Mediaboss Marketing

NEW YORK (AP) -- Facebook may have made social networking a worldwide cultural phenomenon, but it wasn't the first Internet company to connect people online. And it won't be the last. Here's a look at how social networking has evolved. Some companies have come and gone. Some are mere shells of their former selves. And others show promise, even as Facebook dominates the social Web.

Geocities

Launched in 1994, Geocities offered a way for people to build websites and tell the world about themselves with postings and photos. Users could also buy and sell things through online stores. Pages built to feature different subjects formed virtual communities. Yahoo bought it in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, for about $3 billion and shut it down a decade later. Geocities was among the early services that let people form online communities. Yahoo shut down GeoCities in 2009.

Classmates.com

The website created to connect former schoolmates with one another launched in 1995, possibly before its time. It filed to go public in 2007 when it had about 50 million users, but withdrew the IPO that December, citing "market conditions." Classmates.com still exists today, but is overshadowed by Facebook. It's owned by United Online Inc., which is also home to online florists such as FTD and Interflora.

SixDegrees

Started by Andrew Weinreich in 1997, SixDegrees was "the first online business that attempted to identify and map a set of real relationships between real people using their real names," writes author David Kirkpatrick in "The Facebook Effect." Though it attracted millions of users, the site failed to catch on and shut down in 2000. Weinreich later told Kirkpatrick that "We were early. Timing is everything."

LiveJournal

Launched in 1999, LiveJournal offered and still offers a rudimentary form of social networking. Users write online journals and share them with friends or the general public. The site doesn't require people to use their real names, and with short status update snippets more popular today, seems more akin to blogging than to social networking. It's owned by Moscow-based SUP Media and remains popular in Russia.

Friendster

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Beyond Facebook: A look at social network history

General Motors will stop advertising on Facebook, even as the social networking website prepares to go public.

While GM gave no specific reason for dropping Facebook ads, a source familiar with the automaker's plans said the company's marketing executives decided Facebook's ads had little impact on consumers.

While GM's decision could be an exception in the advertising world, it marked the first highly visible crack in the Facebook strategy, said Brian Wieser, Internet and media analyst at Pivotal Research Group.

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"This does highlight what we are arguing is the riskiness of the overall Facebook business model," he said. "It is not a sure thing. It sure looks likely that it will be one of the most important ad-supported media properties, but it's not certain because there will be marketers who are challenged to prove the effectiveness of the marketing vehicle."

Facebook, founded eight years ago by Mark Zuckerberg in a Harvard dorm room, is expected to start trading on the Nasdaq on Friday. The world's No. 1 social networking site raised its IPO price range on Tuesday, potentially giving the company a valuation of more than $US100 billion.

An executive at another large consumer products company said the issue with advertising on Facebook is nobody really knows yet if it works better than traditional media and is worth the money spent. "Is it just a shiny new object, or is it a real value proposition?" said the executive, who asked not to be identified.

GM said it will still have Facebook pages, which cost nothing to create, to market its vehicles. GM pays no fee to Facebook for its pages, which allow the automaker to reach consumers directly.

GM said it regularly reviews how it spends its marketing budget and adjusts its approach as needed.

"It's not unusual for us to move our spending around various media outlets - especially with the growth of multiple social and digital media outlets," the company said in a statement.

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Low impact: GM axes Facebook ads

The new Nokia 112 (left) and Nokia 110 (right) give users web-browsing access at a low cost. Image: Nokia

Dont look now, but Gadget Lab is actually excited by a couple of feature phones.

Nokia isnt just focused on bolstering its position in the smartphone market. The company on Tuesday unveiled two new feature phones the Nokia 110 and Nokia 112 that will bring web browsing, social networking and gaming to budget-conscious consumers and emerging markets.

The Nokia 110 and Nokia 112 will both cost less than $50 without contracts, and will run on Nokias Series 40 operating system. Users will have access to the web through the Nokia Browser, which reduces data consumption by 90 percent by compressing websites to a cloud-based server, according to Nokia. This will keep data costs down for Nokia 110 and 112 users.

Both phones also feature Facebook and Twitter access directly on the home screen. And in its aim to target younger customers, Nokia will make 40 EA game titles available to Nokia 110 and 112 owners to download for free. On board theres also an FM radio and a media player that can play both music and video.

Both feature phones have a 1.8-inch TFT LCD screen, a VGA camera, dual SIM card capacity, and MicroSD slots that support up to 32 GB of storage. The main difference between the two devices lies in battery life the Nokia 110 gets up to 10.5 hours of talk time, while the Nokia 112 offers 14 hours.

While these definitely arent the kinds of phones youll want to wait in line for, both models pack a lot of features at a minimal cost. And Nokia definitely needs to give its feature-phone sales a boost. According to its Q1 earnings, Nokias feature and basic phone sales dropped 16 percent, mainly due to competition from microvendors in emerging markets. Differentiating its phones with web browsing and social-network access, at a low cost, is a sensible move for the company.

The Nokia 110 is set to ship in the second quarter for 35 euros, or around $45, and the Nokia 112 is scheduled to ship in the third quarter for 38 euros, or around $49.

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Nokia Brings Web Browsing, Social Networking to New Low-End Phones

SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Alliance Health Networks, the leading social networking company serving consumers and the healthcare industry, today announced that it has acquired Medify, a leading provider of data-driven treatment information, to offer patients and caregivers the industrys most comprehensive social engagement platform.

Alliance Health will integrate Medifys unique treatment insights across the companys growing portfolio of social health networks some 50 condition-specific sites that serve more than 1.5 million registered users. Likewise, Medify will integrate user-generated content from Alliance Health properties into its products. Medify.com will also remain a standalone website, providing aggregated research generated by its award-winning data analytics and knowledge extraction platform to help consumers and health care providers search and compare information across every health condition, treatment and drug.

Since its founding in 2010, Medify has raised venture capital from Voyager Capital and several leading angel investors. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Medify co-founders Derek Streat (CEO) and Jay Bartot (CTO) will join the Alliance Health leadership team as senior vice presidents, bringing deep expertise in business and technology development to help scale the companys social engagement platform. Streats career has focused on solving hard problems to help people in their everyday lives. As a member of the initial executive team at Classmates Online, Streat oversaw corporate development strategy, taking the company from inception to $100 million in revenue and 60 million subscribers over six years. Streat also held executive positions at Unitus and was a co-founder of Adready.

Bartot has co-founded and led the technology development of several data analytics companies, including Farecast.com, an innovative consumer travel site that was acquired by Microsoft and became the cornerstone of its Bing Travel site. He was also a cofounder of AdRelevance, an advertising measurement platform that was acquired by Nielson/NetRatings. The full Medify team, which includes key members of the Farecast engineering team, will remain in the Seattle office, which Alliance Health will expand to complement its product and engineering teams at its Salt Lake City headquarters.

As social networks continue to transform industries and change the way people live, Alliance Health remains focused on empowering people to successfully navigate their personal health journey, free and independent of the healthcare system, said Stead Burwell, CEO of Alliance Health. The acquisition of Medify brings us two critical elements powerful data analytics technologies and an extremely accomplished team which reinforce our status as the industrys most robust social engagement platform. Combined, we will be in the best position to help consumers make smart health care decisions by providing a unique combination of relevant knowledge and tools for every drug, treatment and condition.

Medifys patent-pending technology mines more than 20 million studies of real patient experiences from disparate data sources, includingresearch studies from researchers, doctors and other medical professionals,and presents them on an easy-to-navigate website. An additional 5,000 new studies are added to the site each day.

As the state of healthcare continues to evolve, transparency becomes an increasingly important factor for consumers striving to manage their patient experience. Through the Medify acquisition, Alliance Health will be able to offer more comprehensive access to relevant health information across all of its properties, including Medify.com, to aid consumers as they make important health decisions, including the ability to:

We could not be happier about the opportunities this new relationship brings, said Streat. We are so like-minded in our commitment to transforming healthcare through social networking and data analytics that its made joining forces a natural fit. I look forward to working with the Alliance Health team to integrate our products, capabilities and knowledge in order to bring people together and give them access to the tools and support they need to best navigate their health journey.

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Alliance Health Networks Acquires Medify to Strengthen Social Health Networks for Consumers and Industry Partners

Investors are eager for Facebook to start trading later this week, and money is already pouring into social-networking stocks.

Stocks in the industry are up by an average of 5 percent today, according to our new researchLAB analysis tool (see partial screen shot below). That makes it the strongest group of the session so far, as the broader market churns with a gain of less than 0.5 percent.

Renren, often touted as China's version of Facebook, rallied 10 percent and is leading the group higher. The company reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue yesterday afternoon, fueled by a surge in online gaming.

Zynga, which makes social-networking games including Facebook's FarmVille, is also leaping by almost 8 percent as investors champ at the bit for the Mark Zuckerberg's company to go public.

FB originally expected to sell shares for $28 to $35, but raised that range to $34-38 last night amid huge investor demand. That translates into a total valuation of about $100 billion.

The stock will join researchLAB's list of social-networking stocks as soon as it begins trading. Despite major volatility in most of the names, the group has outperformed the market so far this year, with a 21 percent gain.

(Screen shot courtesy of researchLAB )

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