Who are you voting for this November?

Jambool launched a contest between the two candidates. Fans of each can now show their support and compete head to head — who gets more share of support every day, and who will get more votes?

Login today to check it out: Vote 4 Obama, or Vote 4 McCain!

I’ve recently had conversations with friends about finding the right local resource for everyday needs — plumbers, car mechanics, restaurants, house contractors.

By far, everyone trusts recommendations on Yelp for stuff like restaurants. It is one of the primary factors in people deciding where to eat. A few friends also swear by Yelp for car mechanics, doctors and plumbers.

But it gets interesting when you have to make a decision for overhauling your kitchen and paying someone $50,000 and redo your world. For one, interestingly, people feel uncomfortable in recommending any contractor even if they’ve used one themselves. And it is also extremely hard to come to trust reviews on Yelp for an investment this size. Most people go with the recommendation from their real estate agents, and with someone they get a good vibe with (or someone who gives them the best quote).

My own experience has been that I use Yelp to cross out places or services I don’t want to use. I look for the negative recommendations and even sometimes read the comments. But all said and done, if a doctor, mechanic or restaurant is recommended I’d try it because the risk is relatively low. On the other hand, for a contractor who I’d pay thousands of hard earned dollars, Yelp reviews will only go so far.

What do you think? Does Yelp help you in deciding the local services you use?

Graphing Social Patterns conference is next week, and if you haven’t already registered, we highly recommend you do — it brings together the best community of social applications developers. Going by the past conferences, the panels and speaker tracks are invariably excellent.

For readers of this blog, who are planning to come, here is a discount code that gets you 20% discount for conference registration: gspe08fos.

Graphing Social Patterns has become the premier conference in the social applications and social networking space. GSP East is in Washington, D.C., on June 9-11. Vikas is speaking on the Virality and engagement panel.

Do look for us there if you are attending.

Reza along with Ken and Aaron organized the Facebook Dev Garage in Seattle on May 5th. It was a free event, sponsored by Microsoft and Facebook. It was a great event with presentations from several developers based in Seattle who gave demos. There were also talks by Facebook and Jim Scheinman (EIR at Charles River Ventures).

We were interviewed by a journalist from Time magazine last week. The article is rather truthful in capturing the essence of the overwhelming number of applications on Facebook: Read it here:

Suffering From Facebook Fatigue?

We’re hoping that Send Good Karma does have a positive impact on helping the fatigue. Positive karma helps, doesn’t it?

We presented at the appnite contest last night at GSP. It went quite well, though we didn’t win. Thanks to everyone who voted for us!

It was a strange conversation at a panel today at Graphing social. At a panel that featured folks from Bebo, Friendster, Meebo and Netvibes, at one point the panelists were talking about the impact third party applications have on the user base and the platforms.

I was very surprised to hear Jessica Alter from Bebo bring up “regulating” third party apps and developers so they behave well on all platforms. It seemed to get quick yays from Friendster and Netvibes, to the extent they were all ready to create a working group right then to regulate these apps.

It seemed to me a case of the platforms suddenly turning prude, especially one like Bebo. I think even Facebook’s recent strategy to turn down the ability of apps to tap into the social graph falls into the same category. Social networks — Myspace, Facebook, Bebo — are all largely built around very inane set interactions. None of these networks have any really deep collaborative components, or even anything that is significantly useful. So they turn to third party apps to build it on their platform.

What they don’t realize (or they realize but refuse to admit) is that users on their platforms aren’t really in the mood for deeper apps. Deep, rich apps don’t do well on Facebook. It is a reality. Spammy, inane apps do quite well — and that is a reality as well.

So they try to force it upon external developers. Turn off virality. “Regulate” them. If the trend continues, like it seems to be, the story of open social platforms will be a short one. Myspace, Bebo, Hi5 even mentioned that they would prefer to open the gates to virality slowly. Maybe they are justified in worrying about the impact to their user base, but they should probably set their expectations right as well.

On the panel, thankfully, Seth Sternberg from Meebo voiced an opinion against the cry for regulating apps.

In fact, even otherwise, Seth Sternberg impressed me on that panel more than anyone else. I’ve not interacted with him before, or heard him before. I hope to, though, in the future.

Today I attended two sessions related to data portability at the Graphing Social Patterns conference. Here are some notes.

First off — I believe that the problem that Data Portability group is trying to address is real, and deserves to be solved for the users. OpenId aims to enable users to not have multiple password protected accounts all over the place. A world where everyone has an identity that can be verified has huge advantages for both companies and users. Users won’t have to share their email address or prove their unique identity to new sites, and will be able to login and try out new websites much more easily. This in turn is a huge advantage for companies who spent a good marketing budget on trying to figure out how to get users to create an account. And if open id works out, I guess the existing password custodians such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook etc. will become identity custodians with a varying degree of user identity verification.

The same goes for personal data such as address information, phone numbers, credit card numbers and so on. However, here things start to get a little murkier. There is value for users to be able to not have to enter their addresses or change them at many different sites. However, unlike a verifiable identity, there are several business models that thrive today on being the custodians of users’ personal data.

Things get even murkier when we start talking about user generated content. This is definitely a huge part of a companies “assets” — so expecting them to freely share it out would bring forth a lot of questions. There are of course questions that I see come up in these panels (e.g., which user really owns which content). But there is more to it. As a user, I may want the ability to take the content I created on one website to another website. A fine idea, and one I support, but it would be hard to get it to reality, I think.

Let us pick an example — Amazon.com reviews. This is user generated content, and I myself have often thought about having the ability to get a hold of all the reviews I’ve written and being able to show them as a part of my online footprint. Now, Amazon terms of service say that once I’ve written a review and given it to them, it pretty much belongs to them. They have the rights to it. I don’t. While I may think it is less than ideal, but one must understand Amazon’s perspective too. These reviews are a huge part of what makes Amazon a unique ecommerce site. They are a large factor in the decision making process on their website. And besides their fulfillment infrastructure, this content makes it harder for a competitor to pose a challenge to them in their space.

Now, why would Amazon suddenly want to make this content available for any other website? Or for that matter, why would anyone want to make such content freely portable to other sites? Don’t they immediately lose their competitive edge — the proverbial barrier to entry that they were aiming to build with this in the first place?

There is definitely a tension here between what might be ideal for users and what might be ideal for the businesses involved. And while as a user I may want all data generated by me to be completely portable, I can’t see why as a business I would want to enable that. And again, as a startup just out the gate, I may be keen to have Amazon do this for their users, so if I offer users something enticing, I may have their reviews from Amazon show up on my site as well. It sure makes the life of a startup that much easier. But the economics of it just don’t make it viable for the players who have the content in the first place.

So, are there scenarios for companies to be willing to share their content? And what kind of content? And under what kind of licensing terms?

I just got back from the morning session of the Myspace Dev Jam at their San Francisco office. The short summary is — their platform is not yet ready to go live, but is getting there quickly. They still do not have a date for the launch to the users, but expect to make an announcement “shortly” (possibly next week at the next meetup at their offices on 5th).

I think after Facebook, Myspace is probably going to be the most exciting one to develop to for the developer community. That said, their history of not working with the widget developers and actually coming out with their own products to compete with the popular widgets on their site indicates the wrong kind of DNA that one would want in the platform company. It came out somewhat in one of today’s questions as well — when asked about the ability to upload photos to the developer sites from within the canvas pages, they were somewhat puzzled we even wanted that ability. Posting forms from within canvas pages in Myspace (and opensocial in general) is going to be an issue for some time too. That said, Myspace is the biggest social networking site online, and has a huge presence in the US. That by itself makes it exciting.