I hate doing press releases - they seem so old school Web 1.0-ish. Scheduling appointments to go kiss Om Mailk’s or Arrington’s ring just seems so arcane to me, but it’s clearly what has to be done to get coverage. And then they assign the post to some ‘junior’ stand-in - who gets the facts wrong and you’re better off letting a viral message percolate - anyway.

After having gone through this nightmarish scenario a couple of times now, I’ve recently been trying to figure out how to “do it right”. To combine the viral effect of information percolating on it’s own sake, versus asking Dave Winer for a link or begging Scoble for yet another video interview.

But its the end of the year and it’s time to summarize 2007 and point forward to 2008. So here goes - the direct method:

1. BBM (Broadband Mechanics) received $400k in Angel funding over the past 18 months. We used that money to supplement our bootstrapped consulting revenues - so that we could stabilize our PeopleAggregator platform, take on some ‘loss leader’ gigs and build up our International presence. DONE.

2. BBM now has a ‘few’ example social networks live which folks will (hopefully) see decouple our demo UI - from what is possible. If you recall (which I’m sure nobody does) the ONLY criticism we got from Mark Hendrickson’s review of our platform (which was a first part of an on-going Ning glorifying effort) was that he thought that our UI was clunky (and still does.) What TechCrunch didn’t quite grok (and neither did ValleyWag) was that our demo UI at PeopleAggregator.net is a ‘catalog’ of features and functionality that can then be easily customized to our customers spec and requirements. It is far easier to take something out then out it in. So:

- Cyama.com - a network for religious youth

- GTChannel.com - a video sharing network for car enthusiasts, drifters

- Letscricket.com - a place for cricket fans

- ExtremeGamingTour.com - a gamer network - run by Picture Marketing for Intel and Dell

were all examples of early, loss leader sites which used PeopleAggregator - which modified the base UI is some way.

3. Recently we’ve gone live with:

- GIANTmag.com - the first network we’ve done for Radio-One - a large Black Media outfit who owns 70 Radio stations, a TV channel (TVOne) and GIANT magazine.

- this network takes on it’s own look and feel and is a sign of things to come

4. And there’s this excellent developer of ours - Pete Quintus - who has a Greek-American networks called:

- PortoKalada.com - which also does some base level changes to the PeopleAggregator UI

Pete is an example of someone who went to our download site, got a copy of our platform and ran with iit. He’s also a contributor to our dev mailing list. Thanks Pete!

5. But all of these networks still have the basic PeopleAggregator underlying set of features and UI and don’t push the envelope very far (well GTChannel ties into Revver and ExtremeGamingTour gets its avatar images from photos taken at a live event - which is Picture Marketing’s schtick.)

What we’ve been working on - and waiting to show off is what we’ve been doing with Bell Canada and Acteva.

- The Bell Video store - is a move downloading site that gets it’s community features from PeopleAggregator via a methodology where we ’send’ little widgets of community over to the Bell ASP .Net platform and plop them into their pages. The site isn’t done yet, and it’ll be available in English and French - but it’s a good example of what we do and why it takes longer than just ‘a click’ to spawn off projects from our platforms.

- the ZDI meta-network from Acteva will be a series of campus run networks where event organizers can get their own social networks and sell tickets to various kinds of events - utilizing the Acteva event ticketing engine. Here we use a reverse widgetization process taking the entire Acteva UI and plopping it inside of our social networking wrapper environment.

- both these projects will go live soon - and showing-off the power and flexibility of PeopleAggregator.

6. Then there is our sports play - MyKingsWorld - which is a social network for the Sacramento Kings. I met Ryan Montoya at the 2006 Gnomedex as he was the guy who brought John Edwards to Gnomedex. We’ve been working since last March on building out this network, but it’ll have to wait until after the New Hampshire primaries to go live. Its a social network designed excitely for basketball fans and goes further down the road of using PeopleAggregator as a malleable platform that can be customized to our customers requirements.

7. All of these networks - some of which are SaaS (software as a service) model deals, others source code licenses show off BBM’s ability to “give the customer what they want”. We don’t believe in saying no to customers, as most of our competitors do and we strongly believe in open stdnards and inter-connecting social network together - which brings me to 2008.

8. In 2008 you’re gonna start seeing all the pieces of the puzzle come together:

- bringing social to software - was the name of the panel we just did in Paris at LeWeb3. It means that social networking’s straight jacket is getting busted open and that social features will start appearing in all kinds of software. Google is doing it, and this is the technique we utilize in our Bell Canada and Acteva projects. All software is about people and now all software will have social features in it.

- DLAs (digital lifestyle aggregators) - this is a term I use to refer to Portals 2.0. This is what NetVibes is, iGoogle and what AOL and Microsoft are doing (I’m still not sure what Yahoo is doing - is the 100 days over yet?.) Facebook is redefining DLAs and MySpace has their own notion as well. The best part of DLAs is that they’re not set in stone and that each vendor can add their own twist, feature set and attitude towards them, while still adhering to the principles of the idea:

- integrated environment - bringing together lots of things in one place

- aggregated information - from all over the place

- highly customizable - which modules, what look and feel and what UI

- all supporting open standards to create an inter-connected meshed web

- International approach and scope - none of this matters if we don’t take it to the people - and most of them do NOT speak English or live in the U.S. or UK. So look for BBM to be everywhere - Dubai, Argentina, India, Hungary, Japan, Singapore and China. Maybe even Russia!

- Open social networking - is what I’ve been preaching about for several years now - as I knew it was an inevitable state. Humans are migratory beasts and they’ll not sit still, while they want to maintain the relationships they established in Friendster, Orkut or MySpace - they also wish to go onto Facebook, the Chocolate lovers network or even LetsCricket. So 2008 will see a growth in the ability of end-users to freely move between networks - taking their social graphs with them. And since we’ll be controlling the source code of our customer’s networks, look for cutting edge promotions between basketball fans, black Americans and events around the U.S.

- OpenID2, oAuth and APML - are the names of the standards which we’ll be using to build this inter-connected mesh. There are others as well. But the building blocks are falling into place.

- microformats and microcontent - if we can focus on events, reviews, people, etc. and tie them into specially designed web services and features that are then tied into places, groups of people and companies - THEN - the dream of a smart, geo enhanced, presence driven web can be born. We ain’t there yet - but it’s ANOTHER goal for 2008 - “get all this stuff to work together!”

- shared, collaborative environments - is the benefit that the corporate world will wake up to. They can continue paying $billions$ to stand alone, locked in solutions - or they can wake up to the so-called ‘open web’. Whether it be social networking, wikis, presence blogging, VoIP or widgets - this is the year that the corporate world gets hip.

- widgets, widgets, widgets - what can I say. Think of the Octopus, the Starfish and a wheel. All are good metaphors and all can inter-operate with each other. I’d add into this mix ‘open source’ not as in free beer, but in the idea that you need to offer your source code to others - to assure them you’re not locking them into your vice. I sure Twitter did that. And Seesmic. So the distributed web will be inter-connected together by widgets, toolbars, plug-ins and all sorts fo other techniques - all leading towards - not being beholden to Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, IBM or MySpace.

- inter-connected customers, end-users and business models - we call it white labeling, others just wanna generate as many page views as possible. There’s also ‘freemium’ models, intense sponsorship involvement and of course targeted advertising on the horizon. 2008 should be a fun year!

We’ve been laying the ground work for all this - in a boring, mundane business model called ‘white labeled social networking’. It may not be flashy or enough to make it onto any list, but our meta-networks ideas were good enough for Ning to copy and we believe within one year they’ll be LOTS of social media features being plopped into existing productivity software, Intranets and legacy apps, etc.

That’s our role - to lead forqwrad and to help empower the distributed web through open standards and example business models.

White labeling gives us an opportunity to build a stable, profitable busienss not beholden upon VC funding which of course will make us a great investment for some large institution or private equity fund.

You can’t raise money unless you don’t need the money.

And we’ll use that money to build our International sales presence and establish a reseller channel to scale our business and continue to provide effective solutions to brands, governments and media companies around the world. Our resellers will come from ad agencies, system integrators, web shops and any entity that touches the customers we’re looking to sell to.

We’ll also use our funding to build out the NEXT big thing - which everyone will copy. But that’s what I’m used to. Ever hear of multimedia players? How ’bout cross platform, author once, playback many places?

And to all - we wish you a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 9:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.