I’m really happy with the efforts they’ve made and continue to strive for to organize all the “noise” out there. You can read news sorted into categories called News Networks. The news is clipped by other readers, and of course you can clip your own news. And the topics aren’t always about social media. There are topics for gaming, politics, current events and more.

You can also follow other readers and see what they’re reading (follow me here).  I know that sounds like FriendFeed, but socialmedian’s News Networks are better than FF’s Rooms, IMHO.

Go check out socialmedian and let me know what you think.

LinkedIn hablan espanol ahora.

Blogger has made 4 updates including Malay availability, comment moderation after a fixed # of days, spam interstitials allowing readers to click through to blogs, and the optional inclusion of your email address in blog feeds.

Flock released a Fashion and Entertainment version of their browser dubbed ‘Gloss.’

Pownce now supports UTF-8, meaning it supports international languages.

But lately, social media has gotten quite stale and I’m wondering if the bubble is already deflating.

I’m not the only one.

Not surprisingly, bloggers are among the first to notice.

Problogger Darren Rowse addressed the changes to blogging in a post entitled, “Has Blogging Lost Its Relational Focus?”

The blogosphere is a different place now in many ways. For starters there are a lot more blogs. There is almost a bigger focus upon blogging as a business tool and the idea of making money online in general.I do think there’s probably been a shift (a smallish one) to some degree in the ways that bloggers look at and treat one another. For example I hear people talking about their ‘competition’ a lot more and see some bloggers link out to other blogs in their niches less. I also see bloggers developing relationships more out of strategy rather than just because they want to connect.

Robert Scoble chimed in with his thoughts in his post, “Has/How/Why Tech Blogging Has Failed You”

I’ve been thinking a lot about Tech blogging and my role in it. I’ve increasingly become saddened. Why? Because we’ve increasingly started focusing on the business side of things. Look at all the stories on TechMeme or Google News’ tech section. It’s all business, almost all the time.

Rewriting (or competing with) the Wall Street Journal isn’t why I started blogging back in 2000. I started blogging because I wanted to share my life with you (back then I was planning conferences with programmers and I was seeing them build remarkable things). I wanted to help other people discover these new things and understand how to use them best.

Over at Big Contrarian, Jack Shedd wrote a post about some of the web’s most popular bloggers (don’t follow the link if you’re easily offended). Here’s a snippet:

Write top ten lists and whore yourself on as many other sites as you possibly can. Don’t be thoughtful, long-winded or interesting. Don’t write about what you love, unless what you love is popular on Digg…. don’t even think about writing about more than one topic.

Whether their strategies work or not is slightly beside the point. It’s cheap. It’s marketing driven, instead of content driven. It’s the type of thinking that leads to a sequel to the movie Garfield.

Blogs were really the forefront of social media, and so I believe that social networking is beginning to fall in these unfortunate footsteps.

Think about it. You sign on to Facebook. You catch up with old college friends. It’s fun at first, but then it fades. Those friends were in your life for a season, but now it’s a new season in your life. And your current friends, well there’s way more to your relationships than a Facebook account.

Even if you disagree with that, you can agree that fads fade. Ask Friendster. No, really. They were an American fad, but have staying power in Asia.

So then we have new shiny things on tap. Twitter, FriendFeed, SocialThing, Plurk, Identi.ca, Tumblr and Pownce. The problem is that most of these are filled with meta-social media talk.

Even good things, there can be too much of.

Which is why we currently live in a world where Google dominates the search market while Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, Webcrawler, and Magellan rest in the search engine graveyard. And Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask.com struggle to survive.

People only have so much time or a capacity to handle all the noise. Is it really any surprise that Google, probably the most minimalistically designed search engine, was the one to survive?

Think about a product like the Flip Video. It’s super simple. It’s selling like hotcakes.

Look for social media’s winners to be the ones that keep it simple. In the meantime, be wise with your social media campaigns. Don’t just jump on the latest, greatest thing. It’s a balancing act. You want to  play in the space while its hot but being ready for where consumers go next. Just don’t be surprised if next comes a little sooner than expected.

One of the biggest problems facing social media today is all the noise. Aggregators such as FriendFeed attempt to simplify social media by offering a place where people can review information from their various networks. But while this reduces the noise of advertising and other non-profile noise from various sites, congregating all the feeds in one place creates a new form of noise. You either need to be ADHD (that’s not a bad thing, btw) or a super multi-tasker in order to manage it.

socialmedian is going to tackle the problem by offering users a volume bar. I think this is freakin’ genius. I hope it works like magic. If so, socialmedian will race to the top of the charts for social aggregators. And it would be nice to see Jason Goldberg and his team be rewarded that way for their solid work.

that’s not the only thing the sm team is doing.

socialmedian continues to move toward the goal of (finally) launching into public beta. Ok, I’ll admit it - I’m growing impatient. But truly, I do respect networks that progress with slow growth. Usually that’s how the best products and companies are built (and personal wealth but that’s for a different blog).

Anyway, socialmedian is almost constantly updating as they make headway on their goal. Here’s what they’re working on now. Oh, how they tease us with features that are forthcoming! (I mean that in a good way).

• Major enhancements to creating a well functioning News Network on socialmedian.  A simple wizard which walks the user through a few easy steps.  Will function more like saving a search than does today.  Selecting topics and sources will be much simplified.  Behind the scenes we’re also implementing a whole new search technology based on Lucene, which I’m sure many are familiar with.
• Tools to spiffy up your News Network:
  • Picture
  • Description
  • Welcome message to new members of your news network
• A new homepage
• Fixes and enhancements to suggested Newsmakers
• New “get started guide” to help new users get going on socialmedian step-by-step
• An in-box sorta thing to help you track which news networks you’ve been invited to.  We’ll expand on this more in the future.
• A bunch of usability fixes and enhancements.
• And, a cool twitter feature that i’m not going to reveal just yet.

Did you read that? So teasing!!!!!!!!!!!! Looking forward to hearing more about what that’s all about.

Of course, the artists have to be signed up to iLike. But even getting updates from a handful cuts down on the time. You find out about concerts, album releases and other stuff. Whatever the artist releases. There’s a plugin for iTunes, a Facebook app, and a web app for the iPhone.

Anyway, as the headline let you know, there are now over 30 million users on iLike. And they’re launching a new ad platform. The platform is for concert promoters.

Also, artists will be able to enable full song playback via Rhapsody.

Developers will soon be able to add iLike to their websites.

Goodness, gracious, that’s a lot of news from iLike. And, I LIKE IT!

What about you? Leave a comment (while I go and update my iLike profile).

I checked Facebook’s blog and they said only a few people have the new designs, similar to what people were experiencing last week when trying to access the new design via new.facebook.com.

Anyone have the new design yet? Like, dislike, other thoughts? Leave a comment!

If you select manual, the window will expand to show your networks.

The sharing feature will be added to the bookmarklet too.

Check it out:

What in the world might they look like, you ponder? Well, like this:

Are they going to interrupt my experience on LinkedIn, you wonder? Well, not according to Jack Chou:

Like existing ads on our site today, DirectAds advertisements are intended to be non-obtrusive messages that accompany the overall experience of LinkedIn. Note that you won’t see any additional ads with the introduction of this product and every DirectAds ad includes the advertising member’s name and profile data, so you’ll know who is trying to reach members like you.

But will it be worth it? Well, you decide. LinkedIn is earning $75 CPM on their existing ads, so they must be doing something right.