Social data portability has been a hotly debated topic with a range of emerging standards competing for adoption.
Afterall, single signon to the web offers a great deal of immediate benefits for users.

Dataportability open standards group has been marketing the concept for a few years now, which supports the OpenID login standard and has been adopted by Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter, and MySpace. Google’s Friend Connect and Facebook’s Facebook Connect are both offering open API’s to developers who can integrate their own login details with one of these major players.  Mashable has a good coverage of both of these tools here

Whilst this is interesting, it’s often not easy to visualise the possibilities of what Data Portability actually means for the end user.

This presentation from Razorfish looks at what might happen if Amazon and Itunes implemented Facebook Connect and cleverly paints a picture of how the experience of their sites would be enhanced.

Portable Social Graphs – Imagining their Potential

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: retail marketing)

I have no doubt that sharing of information between social networks will continue to be embraced, and as long as consumers feel safe that they are in control of their own information and relationships, then the privacy issues can be managed.

facebook connect

For business, allowing ease of signups, as well as potential access to the large amounts of personal information presents a great opportunitiy. So if you have a site that has a large database of users, it’s probably a good time to be considering integrating Facebook’s Facebook Connect and / or Google’s Friend Connect

Here’s a list of 10 Digital Marketing predictions for 2009.

1. Mobile apps
Goldman sachs estimates 210 million  iphone apps will be dowloaded by 2010. Much of this will be monetized by the emerging mobile ad market, e.g. www.admob.com

2. Video streaming from mobile
e.g. www.qik.com www.kyte.com www.ustream.com
Soccer mums through to corporate presentations will be beamed from mobiles directly to the internet

3. Syndication and widgets
Content syndication will become more mainstream
Value will emerge in personalized aggregation services
Rss will start to include ads (most rss feeds are ad free at present), this will finally convince the major publishers (news sites) to publish full feeds rather than only the article teaser.  e.g. Springwidgets.com/ and Sproutbuilder.com/

4. Location based services
Thanks to the GPS functionality on the Iphone and other smartphones, the use of location based services will rise turning the yellow pages directory listing businesses on their head.  e.g. iloop.com and brightkyte.com, but I expect facebook and myspace to integrate location based services in 2009.
Social recommendations will add value creating a mashup of recommendation & discovery services. e.g. tribesmart.com

5. Social media matures        
2009 will see social media mature as brands, organisations and politicians read about why Obama’s campaign was so successful.

6. Integrated campaign metrics
The holy grail of marketing .. will get one step closer as technology starts to allow a more integrated metrics reporting of campaign media.  This will accelerate the move to digital and digital agencies will start to play the lead role in marketing initiatives & strategy.

7. Personalised Knowledge Discovery
Recommendation engines and personalisation will start to produce some value as people learn about needs they didn’t know they had.
Attention spans will overflow forcing a change in information distribution.  E.g. Twitter will be used for what I call SPR or the “short press release”.

8. Attention Surplus Disorder will be coined as a condition that affects a growing number of people.  Media saturation will start to drive a market for a growing range of filtering services, many of them specialised on a niche topic.

9. Opinion fraud will become common place with companies paying for positive recommendations for their products and services.  Traditional media will continue to publish the worst of these stories, but even that will not be enough to discourage a growing number of companies into this activity.

10. Life Streaming will explode as devices simplify the ability to record experiences. Examples Socialthing.com/ (recently acquired by AOL) and Friendfeed.com/ 

All in all 2009 promises to be an exciting time for innovation and despite the economic climate, I believe that emerging tools will continue to prosper.

Technorati launched their State of the Blogosphere 2008 study today, and it reveals that Blogging is still a very active medium.  The full study will be released in 5 daily posts, but today’s post includes some useful overall blogging statistics.

- 133 million Blogs indexed since 2002.
- 7.4 million Blogs had posts in the last 120 days.
- 1.5 million Blogs had new posts up in the last 7 days.
- 900,000 Blogs had new posts in the past 24 hours.
- 76,000 Blogs have a Technorati Authority of 50+.

Global Snapshot of Bloggers

Who are the global bloggers?

• Two-thirds are male
• 50% are 18-34
• More affluent and educated than the general population
  • 70% have college degrees
  • Four in ten have an annual household income of $75K+
  • One in four have an annual household income of $100K+
• 44% are parents

Gartner has released some new research which describes how various people engage in online communities.

Using the term "Generation V", the research confirms that segments do not relate to age, gender, geographic location or social class, but instead are grouped by their interactions and behavioural usage preferences of digital media consumption.

The 4 levels of engagement in Gartner’s model are creators, contributors, opportunists, and lurkers.

The report suggests

• Up to 3% will be creators, providing original content. They can be advocates that promote products and services.
• Between 3% and 10% will be contributors who add to the conversation, but don’t initiate it. They can recommend products and services as customers move through a buying process, looking for purchasing advice.
• Between 10% and 20% will be opportunists, who can further contributions regarding purchasing decisions. Opportunists can add value to a conversation that’s taking place while walking through a considered purchase.
• Approximately 80% will be lurkers, essentially spectators, who reap the rewards of online community input but absorb only what is being communicated. They can still implicitly contribute and indirectly validate value from the rest of the community. All users start out as lurkers.

“Companies should plan to segment all four levels in the community – each has significant business value,” said Adam Sarner, principal research analyst at Gartner. “Differentiation exists between sectors and industries. Marketers with strong brands attract more creators. Certain industries, such as insurance, draw more lurkers.”

Successful communities support the needs of all four segments, and my research suggests that as communities grow, the percentage of each segment will remain relatively consistent.

A recent study from Unisys found that 7% of 1200 surveyed Australians currently used their mobiles for web transactions.

The study was part of a global study of over 13,000 participants across 14 countries.   59% said they would not trust their mobile devices to provide a secure transaction

Online transactions using mobiles are gradually overcoming concerns about security in much the same way consumers exercised caution before embracing web based transactions.

In terms of countries, Germany at 21% had the most confidence in mobile transactions, whilst France at 12 % were least trusting of transactions conducted from their phones.

Australian banks have been gradually adding mobile accessibility to their services with ANZ offering a complete mobile banking website, and National Australia Bank recently rolling out a SMS banking service.

I believe last week’s Iphone launch will be a catalyst to accessing the web from mobiles, due it’s usability and data plans.