Lakers, Socal and Social Utility

The day after a long weekend is not my favorite day, you get back to work from your partying,
relaxing, traveling etc. Surprisingly today has been a good day for me. I guess it is a bunch of things.

• Weather is good today, better than the weekend
• Lakers won and are ahead 3-1 in the conference finals :)
  
• Weekend was gr8 to catch up with old friends
• I am blogging after a long time, its been a fun time the last few weeks
• Excited about playing Mah Jong, Looks like a fun game
  

Tech Thoughts

Social Networks: I am looking to see if people will come with ways to serve vertical markets in social networks.I think social networks are horizontal and there are people with specific interests who gather together on social networks, how do you capture these vertical segments and build utilities that serve them , group of people who love astronomy, elvis fans etc.
I think there are better ways to serve vertical markets in social networks.

Maybe a Linked App/Gadget/Utility for Technology Recruiters.

Monetization: Content is becoming an increasingly valuable asset to monetize. You generate
valuable content then you can syndicate, distribute , publish and charge for it. The distribution channels are interesting to me , I am happy that I get to play with this at work.

I have been trying to learn Mandarin.

Xie Xie (Thanks)
wan an (Good Night)
Ravi

Social Networking and Monetizing them

Social Networks have always intrigued me.
They are great now I can keep in touch with friends,family,coworkers,discover ppl etc

Facebook,MySpace,LinkedIn,Orkut etc are great and useful sites.
Also Ning now allows anyone to create their own social network.

One thing about social networks that intrigues me is revenue generation.

The CPC,CPA etc methods work fine with click based systems.

Having worked with SEM Systems and also Local Search Engines I think we need
to have better systems for monetizing social networks.

Pretty soon I believe we will see behaviour targeting on social networks.
They will not just look for keywords but also look at our friends,interests,actions to determine which Ads to serve.

Maybe we will see different types of ads, widgets may serve the function of dynamic ads.

An Interesting article about this topic.

Fox Interactive Media NYTimes Article

One thing of note is that there are going to be privacy concerns especially with the way we can target users on social networks.

A personalization dream a privacy nightmare?

I believe we can still reap the benefits of personalization and protect our privacy.

Remains to be seen who is going to be the first one to one to come with something similar to
Google AdSense for Social Networks.

Let me know if you see interesting things in this space.

Late Night Blogging, Time to Sleep

Ravi