Cheng Wu is the co-founder and chairman of Azuki Systems.

As mobile social networks gain popularity, many are wondering how to ride the wave of this phenomenon. Leveraging the 3.3 billion potential mobile screens and the viral capabilities of social media, new forms of collaboration and media sharing will emerge and drive new sources of revenue.

As a result, we’ll see mobile social networking expand to build community around Web, user-generated and existing premium content – allowing users to discover and enjoy relevant content, rate and comment on high interest points, and share these elements with friends and colleagues, leading to a more vibrant, dynamic environment across both mobile and the desktop.

The Bad News

Today’s mobile social networks are admittedly primitive – confined to two fairly unattractive choices. Users can:

1. Access a mobile portal in an existing desktop community, where the experience is flat and text-oriented, or

2. Explicitly join a new mobile community in isolation.

It’s clear that change is needed.

The Good News

The broad availability of rich media-capable handsets is a harbinger of change, and with the increasing availability of platforms to enable interactive mobile media services, we’re also seeing the world of mobile evolve into a highly engaging and interactive means of sharing personalized and relevant content.

This evolving breed of mobile phones, along with the accessibility of one’s favorite content on mobile in bite-sized chunks that provide simplified navigation, is redefining the way people interact around content services. Mobile users are actively involved in sharing this ‘snackable’ content with friends and peers, voicing their opinions in online blogs, and viewing rich media content on a small, yet highly capable, mobile screen.

Additionally, mobile social networks are starting to incorporate location-awareness and contextualization capabilities to fine-tune the mobile experience and allow for more fluid formation of communities of interest around local events, news, sports or as an interesting clip that is quickly disseminated among friends. The viral, real-time nature, as well as the inherent contextual awareness, will expand both viewership and monetization options for content publishers, mobile operators and social networking brands.

What’s Next?

Interactive, Snackable Content

In order for mobile social networking to reach its potential, it needs to enable and be driven by interactive mobile content. This interactivity (in the form of rating, ranking, commenting, etc.) is key to enhancing the ‘stickiness’ of personalized and targeted mobile content in a snackable form. In addition, with the inclusion of these features, relevancy to the individual user is also greatly enhanced, increasing the likelihood of participation.

Focus on Content, Not the Community

To be successful and wide-spread, mobile social networking should revolve around the sharing of interactive, snackable, relevant content – and hinge much less on the sharing solely within a particular community. This new model implies cross-community dissemination, whereby group members are fluid and determined based on relevancy of said content. For this reason, it is important to keep in mind that adopting a one-size-fits-all approach for addressing social networks will be a mistake, and mobile users should not be pushed into any one particular network – but rather extend collaboration across Facebook, MySpace and other sites.

Integrate the Data

Mobile social networking will prove to be more about integrating mobile social data with desktop data and less about mobile specific data mining. Community data should be independent of the device that is used to access it. It needs to be a cloud resource in the Internet, accessible from all access devices including desktop PC’s and mobile handsets. Content publishers need to be able to leverage the existing content that is available on the desktop, and then have the ability to optimize it for personalized interaction on a mobile device.

Context-Enabled Social Communities

Mobile social networking also will involve real-time functionality and contextual awareness, with location-based services driving communication among physical communities. In that manner, and as interactive local content is rapidly disseminated, enthusiasm is generated about local happenings and local vendors, increasing the likelihood of service monetization and the overall success of mobile retailing.

Monetize

It follows then that mobile social networking represents the opportunity to monetize based on layered viral social activities over original content. For example, a pre-roll advertisement optimized for mobile consumption stands to be distributed to thousands of mobile users through user-initiated sharing of content on social networking sites. This radically increases CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) and drives revenue beyond a publishers own direct marketing efforts. Instead of the Web model of driving “eyeballs” to the ads, users drive the ads to the eyeballs.

There have already been some initial successes in mobile social networking that are now laying the foundation for this massive new category of advertising. By creating a more personalized experience for mobile users through contextual and bite-sized content, users naturally interact and share more through mobile mash-ups of this snackable content, involving contacts from their social networks. This creates an opportunity for viral mobile advertising where embedded mobile ads are shared along with the contextual content.

With interactive, personalized and snackable mobile content, the mobilization of fixed-Web social networks is indeed poised for growth and success.

Cheng Wu is the co-founder and chairman of Azuki Systems, which provides the industry’s first comprehensive interactive mobile media services platform, and is responsible for the company’s vision and corporate strategy. Wu is a successful serial entrepreneur and well-acclaimed industry veteran, having founded and led numerous businesses including ArrowPoint (acquired by Cisco for $5.7 billion), Arris Networks (acquired by Cascade Communications for $217 million) and Acopia (acquired by F5 Networks for $210 million).

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, lindsayking, tforgo

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In his post on why the traditional CPM model doesn’t work anymore, Dave McClure breaks the CPM denial balloon, noting that the popular content-centric, keyword-based Google Adword model delivers a click-through rate of less than 1%. Dave posits that the problem is not Google-specific, but reflects the problem with the CPM model in the new world of social networks and distributed conversations.

As an answer to the problem with lackluster clicks, especially within social networks like Facebook, Dave looks to widgets to serve up content based on the interests of individuals:

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. It will be Widgetized. Fortunately, that revolution is already happening… it’s called widgets. and Facebook apps. it’s about engaging users via application workflow, and discovering intent. then you don’t have to advertise anymore, you just serve up the stuff that users find interesting.”

Social Networks

What’s clear is that while the appeal of social networks is growing — with 44.3% of U.S. Internet users expected to participate by year’s end according to eMarketer — the CPM model as a means to evoke a response from consumers is not just flailing, but failing.

Ad networks like Lookery, which target Facebook users, have cut ad rates nearly in half. It’s a move that has worked for Lookery in the short term—at least in providing relief to frustrated application developers.

However, cutting ad rates is not exactly the hallmark of a solid revenue model. These guarantees are more like a Band-Aid than the full-scale surgery that is required of online advertising.

Why CPMs Don’t Work

The reason CPMs don’t work in social networks is that they are trying to target new media users using old media technology and thinking. The CPM model asks, “What is the content on the page?” But social media conversations aren’t ON any one page anymore. They jump from one site to another, they take place on a variety of platforms and media types, across blogs and Twitter and FriendFeed and Facebook and MySpace.

In this AdAge article, Steve Rubel talks about the role of social search in the changing role of online advertising:

“Social-network advertising to date… has been a mixed bag. Everyone is innovating, but the draw on social networks is your group of friends. That makes it harder to be distracted by ads. Enter search. Watch for contextual advertising and programs such as Facebook’s social ads. New models will emerge where social algorithms and keywords trigger contextual ads.”

Finding a Solution

It’s clear that a solution to the social media monetization puzzle cannot be solved by content alone. Tools that track the context within which the social media participant engages within various communities are important. Context-based discovery and social search play a role in bringing relevant content to receptive audiences. Interest-based user engagement — based on user context, not content -– tracks interest across various conversations and among the plethora of social media sites.

Knowing – based on her participation across social sites – that a social media participant is a New England Patriots fan who vacations frequently in Hawaii and loves water sports and high-tech gadgets is invaluable to creating a tailored interaction between that participant and companies with offers that are relevant to her.

Universal Profiles

Universal user profiles can inform and strengthen the relationship between social media users, third-party application developers, and advertisers. In contrast to the fragmented identities we maintain in all of the social sites we participate on, universal profiles present a hyperlinked record of users’ participation across sites.

Universal profiles have supercharged the idea of “context” as it relates to the distributed Web, offering the best of both worlds. These profiles track and present the activity of users across communities, while leaving control of the data in the hands of the community or site owner. They are proving to increase traffic for site owners while providing the community with non-intrusive ways to monetize content and build reputation.

This context-based approach to social media advertising offers a creative, secure way to breathe new life into an old model. With a new way to seamlessly present meaningful offers, and even customized environments, to users, advertisers can now understand and appeal to an individual’s online and offline interests based on the fullness of their participation across social media sites. Greeting users on their own terms –- rather than force-feeding them ads based on key words and content — can, over time, transform Internet users from “mouse clicks” and “targets” to fully engaged participants and willing customers.

As founder and CEO of SezWho, Jitendra Gupta brings 13 years of experience in developing and managing software solutions. He holds an MBA from the University of and a B.Tech in EE from IIT Kanpur, India. Jitendra speaks frequently on the topic of context-based search, distributed conversations, and the changing nature of the social web. He has been blogging for nearly two years and occasionally contributes to ReadWriteWeb.com. Jitendra can be reached at jitendra [at] sezwho [dot] com.

Image courtesy of Lou via Flickr

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It is safe to say that anyone reading this probably has one or several accounts on any of the major social networking sites. The same can be said about our family and friends. All of these sites pretty much serve the same function. They allow us to post and share our innermost thoughts, share pictures, music, goofy applications, and network with friends, family and coworkers.

Social networking sites may in time change ownership. They and the data stored on them will almost certainly exist longer than their creators. All too often, these profiles serve as online memorials, obituaries, and a last place for loved ones and the general public to honor the dead.

This is a subject that has made me very uneasy. Due to a recent death in my family, this topic keeps repeating back and forth in my subconsciousness. This particular family member did not have a social networking profile, and was not active online. But if they had, some underlying questions would need to be answered:

1. Do we have the password for the social networking accounts?

2. If not, what are the next steps for gaining access to the accounts?

3. Do we make the profile private if the family wishes to grieve silently?

4. Do we leave the profile intact and public?

5. Do we let the profile become an online memorial for the deceased?

In an email exchange with a New York Times reporter, Tom Anderson, the president of MySpace, said “the company does not allow people to assume control of the MySpace accounts of users after their deaths.” “MySpace handles each incident on a case-by-case basis when notified, and will work with families to respect their wishes,” he added, also noting that at the request of survivors the company would take down pages of deceased users.

Human nature and the fascination with death

Delving further into the subject, I ended up on a site that I had not visited since its creation in 2006. The site is MyDeathSpace and it bills itself as “Your global resource for MySpace.com member obituaries.” It’s an archival site that contains news articles, online obituaries, and other publicly available information about deceased MySpace members.

There are more than 12,000 profiles listed on the site, mainly of younger people. If you need a dose of what reality is, visit this site. I was overcome with shock, horror, and sadness upon learning how some of these people died. Most of these deaths were gruesome and premature, and resulted from accidents, suicides, murders, etc. The site also shows the profiles of many of the criminals suspected and charged with many of these heinous crimes. Overall, MyDeathSpace shows how reckless and senseless society can be.

Online shrines for the family and friends

Reading the memorials and newspaper blurbs gave me a brief snapshot into people’s lives. Sadly, the more I read, the more my curiosity was peaked. I wanted to know more about how the person died, and how they lived. I skimmed through the comments left on their MySpace profiles, and looked through their blog postings, pictures etc. The Majority of the profiles I saw had last login dates well past the person’s date of death.

Family members of the deceased have since logged in, and turned these profiles into online shrines. They monitor the comments, various dates of importance, and in a small way continue to let their loved one live on, perhaps forever thanks to cyberspace. I can see this helping in the healing and grieving process for families of the deceased. The profiles reflect this for the most part, as they are updated and kept in meticulous condition. It’s a way for the family to maintain connections with the deceased’s friends, while also allowing the grieving process to take place in a global public forum.

Comments are left by friends, family members and random strangers. I guess with the belief that the deceased person, in another dimension might be reading it. Many of the comments are written as though the individual were alive today. When in reality, it has been several years since the death. Birthdays, holidays, and significant dates of importance, of both the lives of the author, and the deceased keep the profiles active in memoriam.

Profiles left behind

Then there are other profiles of members who are frozen in time. The last login dates for their MySpace profiles are often the day before, or several days before they met their fateful demise. The pages were last updated by the deceased, and have not been touched since then.

These are the profiles that are especially ghostly. Their last pictures, their last words, and their favorite song usually decorate their profile. Chatter to and from friends about their upcoming plans, and about what they did the days and nights before, is all that remains. I wonder if the surviving family members even know if these profiles exist.

I think it’s only fitting for us to live on in cyberspace when we perish from this earth. I certainly would not have an issue with my family members honoring me in such a way. I also realize that not every family is comfortable with such an open and public grieving process.

One comment I read from a murdered teenager’s mother sticks in my head. The mother basically said, “It’s been three years since my daughter’s death, it’s unhealthy for the grieving process to still be taking place.” She was referring to her daughter’s MySpace profile being flooded daily with encouraging words of support. The fascination with death is only human nature. We fear, embrace and must learn about the unknown. Sites like MyDeathSpace exist for this reason.

When it’s time

Do you want yourself or your loved ones memorialized online?

Image by Kevin Dooley under Creative Commons license.

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Later this year, Meebo will launch Community IM, a product that enables websites to add their own instant messaging and chat service. Back in July, the company announced an impressive list of initial launch partners including Flixster, MyYearbook, and Piczo. Tonight, they are adding a few more partners to that mix, and with it, claiming that in total they will reach “7.6 percent of global Internet users” with the new platform – about 72.9 unique users globally each month according to comScore.

The interesting aspect of Community IM is that for sites that integrate it, users will be able to converse both on the host site and on Meebo.com, the company’s main web-based chat service that also allows users to simultaneously access accounts on AIM, Yahoo, and MSN. Additionally, partners - which now also include Nickelodeon, PerfSport, and Tagged - get a share of the revenue generated through advertising within the IM and chatrooms that Meebo provides.

Meebo is certainly not alone in the private label IM space. Userplane offers a popular and easy to install IM product for publishers, and has partners like KickApps that distribute it to hundreds of niche social networks around the Web. However, what’s unique about Meebo’s offering is that they also offer a popular destination site, in turn enabling users to maintain one identity that they can carry with them to popular sites like Flixster and also access via Meebo.com.

This actually solves a fairly big problem in the IM space. The two biggest examples of IM integrated in social networks – Facebook and MySpace – live largely on islands where you need to be logged into the social network or download a client that supports them to use it. With Meebo, you can now combine the instant messaging experience from more than a dozen different social sites into one, all without download anything. It’s a pretty good deal for users, and one that big partners seem to be embracing as well.

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How many online profiles do you think you have right now? I know, too many to even count! Such is the case with anyone that uses Web 2.0 sites these days.

Whether you have boatloads of profiles or just a few, you need a way to manage your profile information. Here are some tools that you can use to share your profiles online, kind of like a virtual business card.

Tell us in the comments how you share your profiles online.

Customize Your Twitter Background

Twitter has become a popular platform to share your profile. Users are creating customized image backgrounds with all of their vital contact information and using their Twitter account as their primary social profile.

Instead of just using a generic image of some pattern or photo of the dog or kids (guilty as charged here), many people are making their own business card-like backgrounds with detailed biographical information, self-portraits and more contact details. It’s rather simple too, you just edit an image you want to use and add your bio and contact info, then upload it to your Twitter profile. Here’s an excellent example.

Use Your Social Networks

LinkedIn is the network of choice for many professionals. It’s becoming increasingly common to see people using the URL to their LinkedIn profile instead of links to their own blog or website.

Facebook and MySpace profiles are commonly used, but far too many companies block these two social networking monoliths, which could make them a bad choice for your primary online profile.

Aggregate Your Information

Retaggr is a new online profile service that allows you to add all of the social networks that you belong to and create a virtual business card. The cool thing is that this isn’t a static display, the card can actually reveal recent activity on the social sites that you belong to.

FriendFeed has become one of the most popular aggregators for social networking sites, so naturally it’s also become rather popular for sharing your online contact information. The URL is easy to remember, http://Friendfeed.com/username. The best thing about this method is that all of your social networking feeds are available on there too.

MyBlogLog’s widget provides a versatile profile page that shows all of your points of contact in one place. MyBlogLog is used primarily by bloggers, so this might not be the best solution for non-bloggers.

Google Profile was announced almost a year ago by Google and has ever so slowly been showing up in some Google services such as Shared Stuff, Google Reader and Google Maps. The promise was made to centralize all of your profiles for various Google services as well as other services into one place. Sounds nice, but it sure is taking a long time to roll it out to all of their services.

Plaxo has been around for many years. It’s well-known as a social aggregator because of its Pulse feature which was released before FriendFeed, but its primary function has always been address book synchronization and contact management.

Many people are using their Plaxo profile as their virtual business card because it serves many purposes. Not only does it share all of your contact information, but it allows your contacts to stay informed of any changes that you make to vital details such as where you work, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. It also allows them to keep in sync with the changes that their contacts make, which is most useful. The pulse social network aggregation is just an added bonus.

Use Online Business Cards

rmbrME is trying to convince people to go as far as throwing away their real business cards by using their online business card service. Their claim is that your information online is more interactive than a paper business card which can get lost too. While a cute marketing concept, I think it’s silly to ever think real business cards will ever go the way of the DoDo bird.  Is there a potential place for this type of service where people can exchange their information by beaming their mobile devices at one another? Sure, why not.

DropCard is another virtual business card service that’s trying to convince people to give up their old habits of paper business cards. Once again, there are some benefits to the service, but traditional business cards are here to stay.

Create an About Me Page

One of the most commonly used methods of sharing profile and contact information appears to be the About Me page on blogs and websites. Most of them aren’t done very well though; they only contain the most elementary bits of information. However, the trend lately has been to create more socially dynamic and engaging About Me pages. Here’s an example from Julia Roy:

At first glance it appears to be the usual About me or Contact me page. There’s a personal and professional biography and the all-important email address. Then you’ll start to notice more social aspects. There’s the Twitter feed, of course. Then it jumps to what she calls A Digital Life, which shares all of her most commonly used social networks with links to her profiles on each site.

The other interesting and ultra-informative section that you don’t see that often is called Digital Ink, which is where Julia shares links to some of the articles and interviews that involve her or her website. It’s a fun and different way to learn about someone, through the eyes and experiences of other people.

An About me page doesn’t have to be the usual dull and static page that we encounter all too frequently. It can be a dynamic and active webpage with information that’s updated all the time. It can present not only who you were in the past and who you are today, but also link to what you’ll be doing in the future.

There are many ways we can choose to present ourselves and share our contact information online. This will continue to evolve as new services enter the scene and address our need to manage our profiles and contact information.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to have an aggregator that works with your OpenID account so that all of your contact information is centralized and available for use on any new service that you join. It would save a great deal of time and typing, that’s for sure. In the meantime, we will continue to spend a lot of precious time editing and updating our profile information all over the Web in an effort to keep everything consistent and up to date.

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Company

Lizzer

20-Word Description

Lizzer is the easiest way to add links and embed content on the Web.

CEO’s Pitch

Need to find interesting links and content for your blog, email, or site? Lizzer is a bookmarklet (and site) that makes it easy for anyone to find and insert links, images, and videos. Here’s how:

1. Launch the bookmarklet

2. Enter a term in the find links bar

3. Identify and choose the content that you want to link or embed (including from your own account at Flickr or YouTube)

You can add links instantly when using WordPress, Gmail, Tumblr and many others. On “manual mode” sites, you’ll still save time, but will need to copy-paste the provided HTML code.

Mashable’s Take

Lizzer is a service that lets you add links and embed images and videos to just about any Web page through its site or bookmarklet. This can be done in two different ways: Instant Mode, which allows you to add what you want with a click of the mouse, and Manual Mode, which requires you to copy and paste the link or HTML code. In either case, the Lizzer search feature lets you find content across several different popular services at the same time. Enter a keyword and results will appear in special sections for sites like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Wikipedia, and many others.

Currently, Lizzer works best with services like Google Docs, Gmail, WordPress, and Tumblr because you can automatically embed the content from those sites. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t still use their service with sites like MySpace, Facebook and other social networks. You just have to manually copy and paste the code from the Lizzer search results into the page in which you want to use that content.

Lizzer is still in Alpha testing, so you can only use the service through an invitation, which you can sign up for here. You can check out their Demo site just to get a taste of how it works. From early testing we found that the search and insertion process works rather well. However, there were a couple of drawbacks. It would definitely enhance the service if it could search more than just YouTube for video content. While YouTube is still the premiere video content provider, there are many other video services in town these days.

Also, at this time there aren’t a great deal of sites that allow you to automatically insert content through the Lizzer interface. Lizzer has stated that they plan to add many more services for automatic insertion of content, which would only help improve the service. Overall, I think this is a useful service, and a feature that could some day become a common part of every browser, especially for users that need to add links and embed content from the Web.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Fuser has just launched a major update to their email aggregation service. This evening, members were introduced to the new and improved Fuser, which sports a fresh look and feel.

The welcome page is the first sign that things have changed for Fuser members. There’s an entirely different design, which visually explains what the services does: Aggregation of email, social networking messages, and even Twitter messages.

By far, though, the biggest change besides the user interface is the performance, which has been sometimes sluggish because of the intense processing that’s required for connecting to so many different services at one time. They’ve redesigned the entire backend to vastly improve the speed and stability of their service.

For the purpose of this review, we set up several different accounts in order to test the new service, with something an average user would actually use. For example, accounts for Gmail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail, as well as MySpace and Facebook.

Once you’re logged into the new Fuser you’ll see an entirely different inbox setup. There’s a tabbed navigation system for access to email and Twitter messages. Here’s a glimpse:

Notice the checkboxes next to each service under the Add/Edit Accounts tab. That’s the new way to filter which messages you want to appear in your universal inbox. For example, because all of the checkboxes are enabled, all emails and social networking messages will appear in my inbox.

As for those that prefer to view their Gmail messages in the normal threaded display, Fuser has ensured that you still have the option to do so. It will open a new tab to the right and show Gmail emails in the usual manner. Here’s a brief screencast that demonstrates this.

There’s also a handy option to filter which messages you want to view for each social networking service. For example, for MySpace you can choose to read all messages, comments and bulletins, or whichever ones you want. As for Facebook, you have options for messages as well as wall posts.

The email reading and composition tab area is also improved. Besides the general tab for reading all messages, there will be other tabs for each mail system. For example, Gmail’s mail tab will display all emails in the familiar threaded method while Yahoo, Hotmail and others systems will appear as they do on their systems.

At the top right side of the new home screen is the control box. This provides access to several key areas on Fuser.  The first one being your Account preferences. The envelope icon goes to your inbox, the dialogue icon lets you share feedback with the Fuser team. Next is the community icon, which provides access to the Forum, Blog and a new video help center that contains useful screencasts such as the one above about threaded messages. The last two are for searching and logging off.

Here’s a list of all the different email and social networks that Fuser supports at this point in time. They plan to add many more services as members request them.

It’s taken a long time for Fuser to release this update, but judging from initial testing it appears that it’s well worth the wait. The performance is vastly improved and the new interface makes it easier to navigate and control all of your different messaging systems. Being able to quickly filter messages is an important feature. So, it appears Fuser is the ideal service for anyone that wants to consolidate all of their messages from email accounts, Facebook and MySpace and even Twitter.

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WiseStamp is a FireFox extension that lets you add a personalized signature on any webmail service such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL mail, and Hotmail. If that wasn’t cool enough it also allows you to add your signature to just about any webpage (as long as it supports HTML), such as Google Docs, Zoho Docs, etc.

The WYSIWYG rich text editor is loaded with options and easy to use for designing your personalized signatures. You merely type what you want in your signature and customize elements such as font class, style, color and many other options. You can even add your own logo and create separate personal and business signatures.

Here’s how well WiseStamp integrates with your browsing experience. For example, while in Gmail composing a new email message, you’ll see a new addition to your Gmail editing toolbar. It’s the WiseStamp icon, which provides several handy options when you click on it. You can embed any of the customized signatures you’ve created, launch the editor to create a new one or edit an existing one to insert into the message.

The other feature that comes in handy is the ability to add icons and links to profiles on most of the popular social networks and instant messenger services. This allows you to create dynamic Internet ready signatures that connect to all of your online accounts.

Yes, I realize it’s just a browser extension. However, the fact that it provides such a useful service makes it worthy of a review. The ability to connect our signatures to our social network profiles is just an added bonus to an already excellent addition to our surfing experience.

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