Less than an hour ago, MySpace COO Amit Kapur revealed at the Web 2.0 Summit that MySpace is working on its own payments and virtual gift products that MySpace developers will be able to add to their own apps.Source:TechCrunch

Slide founder Max Levchin just kicked off a panel called “The Platform Advantage” at the Web 2.0 Summit. Participants include Google’s Vic Gundotra, Microsoft’s David Treadwell, MySpace’s Amit Kapur and Facebook’s Elliot Schrage.

The panel began with a general debate on exactly what a platform is, and how each of the companies play in the space. Kapur says a platform has to create an ecosystem that includes a core base of users, tools to build applications, and an advertising network to monetize the platform. Kapur also let’s something slip - saying that MySpace will soon release a payments platform and a virtual goods platform.

Schrage says the Facebook platform is a place for users to interact, and for developers to take advantage of that social utility.

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While social networking applications were all the rage last year, backlash ensued in 2008 as users got inundated with app invites and a seemingly never-ending supply of apps with little utility. To a large extent, Facebook’s re-design was actually an attempt to de-clutter the site from the mess that had been created with the developer platform.

Despite the user pushback, a number of application providers saw tremendous success in the past year. Companies like Slide, RockYou, and Playfish now have user counts in the tens of millions, while Facebook began making investments of its own in promising ideas through its fbFund. We also saw the launch of several new platforms like MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, and hi5 , just to name a few, all of which now support applications from third-party developers.

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—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:The Categories:Social Networks Will Be Open: Google, Facebook, and Plaxo Join DataPortabilityParks Associates Study Notes the Opportunity for Developers to Leverage MySpace WidgetsCisco to Build Social Networks for OthersZynga Opens Platform So Game Developers Can Publish Across NetworksHear Steve Wozniak Speak at the Social Networking ConferencePluck It Open. Social Nets on Facebook and OpenSocial.

Earlier today we noted the arrival of The Karaoke Channel Online in the sing-along ventures market. Interesting enough, MySpace Karaoke too is pushing its name out into the news cloud to mark the debut of video support as well as a redesign, a new recommendation engine, and more options for users to share media.

Amy Walgenbach, MySpace’s manager of communications, says that the company believes online karaoke is analogous to music as blogging is to writing. Which can make for fairly deep or shallow analysis, depending on one’s perspective of that particular juxtaposition. But whatever the case, the features now being touted by the network, along with the statistics being flashed for the public - 4 million MySpace Karaoke users with over 500,000 recordings - are certainly ones that many karaoke fans will consider crucial to the art of jukebox heroism.

Design-wise, the new MySpace Karaoke is none too shabby. It’s uniquely MySpace-like, for sure (be that a pro or con, you decide), but give it a generous glance here and there, and chances are you’ll find it to be laid out quite well. Options are clearly represented, and jumping from place to place is easy. To be perfectly honest, I wish the well-publicized MySpace Music were as intelligently drawn as the network’s Karaoke site is. It’s that good.

Will video drive MySpace Karaoke’s usage numbers to much grander heights? I suspect not. The YouTube generation surely enjoys the limelight to significant degree, but the attraction of watching a user’s emulation of Elvis or The Beatles isn’t likely to pull a consistently big crowd. Unless of course there are to be phenomena among the mix, such as a LonelyGirl15 of harmonic allure. And since I wouldn’t put it past anyone to “break out” from the masses in such an unpredictable way, let’s just say that the new MySpace Karaoke is here and is open for goods and bads to strut their stuff. Let your voices be heard, if you dare.

Note: MySpace Karaoke recording can be heard and viewed on Windows- and Mac-based computers, but recording is only possible with Microsoft’s operating systems.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Will You Use MySpace Karaoke?SingShot’s YouTube for Karaoke - Now Free!Votigo Challenges Bix in Video ContestsBreaking: SingShot Acquired By Electronic ArtsThe Karaoke Channel Goes Online (Invites)eSnips Launches MicroPortalsYouTube Underground Contest

Source:Mashable!

Widget platform Clearspring turned some heads last month when it said that it would have reach equivalent to the “7th largest web property” following its acquisition of AddThis, a provider of widgets that enable easy social bookmarking from blogs and Web pages. Today, new data from comScore shows that while Clearspring’s reach is indeed huge, another player in the space – Gigya – is actually reaching a few million more eyeballs every month worldwide.

According to data from August 2008, Gigya reached 174 million unique widget viewers worldwide for the month, compared to 160 million for Clearspring. Slide sits in 3rd with 154 million viewers, with other competitors running significantly behind the top three (however, it should be noted that RockYou was not included in the report). In the US, Clearspring holds a slight lead over Gigya: 71.1 million viewers compared to 70.3 million, respectively. Those numbers might swing back into Clearspring’s favor soon though, since the AddThis acquisition is not yet included in the comScore report.

In any event, what’s responsible for the huge reach of the widget providers would largely seem to be the placement of widgets on social networking sites, where Gigya says that the average widget is viewed by 25 different people. While those numbers are big, the reach of widgets isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison with the page views racked up by leading Web properties like Google, Yahoo, and MSN because they aren’t nearly as easy to monetize yet.

However, Gigya (as well as other optimistic companies in the space I’ve spoke with recently) see this changing. The company cites recent Forrester research and says that “with 83 percent of people trusting a friend’s opinion of a product or service, widgets, and their ability to reach friend networks as user-endorsed content, represent an important marketing opportunity.“ Gigya launched its own ad network earlier this year to begin addressing this opportunity, while Clearspring and Widgetbox have their own offerings too.

On the other hand, a global slowdown in advertising could obviously put a major dent in these plans, especially if advertisers prove reluctant to try less proven formats like widgets. Additionally, it’s to-be-determined how users will respond to increasingly obtrusive ads being placed in their widgets – especially if the brands represented don’t necessarily mix with their personal tastes.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Feedjit Shows Arrivals & Departures of Your Site VisitorsStartMobile Launches a Widget to Sell Mobile ContentClipBlast’s Video Search Widget is Personalized TooFreewebs Holding a Contest to Find the Most Innovative Widget in the WorldGruvr’s Latest Widget Puts Your Band on the MapLemonade Launches Facebook App for Making MoneyEdgeio Offers A Paid Content Widget

This is part of an ongoing series about government 2.0 written by Dr. Mark Drapeau. To view previous posts in the series click here.

Recently I had the chance to attend an event called “Government 2.0 and Beyond… Harnessing Collective Intelligence,” which was hosted by the Department of Defense’s Information Resources Management College (IRMC). It had all the makings of a public relations boon: High-profile speakers like David Weinberger (who blogged from the event), corporate sponsorship, media coverage, and a new auditorium to show off. Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock, was even there. But what I didn’t see among the people in the room was urgency.

Much lip service was given to welcoming new technologies, openness, information sharing, transparency, and collaboration. But there was no talk of a strategy, a plan, or a roadmap. Frankly, there was no talk of anything concrete in the way of actual progress towards Government 2.0, as the title of the event would lead one to believe. And while I am certain that DOD Deputy CIO David Wennergren was genuine when he spoke about the future of command and control being a more agile system of “focus and converge,” I am also certain that people in my workplace have Dell laptops so old they have time for a power nap during boot up.

This is particularly embarrassing given that one of the speakers, Bruce Klein talked in detail about Cisco Connect, their “next-generation workforce environment” that includes an encyclopedia, feeds, blogs, chat, and virtual meetings. No one discussed why the Department of Defense didn’t have this capability, and no one asked. More embarrassing still, Cisco Connect is very similar in principle to something the government already has – the Intelligence Community-built INTELINK, that I have used and written about before; the word “INTELINK” was never uttered out loud.

As the event was winding down, I heard a line not unfamiliar to me at this point, about everyone in the room being an “agent of change” that had to help. I became a bit frustrated with this and Tweeted the following:

While it’s probably inappropriate to “benchmark our enemies” in a Mashable post, I think it’s safe to say that terrorist and criminal organizations don’t need pep talks in wood-paneled conference rooms to adopt new technologies and gain a competitive edge. In the battle of bloviating versus trial-and-error, who wins?

One of the panelists, the co-author of Wikinomics, Anthony Williams, quipped that “The Ontario Government blocked Facebook, so everyone moved to MySpace. It’s a futile exercise.” Many people in the audience snickered. I don’t know about them, but I still can’t access MySpace or YouTube from my work computer. This is not a complicated multinational treaty negotiation. If everyone is so aware of the problem, why can’t we just… fix it?

To be fair, the government has non-trivial security issues when it comes to information systems – they must function alone and with each other properly, cannot be infiltrated by outsiders, and they must provide trustworthy information (imagine hacking not to plant a computer virus, but rather false intelligence or misleading geographic coordinates). The big takeaway that federal officials had from DEFCON 16 in Las Vegas was that social software has created a “perfect storm” for hackers – lots of new software, largely untested security loopholes, and a changing definition of privacy in society. As part of my Social Software for Security (S3) research project at the National Defense University I am working with government “information assurance” professionals to determine which social technologies are {always, sometimes, never} safe to use with DOD systems.

Unfortunately, all of this is likely discouraging young people – digital natives, or the Gartner-dubbed “Generation V” – from choosing honorable work in public service as a profession, and it is encouraging bright people already in Washington, DC to move on to greener pastures. It may be appropriate that a group named “Foreigner” wrote the song I quoted at the beginning of this article, because from my standpoint “urgency” as it concerns adoption of social technology tools into the defense establishment is thus far largely a foreign concept.

Dr. Mark Drapeau is an Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy of the National Defense University in Washington, DC. These views are his own and not the official policy or position of any part of the U.S. Government.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:In Finland, Government Disconnects ItselfFacebook Banned For Ontario Government EmployeesWhat Happens When the Government Goes Web 2.0Granicus Gets $10M for Government Webcasting ToolsGoogle’s Hopes for Government WebsitesUK Politicians Seek To Legislate Against YouTube ViolenceGovernmentdocs.org Adds Social Twist to the Freedom of Information Act

Source:Mashable!

After attracting nearly 20 million active users, what does the application formerly known as FunWall on Facebook do for an encore? Add professional content from the likes of CBS, NBC, and Warner Bros, according to The Wall Street Journal. The application’s creator – Slide – has signed a deal with a number of media companies that will allow users of FunSpace to embed clips of various TV shows on their friend’s profiles.

While the deal doesn’t include full-length shows, it will make recommendations based on the number of times a video is posted to people’s profiles. Of course, you could already embed YouTube videos using FunSpace, so plenty of professionally produced copyright content can already find its way onto the service, at least until YouTube deals with it on their end.

Nonetheless, given many user’s penchant for forwarding video clips to friends, FunSpace’s deal with the media companies should make it easier for them to do so, at least within the walls of Facebook. And for the content producers, Slide’s massive reach on Facebook should provide yet another vehicle to monetize their video online.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Slide - Funky Digital Photo ViewerSlide Users Add 1 Million Widgets Every DaySlide.com Becomes MySpace for SlideshowsSlide Set to Release Official MySpace AppsSlide Widgets top comScore Metrix, Reaching 65% of Widget AudienceSlide Joins Family of Banned Sites, in TurkeyPhotobucket’s Slide Show Upgrades for More Customization