The Social Media Minute (19-Mar-2009)

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• It's all About Location, Location, Location at SXSWi
• Guy Kawasaki Launches Personalized Alltop
• MySpace Enhances Data Portability
• Twitter Search Traffic to Pass Google Blog Search
• Kevin Rose Launches Twitter User Directory WeFollow

It's all About Location, Location, Location at SXSWi

South By Southwest Interactive is the yearly gathering of geeks in Austin, Texas. This March event is known in the social media world as the "Geek Spring Break". Two years ago, a little-known website called Twitter was the buzz of the SXSW festival as chatty nerds were first turned on to the now-popular microblogging service.

So, if SXSW can be seen as a look into the future as to which web services will be popular in the near future, what was hot this year at SXSW? Location-based services seemed to capture the attention of the SXSW iPhone-toting crowds. That is, web services that advertise your current location, so your friends and buddies can join you.

One service called Foursquare seemed to dominate the festival as SXSW attendees installed it on their iPhones to track each others locations as they migrated between parties and to different meetups around downtown Austin.

Another example is #taxishare that allows users to find each other and arrange sharing a cab in the immediate area like an airport. This way, using the power of micromessaging and location, you can share the cost of a taxi and save a few dollars while traveling.

Guy Kawasaki Launches Personalized Alltop

Alltop is a website that allows you to see social media websites categorized by the areas of content they excel in. How does it work? If you are looking for, say, a website dedicated to travel, there is a listing on Alltop regarding travel with the most recent posts from various related websites and weblogs. Guy Kawasaki, the successful entrepreneur behind Alltop, calls his website "a magazine stand for the Internet."

Just recently, Kawasaki launched MyAlltop, a personalized view of the Alltop reference engine. With MyAlltop, you can create a customized Alltop page that contains only the subscriptions of the websites you care about based on any topic you chose. Users can even order the subscriptions and make MyAlltop pages to share with others. Go see the site and get started by creating your own reference page for the Internet.

MySpace Enhances Data Portability

Data Portability, for those unfamiliar with the concept, is a method that enables users of services such as Facebook and MySpace to export their data out of the service for use on other social networking sites. This is necessary because over the years of using a service, social networkers build an extensive friends list, messages and other valuable data that keeps them connected to their social circle. Being able to take this data with you if you move to a different social networking saves a lot of time and keeps these connections alive.

MySpace has made improvements to their data portability by enhancing MySpaceID, their account sign-in process. MySpaceID already allowed members to carry their profile data to other services, however by extending MySpace ID with OAuth and OpenID, MySpace users can now sign into OpenID-enabled websites with their MySpace user credentials.

In the near future, MySpaceID will enable bi-directional activity streams. With this functionality, you'll be able to update your MySpace activity with external website activity, such as alerting your MySpace friends when you upload pictures to Flickr or videos to YouTube.

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Tags: alltop, data portability, location based services, mobile, myspace, social media, social media minute, sxsw, twitter

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• It's all About Location, Location, Location at SXSWi
• Guy Kawasaki Launches Personalized Alltop
• MySpace Enhances Data Portability
• Twitter Search Traffic to Pass Google Blog Search
• Kevin Rose Launches Twitter User Directory WeFollow