Greek social networking service wadja.com has been generating some interest recently, mostly because Facebook has apparently banned emails that contain any mention of the site - so they must be doing something right. Facebook said it’s because of spam, while Wadja thinks it might be more to do with their popularity in their home country.

The first version of the site rolled out in August 2006 funded by angel investors and 16 people work at the headquarters in Athens, Greece.

Managing director Alex Christoforou tells us more.

Alex Christoforou, managing director of Wadja.com

• Explain your business to my Mum.
“Wadja is a communication service that goes where you go. You can collect, organise, and manage your friends, photos, videos, and contacts in a way that can be accessed on your PC and mobile phone. Wadja can also help you connect via email, web or global SMS, for free, so you are always connected.”

• How do you make money?
“We don’t rely on the standard cost per click revenue models that power 99% of community-centred sites. Our revenue model is based on providing premium content to our users, partnerships with mobile operators, premium messaging services targeted at businesses and professionals, and a new message advertising platform based on friend-to-friend communication.”

• What’s your background?
“I was born and raised in the US, I have a degree in economics and masters in international business and management. I split my time between our offices in Cyprus and Athens.”

• How many users do you have now, and what’s your target within 12 months?
“We currently have 1.5m registered users. Our target is to surpass the 10m user mark, but more importantly to add value to our users through great communications, which also helps to grow our business.”

• Name your closest competitors.
“Many of our users also have connections with Hi5. We see many similarities in our international feel and language support, though I feel we are more European focused with a big tilt towards mobile.

• How are personalisation and recommendation part of your business?
“Focusing heavily on mobile communication means generating local buzz while growing usability on a global scale. Wadja was the first network to provide interface language while giving users the option to view other communities on a totally different country level. For example, you can set your Wadja profile language to Greek but view, browse, and search for friends located in the UK if that is where you live. It is simple but very personal. ”

• What’s your biggest challenge?
“Creating a social networking site that is fun, innovative and financially viable. That is, based on a business model not funded purely by sponsorship and banner ads.”

• Any weird business experiences so far?
“Just last week Facebook banned the word Wadja.com throughout the whole site. That was weird and quite amusing. Here is this big Silicon Valley social network banning the word Wadja, an outfit based in the Mediterranean, having fun connecting people.”

• Are we in the middle of a new dot com bubble?
“Not a bubble - a readjustment. People are questioning the financial viability of social networking. People are asking how these sites make money, but so far none of the big three or four networks have solved this issue, irrelevant of their astronomical valuations. We need to get back to basics and build open, useful services and tools, anchored in a business model not entirely dependent on serving traditional banner ads to visitors.”

• Which tech businesses or web thinkers are the ones to watch?
“Steve Jobs - always. He reinvents the industries he goes into with a precision and flair for design that is second to none. Eric Schmidt of Google is also great. He executes a plan better than any other.”

• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
“We are all about open, device independent messaging and media sharing, so really in five years I would like Wadja to be the service of choice for the mobile active generation.”

wadja.com

Source:blogs.guardian.co.uk

The European Parliament is to create its own social networking website at a cost of £3.2 million to taxpayers.

Creating and running the new service will cost more than £4,000 for each Euro-MP over the next 18 months, even though many already belong to free and popular networking sites such as Facebook or Bebo.

Despite the use of taxpayers’ cash, much of MyParl.eu will not be visible to the public, with its networking “restricted to parliamentarians”, The Daily Telegraph has learned.

Only parliamentarians and “civil society”, Brussels-speak for officially sanctioned NGOs and trade associations, will be able to use the site for comment and debate. “Myparl.eu offers you a unique online political forum with a social networking tool, enabling you to engage with other parliamentarians across the EU,” said the pilot site launched in Brussels on Thursday.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

INFORMATION WEEK — May 22 — Facebook will clean up users’ profile pages and improve organization now that the site has more than 20,000 applications. The new applications will be organized in one of four tabbed categories for easier navigation and access. The new design is also expected to give users more control over which details about themselves they want to highlight. FULL ARTICLE @ INFORMATION WEEK

FORBES — May 22 — Big phone carriers seem to be itching to get a ride on consumers’ enthusiasm for social networks. Comcast agreed to acquire online address book service Plaxo on May 14, for an undisclosed sum. On May 16, U.K.-based carrier Vodafone spent $49m on its first mobile Internet purchase: Zyb, a private Danish company, which, like Plaxo, helps users manage their contacts with social networking features. Most major carriers already have deals with large social networks. AT&T has offered a mobile version of MySpace since 2006 and also supports a mobile version of Facebook. Mobile-specific social networks like airG and MocoSpace say they have millions of users worldwide. And Nokia is pouring money into Ovi, its own brand of Internet service. FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES

SNW — May 22 — The Social Networking Conference in San Francisco July 10th-11th is shaing up very nicely. A very highly esteemed keynote speaker has been confirmed today and will be announced shortly. Hint: If it wasn’t for this man, the social networking industry probably would not exist. Watch this space. - Mark Brooks

Google Inc. extended its share of Internet searches in April to 61.6 percent, while Yahoo Inc. sites and the other major search engines saw slight declines between March and April, according to comScore’s April search rankings.

Google’s share of Internet searches rose 1.8 percent from March to April, from 59.8 percent in March to 61.6 percent.

Yahoo, meanwhile, the target a possible proxy fight and of a takeover bid by Microsoft earlier this month, saw its share decline 0.9 percent, from 21.3 percent to 20.4 percent of searches.

Following Yahoo were Microsoft Corp.’s sites, down to 9.1 percent of searches in April from 9.4 percent in March; AOL LLC, down to 4.6 percent from 4.8 percent; and Oakland-based Ask.com, down to 4.3 percent of searches from 4.7 percent in March.

Searches beyond the core domain, such as map searches and searches for user-generated videos, were not included in the numbers.

The rankings also reported that Americans conducted 10.6 billion searches on the core search engines, a 2 percent decline from March. More than 6.5 billion core searches were conducted on Google, followed by 2.2 billion on Yahoo sites and 961 million on Microsoft sites. AOL saw 491 million searches, and Ask.com saw 458 million, according to comScore.

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)walked away earlier this month from its offer to buy Sunnyvale-based Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) for $33 a share, or about $47.5 billion. Yahoo said it would take a minimum of $37 a share.

Reports since have said Microsoft in considering other deals with Yahoo that would not be a complete takeover. The software giant is looking for ways to better compete with Mountain View-based Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).

Investor Carl Icahn has also begun a proxy battle to force a sale of Yahoo, and has compiled a slate of directors he wants to have take over at the company.

Source: www.bizjournals.com

LinkedIn was the fastest-growing social networking site in April, with traffic increasing 361% to 8.7 million unique visitors from $1.9 million a year ago, according to comScore.

MySpace easily remained the category leader with $58.7 million users, but has only grown 3% since last year. No. 2 Facebook is up a healthy 56% over the last year to 22.5 million. AOL Hometown has seen the steepest fall-off in traffic, dropping 25% to 6.3 million in the last year.

Among blog sites, WordPress was the biggest gainer in April, growing 160% to 16.6 million visitors. Blogger held the top spot with more than 38.4 million, up 40% from a year ago. By contrast, traffic to Xanga.com has slipped 33% to 2.4 million.

–Mark Walsh

Source: publications.mediapost.com

Social networking has moved rapidly from teen-centric sites such as MySpace into the realm of business with career-networking sites like LinkedIn. Now the trend is picking up speed in the world of small business with sites like Moli.com.

This self-described social media/social commerce site has launched the Moli Small Business Center, which it said is designed as a destination where small businesses can go to collaborate with, learn from and market to their peers.

The company defines small business as a the owner/operator or business with fewer than 10 employees and Judy Balint, Moli’s president and COO (and one-half of the management team that created Etrade), estimated that there are 22 million such small businesses in the U.S., and a total of 40 million world wide.

Balint described Moli as a free, online social community designed for collaboration and e-commerce, a place where individuals and small business owners can create their own Web sites. It lets them manage multiple Web profiles from a single account to control their privacy and separate their social, business and family relationships.

The site offers tools and resources to help small business owners take their companies to the next level and, said Balint, still have time for their real life. Through a partnership with E-Myth, an expert in work/life integration, Moli offers E-Learning courses covering topics such as sales, marketing, accounting, HR, finance and operations.

“Moli combines rich functionality that lets people do more in one place in less time,” said Balint. “It lets us get offline and get things done in the real word. We’re not teenagers with hours to spend. Efficiency is key for us.”

Other resources available in Moli’s Small Business Center include a variety of forums, courtesy of a partnership with Yedda. In the community forum, members can connect, network, discuss issues and get advice and support. In the Ask the Experts forum, members can seek advice from retired business entrepreneurs.

The Small Business Center also offers a media album, calendar, blogs, RSS feeds and message boards along with audio and video clips and podcasts that contain content from both original and third-party sources.

“Business owners can’t afford to spend unproductive time searching aimlessly around the Web looking for the resources they need to better manage their businesses and improve the quality of their lives,” said Balint. “With the Moli Small Business Center, members have the most comprehensive set of resources and tools available to grow their businesses for long-term success.”

Web Pages, E-Commerce and SEO

According to Balint, small business owners often have a hard time driving traffic to their Web sites, if they even have one. “Building a Web site in a social networking environment let’s then focus on marketing and promoting their business instead of on SEO,” she said. She added that Moli does it for them because its building community for everyone.

A free Moli account includes a control panel, a private page where you can manage your separate business, personal and family Web pages. Balint said that Moli uses CoVibe technology that protects personally identifiable information and provides members with consumer data aggregation and analysis on the visitors to their sites.

Members can purchase reports from CoVibe that contain real-time stats on the visitors to their sites, including how many visitors, their sex and their age. Balint promises that none of the information is personally identifiable but meant as a way to let members know what kind of an audience is interested in them.

Reports cost between $3.99 and $7.99 depending on how many variables and the type of analysis you want to include.

Moli also includes online store resources to let you sell products on your site. Tools include audio and video, text, a proprietary, AJAX-based shopping cart, Google Checkout and PayPal. Balint claims you can set up an online store in 30 minutes without any programming.

The online store costs $3.99 per month, and Balint said there’s no limit to the number of products that you can sell, and that Moli does not take a cut of the transaction fee. Currently, the e-commerce function does not work with QuickBooks, but Balint said that integration with the popular accounting program is in the works.

Membership on Moli is free, and includes one personal URL and as many profile pages as you like. You can make profile pages private, public or hidden altogether, a capability that Balint said makes it easy for small businesses to create separate, hidden pages for vendors, clients, customers and employees.

Additional URLs cost $1.99 per year each. Currently, Balint said there are no storage limitations because the service is still young and they’re learning about the community’s usage patterns.

They may add storage limits in the future, with options to purchase more, but Balint said the basic storage offering would stay in line with the marketplace (i.e., Google currently offers more than 2 GB of free storage).

The company launched in January 2008 with 241,000 registered members. According to Balint, in April 2008, the site received 20.9 million unique visitors.Lauren Simonds is the managing editor of SmallBusinessComputing.com

Source: www.smallbusinesscomputing.com

Loss of productivity has been a major concern for business owners and companies all around the world. Employees have been known to spend working hours doing other things apart from work: socializing, gossiping, and the sort. With the advent of the Internet, a new time-waster could be a threat to productivity in businesses.

They are the famous online social networking websites: You know them- Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Hi5, and the likes of them.

Let me state categorically that I have no personal beef with social networking. As a matter of fact, I am a big fan and addict. I have an account on one of these sites where I spend at least twenty of my time everyday. I believe that Forums, bulletin boards and blogs on these networking sites are an excellent way to communicate business ideas, views, opinions and policies.

Facebook is a good site. It’s a beautiful thing that through facebook you could reunite with old friends, acquaintances and loved ones. You could also make new friends and build on already existing relationships. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg calls it a great social networking device through which company owners and employees can follow-up on business contacts and possibly seal business deals.

I beg to differ.

If truths must be told, Facebook is a big time-waster which eats seriously into the working time of millions of company employees all over the world. We all know that in many organizations round the world, many employees burn several minutes or even hours of working time socialising on Facebook. Instead of working, employees spend time accepting friend requests, event invitations, and loading a battalion of applications, most of which in the real sense are silly, pointless and irrelevant.

Last year in August, some of South Africa´s biggest companies blocked access to Facebook because it was slowing down productivity on the part of company staff. All companies may want to do the same thing. Alternatively, companies could limit access to Facebook and make the site accessible only during lunch-break hours.

While so-called internet marketing experts and employees may claim that such sites could be used as a huge business tool in connecting with other businesses and other potential customers, what ever happened to the KISS principle: Keep it simple stupid?

Facebook, Myspace and the likes make social networking complicated and time wasting with the battalion of applications friends request you to upload. In Facebook, for example, the numerous number of substantive features are redundant. You are constantly distracted by friends who are updating their profiles, giving you virtual drinks, chocolate, punches, hugs and kisses. You also feel an obligation to respond and so you send the same back to them. You are tempted to send wall posts as well, comment on pictures and poke some of your favourite people. By the time you are done with all that, you’ve wasted an hour or more, and you’ve got a pile of workload on your desk. In the long run, your productivity is derailed, and you end up postponing work until later.

Considering how much you have to do in managing your facebook life, you are better off on LinkedIn if you really need to connect to your workers through the web.

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site which provides one with less distraction. Basically, it allows you to create and maintain a list of your professional contacts, and its purpose is strictly to network with your professional customers and potential ones. LinkedIn keeps it simple. There are no irrelevant features, applications and walls to consume your time. All its features are strictly for business purposes. The LinkedIn Groups feature for example, allows users to establish new business relationships by joining alumni, industry, or professional and other relevant groups mainly used for professional networking. Just what you need for business.

Facebook could be the best social networking site for maintaining and building and maintaining informal relationships. It’s also a great tool for wasting time at work. But if you are really bent on online business networking, why not stick to LinkedIn? You cannot go wrong that way.

Mfonobong Nsehe is a communications student at Daystar University

Source: americanchronicle.com

AOL has closed its US$850 million acquisition of Bebo, and the portal will use the social network as the basis for a new People Networks business unit.

Bebo Chief Executive Officer Joanna Shields will serve as executive vice president of AOL and president of the People Networks division, which will combine Bebo and AOL’s two chat platforms — AIM and ICQ. All told, the platforms will reach 80 million users worldwide, AOL said.

AOL is positioned to “capitalize on the exploding social media space,” said AOL CEO Randy Falco.

The move comes as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT)   and Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO)  continue their lengthy and complex mating dance — the two reportedly are mulling a partnership that stops short of an all-out merger and could have implications for that portal. Yahoo and Bebo have had an advertising  partnership in place since late 2007 through which Yahoo serves display ads to Bebo users in the UK and Ireland.

A Unique Approach

The close of the acquisition will enable AOL to focus on three business areas — its advertising network, publishing and people networks, Falco noted. He argued that AOL is making progress in all three areas, citing recent comScore data showing that the portal’s publishing network reached all-time highs in both unique visitors and page views earlier this spring.The question will be how well AOL can monetize Bebo’s fast-growing user base. AOL believes it is well-positioned to do that because of its Platform-A advertising unit and other content offerings.

For instance, Bebo has long set itself apart by offering ways for users to utilize music and other media — the platform is known for a variety of original, serial video programming. With the instant messaging platform and other tools, people will be able to connect more effectively with like-minded people across the Web, Shields said.

Bebo’s unique approach to video programming has caught the attention of advertisers, noted JupiterResearch analyst David Card.

Bebo’s KateModern program is hugely popular in the UK and has proven the value of creating content that is specifically designed for the Web, not television content repurposed for the Internet , Card told the E-Commerce Times.

“Bebo has been able to bring along an audience for its shows,” said Card. Perhaps more importantly, it has been able to secure sponsors, who buy non-traditional product placement and other sponsorship opportunities. The early successes could enable AOL to position Bebo as a rival to YouTube and perhaps one even better suited for monetization.

Integration, Amalgamation

Users will now be able to use a single sign-in or screen name for both AOL and Bebo, and the social network’s content will be cross-distributed over the broader AOL network. Other AOL acquisitions — including widget firm Goowy Media and question-and-answer service Yedda– will be folded into the People Networks division.

Bebo also features an Open Media Platform that has enabled traditional media companies to distribute their content to Bebo users and has been effective at persuading third-party developers to create applications for the platform, with more than 6,000 such plug-ins developed since the platform was opened up earlier this year.

Getting Bebo a higher profile in the U.S. will likely be a top priority for AOL, Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li told the E-Commerce Times.

“As a stand-alone social network, Bebo had no chance of competing against big boys like MySpace and Facebook,” she said. “But as an integrated part of the larger AOL content and ad network, it has amazing potential to play a role in how social networks develop.”

Looking Ahead

AOL may see a future where social networks are integrated into all parts of a user’s online activities and interactions, rather than standalone, walled-off sites, Li added.

Meanwhile, Facebook may become even more of a sought-after takeover target now, and even more so if the strategy of AOL proves successful, Li added. Microsoft already owns a 5 percent stake in that network and reportedly revisited an outright acquisition after Yahoo repeatedly rebuffed it.

“While there’s tremendous consumer uptake of social networking sites, marketers still haven’t figured out how to tap into all of that energy and enthusiasm,” she added. If AOL can point to a successful path for marketers, that could dramatically change the entire market.

Source:.technewsworld.com