Businesses want to know if the fans you have on your Facebook, really do make you a minor celebrity in your circle. If they paid you for it, could you endorse a product for your social network fans, and make a difference to your sponsors? If your fans follow you on Twitter, will they follow your choice of restaurants, movies or soft drink? The idea has really taken off, and advertising promoters exist who work exclusively on product promotion on the social network scene. It is their job to convince advertisers of the effectiveness of product placement on Facebook and Twitter, and also to find influential members whose opinions and endorsements will matter.

A social network where you spend time with your friends is one of the last places you would expect to be pitched a product; that element of surprise is what the advertisers are looking for. Amazon even has a proper service in place for this, and they call it Amazon Associates. They’ll pay commissions to anyone who will refer buyers to the online retailer’s website. Friends on a regular tweet from someone they subscribe to, will, in the middle of it all, suddenly see a tweet like “Yo! Check out Bobby Crusoe’s latest track on Amazon.com – it rocks!”. Actually, a few minor television stars actually earn upward of $25,000 for a single commercial tweet. Regular people with sizable fan followings on Twitter, can make a couple of thousand dollars for a commercial tweet.

Twitter advertising companies like Izea first started placing advertisements with Twitter members with no specific warning at all. If there was a celebrity chef, and he was tapped to place an ad for a particular brand of butter, there was nothing that would tell his followers that it was not his personal opinion they were reading. Izea has made sure that that doesn’t happen anymore, after they received protests. With those initial teething problems over, social networking advertising is all set to becoming the next greatest thing in advertising.

If these are the tactics the big boys have to adopt, consider what one will need to do if one is an up and comer, like WeGame.com. If a sign-up to WeGame.com gives them his contacts list, the website will proceed to send the misleading e-mail to every one of those contacts, with a message that asks them by personal invitation, to see some of your photographs on WeGame.com. When you click on the link, you will be taken to the site, but you will be asked to enter your e-mail password, for “identification purposes”. That of course is just what they need to do to get your contacts list and do the same thing all over again to everyone on it.

It is not uncommon for a website to ask you for your e-mail address and password for legitimate purposes. All of Google’s services ask you for your Gmail password for example. But it looks like these day, this model is being exploited for spam created by legitimate websites. It looks like we will need to go back to the old model where you just do not give out your e-mail and password anywhere at all, and just create a new one for each website afresh.

Ms. X, on the advice of her doctor happened to take a vacation, and show up at her birthday party celebration. She then took pictures, and posted them on Facebook. Her insurance company admits to routinely using resources like a Facebook profile of anyone connected to a claim at their company, to investigate their lives. So when they found that they had been paying Ms. X for more than a year, and in their enthusiasm to find a way to wriggle out of their commitment, they happened to look up her social networking interests. And what did they find but a gift from heaven – pictures of Ms. X having a good time at her vacation, her birthday party, and in general looking quite normal and happy. This helped them somewhat prove that Ms. X was no longer depressed, and right away they were off the hook.

Of course, Ms. X isn’t letting this go easily – she is suing them. But it just goes to show how easy it is to invite a lapful of trouble with too much disclosure on Facebook. You just never know whom the details of your personal life can reach and come back to haunt you.

It seems to be evident that a group like “Rogue Facebook Apps Early Warning Group” appears as a dangerous threat, even more when one knows that they spread unsafe information. But nevertheless, appearances could be misleading. Actually this group was created to warn its members about attacks happening on the social network and the risky information was divulged by mistake. But the Facebook team disabled the account of the group’s administrator. This decision appears like an unfair punishment.

The red line between knowing to attack and to protect isn’t often easy to determine.
In fact the real stake of “protecting Facebook” is not really to care for the application, but to protect the personal information and data of its numerous members who trust it and its security. We know that Facebook is not just a network of private life but also a job network. Therefore the dangers and stakes are greater.

So is it really a shame to form a group which can help adherents to be sure of their privacy and confidentiality? Having to opt between the network system’s survival and our own information, the choice should be quick!

The number of people accessing the internet for anything at all is on a steady increase, and the number of people going onto social networking websites for some reason or the other is mind boggling. Nearly 70% of internet users use social networks of some kind, for some purpose or the other. We have already seen the information rush, where everybody wants to know about everything and the internet serves as a perennial storehouse. The trend is slowly moving towards information about everyone on your friend list. As the line between private and public information blurs quickly, people now want everyone to know what they are doing, what they are thinking, and almost everything else in their lives. Status messages on sites like Facebook, and constant updates on twitter, are not uncommon, letting people know exactly what you are doing, at every step in your life.

Although it started off as a phenomenon, that can almost be a termed a movement among youngsters, older people aren’t staying away from it anymore. Big social networks are having millions of 40+ aged users signing up. The idea of being able to connect with long lost BFFs and people that have been encountered at various stages in life, is simply irresistible.

What’s more, social networks seem to be replacing emails. A few years ago, email seemed like the greatest invention of mankind, doing away with traditional snail mail and making things so much faster. Today, social networks have almost substituted emails. People simply send messages over these sites, which provide options of both private and public messages. It’s easier, faster, and takes very little effort. Besides, you network with a whole bunch of friends together in one place. For the ones with the not so great memory, their presence that keeps popping up at you on the website reminds you that they exist and that you could drop in a word or two. Inviting people in large numbers for events/ parties/ concerts etc are also just so much simpler.

Sites like twitter are driving people strongly addicted to them. People find a compulsive necessity to tell people what they are doing, ever so often. The good thing is, that now people get to have an idea of how people in different parts of the world, living in different countries, following different cultures and speaking different languages think. It has added to the global village that we are turning into. The numbers and popularity of social networks is only going to go up, for a long time to come, and let’s see what new technology takes over next.

Let’s take another figure, say $225m. OK, given the choice between $850m and $225m it’s obvious which one you’d take, but forgive me if I bite the hand off the person who offers me $225m for my website.

So, what on Earth am I talking about here? Believe it or not, these are the latest figures for corporate take overs of Bebo and Digg respectively.

Bebo is a large social networking site that claims to have over 40m users worldwide. It is the 3rd largest social network after MySpace and Facebook (both of which were bought for $580m and $280m).

But large buyouts of this kind are not confined to the big players, in 2007 a facebook clone (literally down to the last detail!) called Studivz was bought out by a single investor for $132m. The unique thing about Studivz was that it was aimed at a niche (albeit a fairly broad niche). The niche was a social network for German speaking people.

So, like Studivz, how can you jump on this bandwagon of massive buyouts (and lets face it, I think we’d all be quite happy with a paltry $10m)? First off, target a niche – whether it be by country, region, language, interest, cause or whatever. The days of being able to start large generic social networks are over. It is the time of the niche social network.

Define your niche properly before you start, and you too could get a knock at your door with someone trying to offer you millions for your little piece of the web.

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