, been using social graph data to make their SERPs look so good. however, the recent increased usage of XFN and FOAF data in these rel tags (XFN - the XHTML friends network and FOAF - Friend Of A Friend, are standards based linking meta-data mechanisms let you specify when you link to a URL, how are you related to the person who owns that URL) google has made it really easy for developers working on so many applications other than search to harness the usability of social linking.

More on: Google Code, Tech Crunch

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Amazon launches the “All Business Center”

Amazon sent out a press release a few hours ago announcing a new niche category on the online super-mall - the All Business Center - for small and medium sized businesses.

This latest offering from Amazon is a sort of niche social-network and retail store where small business owners can use the discussion forums to chat about their businesses and rest of the “business center” to buy stuff ranging from amazon webservices to office supplies and amazon fulfillment services to books and software.

While research indicates that small and medium businesses are experiencing a higher success rate in the early years, entrepreneurs still struggle with many day-to-day challenges such as poor inventory management, unexpected growth and low sales. The Amazon All Business Center provides customers with a single, comprehensive resource aimed at helping small and medium business owners address these types of issues and increase the odds of success.

All in all, a nice web 1.4.5 place to shop for business needs, it could be marketed a whole lot better if amazon added more social-networking elements to the mix other than just a plain old discussion forum.

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The Official eBay facebook App goes live

Finally! Arguably the world’s biggest e-retail brand - eBay has launched it’s very own app for the facebook social networking platform (a.k.a - The Social OS).

eBay has finally launched its Facebook application, which enables you to share your eBay items within your Facebook profile. While there are a handful of Facebook apps that have been created to interact with eBay, this is the official application that’s been created by eBay itself.

There’s a good level of integration for your eBay account to work within Facebook, showing items you’ve found on eBay (your watchlist) and check out the items your friends have added to their watchlists as well. Security options let you pick and choose what information you want to share, and how this information is shared.

Mashable has the story…

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Shoppero.com - A Social Shopping Network that Pays Back

This is the new PPC - Pay Per Contribution.

I talked about NuVy.com here a few days ago, a social shopping network that pays users to upload video product reviews. Mashable, Today announced the launch of another social shopping network with a similar concept - to reward it’s users for contributing to the network - with cash.

Shoppero enables its users to write product reviews which get centrally bundled through the platform and can be advertised by users implementing adgets [widgets] in their own sites[and social network profiles, blogs, etc]. The resulting advertising revenues are being split among Shoppero.de and the users — The latter receiving 20% of the ad-revenues from the pages created by themselves and 60% of the ad-revenues generated by linking to the Shoppero portal. Reaching the minimum total of 25 Euros will trigger a payout to the user via PayPal at the end of the month.

This is (maybe not these particular websites, but the concept in general) the future of social networking - The basis of any economy, including what is being called the “Attention Economy” is, ultimately, Money. If users of a social network help them make money, the users MUST have a share in the revenues of the network.

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Nuvy.com: Social Shopping + Video Reviews + Affiliate Marketing:

There is a very interesting new social shopping / video reviews website that Jamie Birch just posted about on the revenews blog.

Nuvy - is a youtube clone plus a comparison shopping engine, that - pays - users to upload videos, that are product reviews.

The idea is this: Anyone, can review any product on video, and upload it on the website, the community votes on how good the video is, and based on that, the reviewer is paid a anything between $1-$10.

Video pages are very similar to youtube - but also a little more - there are three tabs below each video - “Product Description” , “Comments” and ” Where to buy” (so that covers the social part in a simple but elegant way)

There are two reasons why I like this:

First, Nuvy is making really fantastic use of the social media/web 2.0 as an affiliate marketing platform.

Secondly, they are actually paying “consumers who are also content creators” - you don’t see that a lot on web 2.0, but that’s what web 2.1 is for - if users create content that helps make a social media platform money, then the users should be treated partners in the business, the best way, IMO is to reward users according to their contribution - in cash.

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Update: I was reading costpernews a while ago, and read Sam’s 600th post there where he is upset at the pace at which affiliate marketers are adopting the new media. So … To cheer Sam up, who is a fellow believer in the salvation of Affiliate Marketing through Web 2.0, I send this Trackback.

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New social shopping network: ShoppingWords.com

On the 18th of June, which is today to most readers of this blog, a new social shopping network has been announced - Shoppingwords.com.

Don’t mind the overly dramatic introduction to this - the shopping network isn’t all that great. Just another social shopping network with a slightly unique approach to things in that unlike wists or thisnext, this isn’t quite a social bookmarking or comparison shopping service. it’s more like a 2.0 criaglist, a huge, free, discussion forum around ‘keywords’ related to shopping (the founders of this must be SEOs or something, hehe) that could be, by some miracles - that usually happen in social networks, turned into an actual marketplace.

For example, let’s check out the Thinkpad tablet page. 4 people with profiles want to buy it. one person already has bought the computer. and one person has changed her mind about the product. there are also two comments on the product page with people suggesting other, similar products. That means, for now atleast, this isn’t quite an online shopping aid, more of a shopping research platform that plans to use the wisdom of crowds in helping people make buying decisions.

IMO, the website could start using a better design and get rid of the google adsense clutter if they would like to be considered as a worthy application by shoppers worldwide.

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I’m back! (and the hookah cafe idea)

It’s been a busy last week, I was spending most of my days this last week travelling all over Bombay looking for a shop that Amit Lewis (an old friend and co-founder of a company we started back in 2000 “General Exports” that was to be an export company but eventually became yet another internet marketing company) and I can rent to start a “Hookah” cafe that will be in business sometime next month. Hopefully, I’ll be blogging again a lot more this week, and unlike this post, mostly about “e-Business 2.1″.

Smoking “Hookahs” or water pipes, has become the latest fad here in Bombay - Very famous with kids 15-25. especially those in the age group of 15-18. Because cigarettes aren’t sold to those under 18 in India, kids try out Hookahs, that contain what is called flavoured tobacco - which isn’t any tobaco, but an array of what is really various scents - ranging from cola and red bull to more fruity flavours like strawberry and apple, that one can smoke with the steam from water in the hookah pipe. A hookah in one of these cafes is sold for anything between $4-$10 on a smoke as much as you want in an hour basis.

Now, most Hookah cafes in bombay do it the traditional way - since they are a coffee shop and it would be a outright silly to not serve anything to eat or drink with the hookahs, they have their own kitchens, and chefs and cooks and all that. It’s a lot of cost to run a hookah cafe and if you’re new in the business, building up a brand may take a while and the salaries are a large part of the cost to run the place meanwhile.

We have thought of a slightly different concept with our hookah shop.  What we are doing here, is that we are making the place an “open platform” kinda like facebook. When looking for the shops, the places we short-listed had to meet one criteria: there has to be at least: one coffee shop, one ice cream shop, one restaurant and one bakery nearby. The menu of our coffee shop will contain of everything these shops sell - and will be co-branded. Unlike other restaurants, we will not only allow but encourage guests to bring “outside food” to the table - and they may order anything from one of these restaurants right from where they’re smoking their hookah - all we do is call up the restaurant(s) and have the food or beverage delivered to our cafe, track what we ordered from where, and collect a commission on each sale we send to any of these restaurants. Later on, if the place gets any popular, we plan to give access to local retailers of non eat-or-drinkables to the cafe and sell their stuff right there. Whether this concept works or not is to be seen - but it feels kinda cool to take what one learns doing business on the internet and put those ideas to use in, of all things, a suburban Bombay hookah cafe.

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e-Retailers taking advantage of the Facebook API

Since Facebook announced it’s API and opened itself up as a web-platform a couple of weeks ago, many internet companies have taken advantage of the same to promote their businesses to users of the social networking phenomenon. Most of them, web 2.0 type businesses like twitter, ilike and last.fm

It is good to see though, that already, more traditional ‘web 1.0′ e-businesses have started to figure out how to use facebook to further their marketing objectives and expand their audience.

Blue Nile - one of the biggest jewelry and diamond retailers is one of the first in the e-retail world to do this by allowing shoppers to share their blue-nile wishlists on facebook.

Some may think that facebook, known as a social network of mainly college-students may not be the right market for blue-nile and similar e-businesses. That, however is not the case anymore. According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote presentation, the fastest growing Facebook demographic is 25 and older, and currently 60% of its users are outside of college.

[via Get Elastic]

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eBay to sell radio ad spots

Reuters reports that, in direct competition with Google’s Radio Ads offering, eBay will soon begin to auction radio ad spots on 2,300 participating U.S. radio stations.

The move, which puts eBay into competition with Web search leader Google Inc.’s recent expansion into radio advertising, involved eBay partnering with Bid4Spots to power what it calls the eBay Media Marketplace for Radio.

The new auction marketplace is set to go live on wednesday and include online as well as terrestrial radio stations.

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Affiliate Marketing at Yahoo Answers

We have seen affiliate marketers use new web 2.0 social platforms such as twitter and squidoo as a medium of promoting their websites - There is another social network I hadn’t previously taken very seriously as an affiliate marketing platform.

I just realized that affiliate markers are turning to yahoo’s answers service in a bid to drive traffic to their websites.

An affiliate I noticed is answering questions related to a particular niche and directing traffic to their website - what’s more, the affiliate is also using text-link-ads to drive traffic, not directly to their domain, but to the page on yahoo answers that has a link to the domain(that is how I came to know of this, a link was bought to a yahoo answers page on one of the niche blogs I sometimes write for).

This may seem like black or grey hat SEO to some, but I perceive it more as social media marketing, or what I sometimes call, “Participation marketing”. The affiliate is actively participating within the social media doing what he/she is expected to do, and making money in the process - without spending on domains, hosting, search marketing campaigns etc - driving probably what should be very handsome ROI.

On the negative side, I didn’t notice any disclaimer on the answers stating that the answerer owns the said website(s) for the purpose of profit - it would be a good idea to add such a disclaimer, just to be safe and not misguide the traffic.

Yet another example of smart affiliate marketing!

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