MarketMe 2.0

U.S. spending on Internet advertising will surpass $21 billion this year and double by 2011, as more money moves away from traditional media like television and newspapers, research firm eMarketer forecast on Wednesday. The company said concerns about the economy are hurting forecasts for advertising spending across the board, but said in a report that budgets for online campaigns will likely hold up better than for traditional campaigns.

“Mainly because of the credit crunch and related economic fallout, Internet ad spending will not increase as much in 2007 and 2008 as analysts previously expected,” the report said.

“However, reduced spending will be tempered by advertisers buying the low-cost display advertising gobbled up by mortgage companies’ shrinking marketing budgets.”

Total spending this year is expected to rise by about 2.1 percent, eMarketer said, while Internet advertising is forecast to rise by 26.7 percent.

In the coming years, paid search will remain the biggest form of online advertising, accounting for about 40 percent of spending annually through 2011. Display ads like banners will generate about 20 percent of Internet ad revenues, while classified ads will contribute about 17 percent, the report said.

By 2011, it said, online spending on advertisements should reach $42 billion.

Have you ever wondered why rich people seem to get richer easily while those in the poverty cycle seem destined to be stuck there forever? The reason is simple. You need to think and act like a rich person first before you can really be rich. Let’s take a look at some of the characteristics of rich people.

1. No limited self belief
Rich people believe they are destined to be rich and there is nothing that can stop them from achieving that financial goal. They will do whatever necessary to reach their goals including doing things that they dislike or taking on tasks that seem impossible to complete.

2. Recognize the importance of time
Rich people also recognize that time is their most important asset and a very scarce resource. They do not waste their precious time sitting in front of a TV watching soap operas or other entertainment programs like “Survivors.” They also know how to use the power of leverage to achieve maximum results with minimum efforts.

3. Seek out other people of higher social status
Many poor people only network with other people that are of the same status as them. They do not actively seek out other people who are wealthier. The rich people will do the opposite. They want to network and learn from others who are better and wealthier.

4. Expense as investment
To many poor people, the best way to manage is to use less of it. However, rich people have a different viewpoint. To them, many expenses can be viewed as investments. By spending a certain amount of their money to acquire an asset or skill, they know they will get back what they spent in the future.

5. Strong self-confidence
Many rich people exhibit a high level of self-confidence that is often contagious. They are optimists and maintain a positive outlook at all times. Their confidence is not easily shaken by external factors.

6. Good money habits
While saving is a good virtue and habit, many rich people feel that it is not the best way to grow your money. Rich people will put a significant portion of their wealth in a saving account. They also do not spend their money aimlessly buying things that have no real value such as lottery tickets.

7. Philanthropy
Many rich people are also great philanthropists. They frequently make charitable donations intended to increase human well being. A great example is Bill Gates who set up his own charitable foundation aimed at providing lifesaving health care products for the poorest part of the world.

Most rich people did not become wealthy overnight. They faced many setbacks and challenges to get to where they are today. To them, setbacks and challenges provide valuable lessons that help them find the way to great wealth as well as strengthen their ability to faced adversities in life.

A résumé and a brief job interview can’t answer the question that matters most to a new hire’s co-workers: Is this person an absolute pain?Despite a labor shortage in many sectors, some employers are pickier than ever about whom they hire. Businesses in fields where jobs are highly coveted – or just sound like fun – are stepping up efforts to weed out people who might have the right credentials but the wrong personality.

Call it the “plays well with others” factor.

Job candidates at investment banks have long endured dozens of interviews designed, in part, to see if new hires will get along with everyone they’ll work with. Whole Foods Market Inc. holds group interviews, in which people who will work under a manager are part of the team that grills candidates and collectively picks hires.

Now other companies are setting up higher hurdles.

“In this bloggable, cell phone camera world, your brand on the inside is going to be your brand on the outside. If you have a bunch of jerks, your brand is going to be a jerk,” said Tim Sanders, former leadership coach at Yahoo Inc. and author of “The Likeability Factor.”

With the national unemployment rate low, at 4.7 percent, and the baby boom generation heading into retirement, employers from Microsoft Corp. to rural hospitals are worrying about finding enough workers. But companies like Rackspace Managed Hosting are bucking that trend, working hard to find reasons to turn people away.

Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier said, “We’d rather miss a good one than hire a bad one.”

The 1,900-person computer server hosting company is divided into 18- to 20-person teams. One team is so close, the whole group shows up to help when one member moves into a new home, Napier said. Job interviews at the San Antonio-based company last all day, as interviewers try to rub away fake pleasantness.

“They’re here for nine or 10 hours,” Napier said. “We’re very cordial about it. We’re not aggressive, but we haven’t met a human being yet who has the stamina to BS us all day.”

There’s a possible downside, however. In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Fool vs. Jerk: Whom Would You Hire?” Tiziana Casciaro of Harvard and Miguel Sousa Lobo of Duke University point out that people generally like people who are similar to them, so hiring for congeniality can limit diversity of opinions. One venture capitalist told the authors that a capable manager he worked with built a team that “had a great time going out for a beer, but the quality of their work was seriously compromised.”

At KaBoom, a nonprofit that builds playgrounds, the board was hammering co-founder and CEO Darell Hammond four years ago over the organization’s high employee turnover.

“I rationalized that they were on the road too much, when in reality, it was the wrong fit in the wrong role,” he said.

He started thinking about who left and why, then focused on the characteristics of workers who stayed. The list of traits: Can do, will do, team fit, quick and smart.

His team kept a closer eye on job applicants in the reception area, which is set up as a playground, to see how they acted around playground equipment.

“If you’re early, you may have to sit on a swing or the bottom of a slide,” Hammond said. People who stand with a tight grip on their briefcases instead of sitting on the playground equipment aren’t asked back.

KaBoom sends prospective project managers to one of its four-day playground building trips, with the actual build on the last day involving 200 to 300 volunteers, many of whom have questions for KaBoom staff.

“If they’re not easily approached, or they’re easily stressed – this is the way we find out and they find out if it’s not going to work,” he said.

When all 90 of the people on his staff meet that criteria, he said, “It’s incredible. If you have 89 who do and one who doesn’t – it’s painful.”

Beyond the résumé

South Sound employers also attempt to discover who the job applicant is – beyond the résumé.

At Roman Meal, President Gary Jensen speaks on the phone with every likely job candidate.

“I take the person through a review of our vision, our mission, our strategy, our business imperatives and our goals. I ask them if they can align with that. If they can’t answer positively, I ask them to reconsider.”

If a person passes the initial review, Roman Meal invites the candidate for a visit to the South Tacoma headquarters and a meeting with the executive leadership team. After that, if all goes well, they meet with a member of the Matthaei family, which brought Roman Meal to prominence 80 years ago.

At Tacoma Goodwill Industries, Richard Corak, director of workforce development, says applicants for staff positions are asked to participate in a scenario.

“If they’re going to teach a class, we ask what they would do with a disruptive student,” Corak says. “How do they handle that situation? If they say they would take the person outside, then what would they do with the students left inside? Their answers help you further explore the response.”

C.R. Roberts, The News Tribune

When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg spoke to a room full of reporters shortly after announcing the company’s new Facebook Ads initiative, it became clear that this move is a risky one. Facebook Ads, with its focus on “trusted referrals,” is heavily rooted in viral distribution tactics. And it’s well-known by now that while a viral phenomenon can reach soaring levels of popularity, it can also become synonymous with in-your-face annoyance.

Zuckerberg was insistent that Facebook users will appreciate the fact that they’ll be seeing advertisements that cater specifically to their interests and that showcase recommendations from their friends. “It seems like people prefer targeted ads. They just perform way better,” he said. “The point that we’re trying to make today is that it’s way more organic and natural.”

But there are questions–some big ones. One reporter voiced skepticism over the fact that because they’re advertisements, the “trusted referrals” will only extend to positive reviews, whereas a major component of real-life recommendations among friends is what not to buy.

Perhaps more troubling is the fact that if you sign up as a “fan” of an advertiser group on Facebook–a brand of sneakers, for example–your name will automatically run alongside “Social Ads” for that brand in your friends’ profiles, and Zuckerberg said that there’s not yet a way to opt out of that.

“This is the first iteration of this,” the Facebook founder assured the press as he explained that since Facebook Ads is new, the company could potentially change that no-opt-out policy for being a “fan” of a group. “When we announce a product, we want to also launch it (but) I wouldn’t say that what we’re launching today is the final version.”

He promised that the company would act quickly if any concerns arose.

Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang emphasized that Facebook is still being very careful. “User backlash should be low for a few reasons,” he said. “One, only two Social Ads display per day, (and) two, since users have become fans of a brand (opt in) they personally endorse, they ask for it.” Essentially, they’re getting what they’re paying for, Owyang said in an e-mail interview with CNET News.com. “Since there’s already ads on Facebook (flyers, banner ads, and sponsored groups) this is nothing new to a system where the features are free.”

To add to Facebook’s caution, the launch partners in Facebook Ads are also conscious of the potential for backlash. One of them is Sarah Chubb, president of Conde Nast’s CondeNet Web division, which will be debuting tie-ins for its Epicurious and Flip.com brands on Tuesday night. “Anyone who was in that room today who’s participating in this thing has probably thought very hard about that,” Chubb said of the launch event in an interview with CNET News.com. “What’s going to be interesting for anybody who’s using the service as an advertiser is figuring out which kind of messages get the best reception–I think any one of us would risk alienating people.”

But Chubb is ultimately optimistic. “We’re advertising our sites and ultimately probably our magazines as well, and our sites are based on very vertical categories of interest like food and travel. Because those are sort of the things that people like to badge themselves with and share on Facebook anyway,” she said, “we think that we don’t run much risk.”

Speaking with the press, Zuckerberg also answered questions about exactly what Microsoft has to do with Facebook Ads in light of its $240 million stake in the social network. The answer: not much. Redmond will be providing the “non-social” advertisements that will remain on the site.

“Microsoft is the exclusive third-party provider of IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) standard ads on Facebook. This program that we’re launching, it’s just a different format–they’re not IAB-standard ads.” Zuckerberg added that Facebook had worked the situation out with Microsoft. “We think it’s a different kind of advertising.”

Forrester analyst Owyang says there’s no reason to suspect this wasn’t the plan all along. “It’s my understanding that Microsoft will continue to do what they do well–sell banner advertising and visual banners on Facebook,” he said. “This has little impact to their current relationship, although it would make sense for the Microsoft Sales team to be selling these additional products to their clients. In some cases, expect banner ads to be used in a coordinated method with social ads.”

At the conclusion of Zuckerberg’s meeting with the press, the question arose about Google’s OpenSocial platform, which has been described by some as a “Facebook killer.” But the Facebook founder said it hasn’t caused them to lose much sleep. “We’ve been so busy with this launch that we haven’t had time to really look at that,” he said. “We’ll see after it launches.”

Zuckerberg paused. “They’re working on some issues.”

The details of Facebook’s “SocialAds” initiative, set to debut on Tuesday, have leaked through enough channels so that we have a pretty good idea of what we’ll be hearing. SocialAds will not only serve up uber-targeted ads based on your Facebook profile information, there will allegedly be some sponsored vertical categories involved, as well as e-commerce tie-ins that will tell your friends what you’ve been buying, preferably with an opt-out clause.

Facebook rival MySpace, meanwhile, has recently introduced “HyperTargeting,” a similar advertising strategy.

The debut event itself, intended to be shrouded in mystery, hasn’t exactly stayed that way. The previously undisclosed location was unceremoniously leaked by a few bloggers, so it’s now beyond common knowledge that Facebook will be taking over the Loft Eleven event space on West 37th Street for pretty much the entire afternoon.

What’s on the agenda? It’s not quite clear yet, but the day will feature a keynote by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as well as some “panels” and a press Q&A. It’s also a big question mark as to who will actually be there, since a formal list of partners has not been released–though an unconfirmed list was leaked several weeks ago.

Hovering over the head of it all will undoubtedly be OpenSocial, the social network developer platform code that Google released last week to much fanfare. OpenSocial’s debut certainly took some of the spotlight off Facebook, but at the same time, there’s no clear path for exactly how it will be a “Facebook killer.”

The thing about OpenSocial is that it’s provided a set of tools that are potentially very powerful–I mean, hello, it’s Google–but the catch is that a whole lot is left up to the “partners” themselves. OpenSocial’s uber-openness can make Facebook look closed-off and inaccessible, but at the same time, if people are going to ditch their Facebook profiles, somebody else is going to have to step up to the plate in turn.

I’ve been playing with the Google-owned Orkut, which many are saying is Facebook’s heir apparent. It’s impressive, and has a very neat and clean interface, but it asks me for way too much information. Does anyone else find it creepy that a social-networking site asks me what my turn-ons are (Thunderstorms? Skinny-dipping?) and whether I find myself attractive? Not only am I not sure I want to divulge that sort of information about myself, I most certainly don’t want to know it about my friends.

So, as far as I’m concerned, Facebook is still on top of the social-networking game. Bt SocialAds had better be good–and not too intrusive. I’m having enough trouble with a news feed full of zombies.

Facebook is now valued at $15 billion by many estimates. Soon the young company will have to prove it’s really worth it.

Next week in New York, Facebook is expected to unveil its new advertising strategy on the heels of an expanded advertising partnership and $240 million investment from Microsoft. The company will likely talk about selling targeted ads to members, but experts say that to build its own ad serving system, Facebook must figure out how to serve the right ads to the right people in real time.

“That’s a very difficult problem at large scale, with so many ads and millions of people,” said Greg Linden, founder of Findory and an architect of Amazon.com’s early product recommendation and personalization engine. “And the data’s not well tied to purchases like at Amazon, or even like Google, where so many Web searches are about products.”

The predominant question on everyone’s mind is: Can Facebook build an ad system clever enough to keep pace with the passing fancies of its social-networking members? Facebook will have to get really good at processing all of the data it has collected on its reported 49 million members–demographics, personal preferences, and social histories–to predict what advertisements they might actually like and respond in their “news feed” or next to their “wall,” according to industry executives.

That’s no small task. In fact, it’s a massive computing problem and one that very few companies apart from Google and Amazon have mastered. That’s why Facebook–a company known for its young, fun culture–has been trying to hire more seasoned experts in so-called machine learning who can develop the right algorithms for a new generation of targeted advertising, people familiar with the company say.

One tech executive characterized the challenge like this: “The company that can process the most data will win.” That maxim has proven true of Google in Web search and Amazon in e-commerce sales and product recommendations. Now Facebook must figure out how to take billions of data points about its members and turn that into an automatic ad machine.

A Facebook representative declined comment for the story.

There’s no question Facebook is sitting on a data goldmine, with an exhaustive amount of information on people’s preferences, backgrounds, and social histories–all given voluntarily by members. Facebook has profiles that include people’s favorite music, television shows, books, and hobbies; their job history, education, birth date, and marital status; as well as daily activities, social networks, and interest groups. Traditional ad networks would kill for all that information in one place.

But with that data comes some interesting machine learning problems, experts say.

Machine learning is a broad term in the field of artificial intelligence. It refers to developing algorithms that can discover patterns in data and learn from them. Google, for example, has used probabilistic Bayesian models to serve results to data searches based on keywords. With advertising, it’s all about matching the right person to the right ad. And on an individual level, that’s a tall order.

So some technologists focus on lumping people into groups or types, tracking their typical behaviors in aggregate, and then trying to predict what they might want or do next.

Machine learning in online advertising might involve trying many different techniques on affinity groups to figure out which work best. That’s because no one obvious technique is the silver bullet for social networks–no one has solved the problem of serving ads in that setting before.

Many thorny issues can arise, too, such as trusting what people post about themselves. Social networks can be noisy in terms of data, meaning that one day a member can say he broke it off with a girlfriend and change everything about his music and film tastes. On social networks, people are prone to misspellings, random statements, and exaggeration. Also, Web surfers are on Facebook to socialize, network, or be entertained, not to buy something. In that kind of social environment, ads can be ineffective or annoying.

That’s why Facebook must perfect a subtle product placement or recommendation system. To do it, it will have to invent algorithmic tricks. For example, knowing a list of people’s friends isn’t necessarily useful unless the system could automatically remind people of birthdays, and then advertise a specific gift the friend might like based on his or her preferences.

Aggregate Knowledge in Palo Alto, Calif., which is backed by Google investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, may also have an ad solution for social networks. Aggregate has developed algorithms to determine what are called “affinity clusters” of people and, based on the personality profiles of those people, targets ads. It does this by looking at people’s habits in aggregate, rather than as individuals.

“We do a contest of algorithms in each context…and see which works best (to serve an ad) and that’s a traditional machine learning technique. But this requires massive computing power,” said Paul Martino, founder of Aggregate Knowledge. Martino said his company is in talks with various social networks, but does not yet have a deal with any of them.

One of the techniques in this field is known as collaborative filtering, which Amazon used when creating its product recommendation system. Amazon’s system automatically analyzes your purchase history and looks for the same buying patterns among other shoppers. By sizing up the purchase histories of similar shoppers, the system can look for the products you haven’t bought yet and that other similar shoppers have. Then it can suggest items you might also like.

Facebook plans to adopt similar techniques, for people who like the same music or films, according to people familiar with the company. That way, movie or music studios could “suggest” entertainment in the form of a product placement.

Behavioral targeting
Another approach is to tailor ads to a person’s demonstrated behaviors, or what’s called behavioral targeted advertising. That means that a site might keep track of a person over time and factor in his or her demographics and preferences. A high-income woman who has recently said she’s looking for a car might receive a Lexus ad, for example.

Facebook has already come up with some machine learning tricks to allow people to search on a person’s nickname, even if the person hasn’t divulged that information. According to one source, the company developed an algorithm that could strip words from people’s “wall” (where friends post messages) and then remove from the list all the words that weren’t in the dictionary. With what remained it built a comprehensive dictionary of nicknames so that people can search on a friend’s profile under alternative names.

“That’s an interesting machine learning problem, and they have a million things like that,” said the source.

Facebook is already clustering people into groups, such as tech geeks or music lovers, and following patterns of people’s behaviors to predict other kinds of behaviors, according to people familiar with the company. For example, groups who like baseball could like sushi, in a hypothetical link within data patterns that you might not expect. The ad network could then target ads for local sushi restaurants to members of that group. But the company hasn’t deployed this methodology on a wide scale.

Facebook is also a tremendous barometer for public opinion. So the site could eventually track chatter about a movie like Spider-Man, for example, and sell that information to the film company or watch how a message about the movie on a wall is received. If the chatter falls off quickly, it could be time for the studio to release the movie on DVD rather than keep it in theaters.

The big search sites have done some work in this area. Google, for example, in order to send the right ad, looks at search terms, a person’s physical location (by IP address), and type of content on the site he or she visited. Yahoo targets ads similarly, but it also sells behaviorally targeted ads to marketers. For example, Yahoo might deliver an ad for baby formula to a person the company know has looked at pregnancy-health pages.

Microsoft serves ads based on audience segment, such as car shoppers, by anonymously tracking the behavior of users across its network. If an MSN user has browsed MSN Autos or searched for “Kelly Blue Book” on Live Search, the user will see relevant ads. The search and Web browsing history data is blended with data people offer to Microsoft during registration, such as age and gender, but not identifiable information.

For now, Microsoft will be serving Facebook’s graphical ads, but it remains to be seen how the social network will tackle the ad issue on its own.

“The problem isn’t that they can’t make revenue, it’s that the expectation is so high on the amount of revenue that they can make,” Linden said. “Because people aren’t in a purchasing frame of mind (at Facebook), it’s going to be hard for them to get as much from the advertising as the hype right now.”

CNET News.com’s Elinor Mills contributed to this report.

While attending the Snap Summit last week I was asked by a Marketwatch reporter what I thought the current trend on Facebook is. My response was “crappy apps.” The majority of applications that I filter through every day are pretty poor. Once in a while though, a great application comes along that I know I will use on a regular basis and won’t remove from my application installations. The most recent application that has qualified for my mark of excellence is the Restaurant application.

Restaurants are one of the most social activities for people; any application that takes an already socially popular activity in the real world and brings it online is sure to have a great chance for success. One of the first places that I turn to when I’m looking for a great restaurant is my friends. As such, I’m going to go straight to this application anytime I’m looking for a great restaurant. This would also be an amazingly useful application to convert to mobile. Imagine getting off a plane, loading up your Facebook app on your phone and checking out what the best restaurants in town are based on your friends’ recommendations!

This is only the first phase of this application but the opportunities are endless for making this a more useful application. There were some issues with the restaurant search tool and a couple browsing issues but aside from that, this application works amazingly. I’ve communicated all the issues to Hungry Machine, the developers of this application, and they said that they are working on resolving the issues now.

One other great feature about this application is that you can immediately make a reservation via a link to OpenTable. So right after you view your friends’ favorite restaurants you can set up a reservation for later that evening. I have a feeling that this application is going to gain millions of users just because it’s so useful. This application (along with the CourseFeed application) may be one of the most useful applications I have seen on Facebook to date. Is it the “golden application” that I have long dreamed of? Not quite sure but I know that I’ll be using it a hell of a lot.

If you want to review restaurants or find great restaurants via recommendations from your friends, go install the Restaurants application.

There are just over 24 hours left until the formal announcement of Facebook’s new advertising initiative. Is the site experiencing some jitters in preparation?

Late last week, one of my editors IMed me to ask whether Facebook was down. It was, but within five minutes, it was running again. Over the weekend, I noticed that the site was logging me out periodically. I wanted to check out a friend’s new profile photo, but I repeatedly got log-in screens instead.

Then, on Monday morning, the site has slowed to a crawl. When I attempted to approve a new friend request, Firefox asked that I save a PHP file to my computer rather than actually opening up a page. Eventually, it allowed me to approve the request, but I’m still getting “page timed out” messages on occasion.

It’s not necessarily anything major: in the summer of 2006, both Craigslist and MySpace.com experienced major outages that threw off the sites’ operations, for example. And don’t even get me started on Second Life. But the Facebook mini-outages and glitches have been noticeable, and that’s not good when you’re trying to get big ad partners onboard a new project.

There’s no official word from Facebook on whether all this is due to server issues, connection issues, or the fact that I used a stupid profile photo of myself in my Halloween costume. (I’ve since taken it down.)

Has anyone else out there experienced Facebook instability over the past few days?

Yahoo is set to launch Kickstart on Monday, a social network aimed at college students, alumni, and recruiters.

Yahoo already is experimenting with a general-purpose social network, Mash. But whereas Mash will be for socializing, Kickstart will be for career networking, says Scott Gatz, senior director of Yahoo’s Advanced Products division.

“It’s a professional network with a purpose–to help college students and recent graduates build a professional network,” he says.

The initial “early preview” is focused on professionals and alumni, with a push for students to come next year.

Gatz says the site won’t really compete with Facebook because Kickstart is focused on career advancement, not on fun.

What about LinkedIn, which caters to the professional crowd? “LinkedIn doesn’t cross the minds of college students,” Gatz says.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Also on Monday, Yahoo’s Brickhouse technology incubator will be launching a development platform, code-named FireEagle, that will eventually enable people to provide their location in one place and have that information distributed across multiple applications, such as social networks, microblogs and instant-messaging services. The data dissemination also can be automated with a GPS-enabled phone.

“The platform geocodes the data and makes it machine-readable so other applications can plug into it, publish to it, or read from it,” says Salim Ismail, head of Brickhouse.

Yahoo isn’t a start-up anymore; it hasn’t been for years. But it has retained the start-up mentality in its Brickhouse and Advanced Products divisions, where ideas can go from scrawls on a napkin to product in a short amount of time.

“We can throw things out to the marketplace and see if they work,” Gatz says. “We have created an environment where we build products quickly, get them to market quickly, and iterate, iterate, iterate, and then bring them into the core business unit.”

We will soon approach the six-month anniversary of the Facebook platform. By that time, close to 10,000 applications will have been launched a few of which will have experienced phenomenal growth, the majority of which will have failed to turn their developers into overnight rockstars. By the time the six-month anniversary rolls around, hopefully a few of the OpenSocial platforms will have launched. Chances are, most will not.

Just a few months back, many of us that became part of this Facebook ecosystem were preaching that soon enough the golden apps of Facebook would arrive. While I have seen two that may be those golden applications (Restaurants and CourseFeed), neither of those apps have sparked a webwide revolution. Perhaps my expectations of the golden application were overblown or perhaps those applications are still under development.

Whatever the case may be, it is only right to at some point ask if much of what is taking place is simply hype. Once OpenSocial stabalizes and becomes a viable distribution channel for social application providers, will all the web products suddenly become widgitized or converted into social apps? While I believe that RockYou, iLike, Slide and a few other teams of developers will eventually be able to successfully monetize their offerings, I am beginning to question the viability of social applications as a business. Am I being overly critical or are social applications really the hype of 2007?