Facebook Credits virtual currency platform set to expand its payment options in Asia. Facebook and MOL Global just announced a strategic partnership to enable the purchase of Facebook Credits using MOLPoints, an online micropayment system developed and managed by Malaysia-based MOL, one of the largest internet companies in South East Asia.

Credits, the official virtual currency on Facebook, enables the purchase of gifts and virtual goods for games and applications on Facebook platform. Popular games like Farmville, Millionaire City, Hotel City, Petville, Bejeweled Blitz, Hotel City, Barn Buddy, Likeness and hundreds other games and applications are already accepting Facebook Credits (up-to-date list of games here). There are over 200 million unique Facebook users playing games each month. Soon, these social gamers can buy Credits using MOLPoints. And they can reload the MOLPoints through MOL’s network of over 500,000 physical (e.g. 7-Eleven, cybercafes, bookstores), online banking and mobile payment channels, in over 80 countries.

“The relationship with Facebook demonstrates MOL’s growing role as a leading payment provider for social networking sites in Asia, especially in our core countries of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and India,” said Ganesh Kumar Bangah, group chief executive officer for MOL Global.

He added, “Over the last few quarters, we have seen a double-digit increase in payment transactions and payment volume. This partnership continues MOL’s momentum to build the largest end-to-end content, distribution and commerce network in Asia.”

According to Vaughan Smith, director of business and corporate development at Facebook, “working with MOL means we can offer the benefits of Facebook Credits to millions of people in Asia using a payment system that is already widely used and trusted. We’re investing in the long-term future of Facebook Credits and we view this agreement as a major opportunity to broaden the availability of a simple, unified currency that can be used in games and applications across Facebook.”

Currently, Facebook users can purchase Facebook Credits using credit cards and Paypal. However, they can also earn Credits via other means, such as drinking a Slurpee.

In Asia, the availability of physical channels to pay for Credits can further spur the virtual goods economy on Facebook. The 18-to-24 is the largest age group in most Asian countries – Indonesia, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam among others. Many in the age group don’t own a credit card. Also, Asian gamers are spending big money and today, the virtual goods market in Asia is worth $7 billion!

UPDATES
(1) Signing of strategic partnership between MOL Global and Facebook

(2) Official press release

Coming soon: Facebook Credits available at retail stores in Asia originally appeared on GreyReview on July 8, 2010.

Today is World Cup 2010 kick-off. And today’s most popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, Facebook – are joining the fiesta. I’ve listed here, in order of interestingness:

1. Twitter

The microblogging social network launches a dedicated World Cup 2010 page to make it easier for people to follow #WorldCup conversations on Twitter. You can Live Tweets about each match. It also features Top Tweets, which are “algorithmically selects and retweets some of the most interesting tweets about the World Cup.”

2. Foursquare

The location-based social network partners with CNN to offer World Cup 2010 badge. People in the 32 World Cup countries can earn the badge by checking in to viewing venues. Those attending matches in South Africa can earn “South Africa Explorer” badge.

Fans in World Cup countries can earn this Super Fan badge:

3. Facebook

Sports on Facebook was launched on May 12 2010. Fans can vote for their favorite country teams. Facebook calculates Passion Index for each team – total number of Likes received by the country’s team divided by the country’s Internet population.

How Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare are joining the World Cup fiesta originally appeared on GreyReview on June 11, 2010.

Facebook is on a growth rampage in most parts of the world, but other social networks are crafting niche identities to define their competitive advantage and some are these not-Facebook social networks are thriving. For Multiply social network, it is in a sweet spot when it comes to social shopping. Now, Multiply Marketplace has over 41,000 merchants, mainly located in the Southeast Asia countries – Phillippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. These micro-merchants use Multiply to setup their online storefronts to take orders (and currently, payments happen outside Multiply network).

“We have only just begun to offer tools and support to the growing community of sellers and buyers doing business on Multiply,” said Peter Pezaris, president and founder of Multiply. “We now have the largest number of online storefronts in the region. Going forward, our primary focus will be to make the Marketplace the premier social shopping destination on the web, making shopping easier, safer, faster and more entertaining.” In coming months, Multiply plans to upgrades its Marketplace with integrated payment system with expanded set of payment methods (including offline payments), shopping cart, self-serve advertising, seller rating system, promotional programs to increase traffic to shops and trusted seller program.

Multiply already been praised for its integrated media management feature and the social shopping function is the latest addition to the social network. The social shopping feature is a natural progression for Multiply, as it continues to craft and define its key distinctive advantages in the increasingly competitive social networking service marketspace.

Blending social networking and e-commerce in Multiply Marketplace originally appeared on GreyReview on May 21, 2010.

Facebook has acquired Octazen Solutions, a Kuala Lumpur-based maker of Contacts Importer software, reported on GigaOM. Octazen’s software already in-use on Facebook and helps the social networking giant to “grow by making it easy for users to invite their contacts on other services,” such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and others. This ‘old’ PDF document explains a bit more on how the Contacts Importer works.

Octazen Solutions – Contacts Importer Web API

According to the article, Facebook said the acquisition as “talent acquisition”. Octazen’s two employees will join Facebook as engineers and remain in Malaysia (Octazen with an office in Taman Melawati, Kuala Lumpur), making them social network’s first Asia-based full-time employees of Facebook.

Screenshot of the announcement on Octazen Solution’s website:

¶ @zhiQ

UPDATE: For more details, read Michael Arrington’s posting here.

Facebook Acquired A Malaysian Startup originally appeared on GreyReview on February 20, 2010.

Friendster started looking for buyers in July 2009. On 10 December 2009, the once leading social network is acquired by Malaysia’s MOL Group. No financial details were announced. However, in July this year, TechCrunch estimated Friendster to worth around US$137 million. (UPDATE: TechCrunch reported Friendster valued at $26.4 Million in sales)

Why buy Friendster? According to the new MOL/Friendster Group CEO Ganesh Kumar Bangah, it’s because of its “strong South East Asia base… very focus, has a very strong following in Malaysia.” He believed “right localization,” in terms of features, contents and applications, is Friendster’s competitive strategy. Ultimately, he envisioned Friendster as South East Asia-centric community, a platform for Asian-ized contents and applications.

He also mentioned about his intention to purchase Friendster way back in 2007 but was not taken seriously by some of shareholders of the social network. When Richard Kimber became the CEO of Friendster, MOL started to establish commercial relationships with Friendster. “After a while, when we look into how we can have a deeper relationships, and that culminated into today’s MOL buying Friendster,” said CEO Bangah.

To remain competitive, Friendster already launched (or going to launch) these features on its social network:

• Microtransactions or sales of virtual goods, are particularly popular and widely adopted by the Korean (Cyworld) and Chinese (QQ.com) social networks. Friendster already launched its Wallet and Gift Shop. With microtransactions, is Friendster is merely trying to milk an aging cow?
• Social gaming: Facebook and MySpace are already the two popular social gaming platforms. Electronic Arts recent purchase of social gaming company, Playfish, in a deal worth US$400 million, underscored the upside of this segment. Friendster will soon join the party.
• Music: MySpace is still the king of the hill, when it comes to music. It is still THE preferred social network for music bands. Friendster too is eyeing to enter this space. (This is no surprise, considering Friendster’s Head of Asia, Ian Stewart is formerly from MTV).

Friendster (and other social networks) can no longer compete with Faceboook, on scale and scope. So, MySpace is carving its niche along area of interest, which is music; whereas Friendster along regional lines. The new Friendster’s goal is to be the favorite social network for youth in South East Asia through fun, simplicity and local knowledge.

Below is the full speech made by Group CEO Ganesh Kumar Bangah at a Friendster’s event last night.

To Revitalize Friendster, Just Blend Together Microtransactions, Social Games, Music and a Fair Dose of Luck originally appeared on GreyReview on December 11, 2009.

Orsiso (or Organize, Simplify, Socialize) offers a functional approach to manage the deluge of your social networking and messaging online. It acts like a social streams dashboard, which aggregates and organizes status/photo streams (from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, Bebo, Friendster) and messaging (from popular IM networks like Messenger, Yahoo!, Google Talk). In the past weeks, Orsiso has been quick in releasing new version; each version update with new interface design and performance. Previous versions, buttons were lumpy, design was noisy and user-interface was not so, shall I say, spritely. Using it for the past 4 months, I must say the latest version 1.1.36 spot a more organized interface, more minimalist and much more perky.

Orsiso version 1.1.26 (screenshot dated August 21 2009)

Orsiso version 1.1.36 (screenshot dated October 23 2009)

Albums section is where you get to view your friends photos, from both Flickr and Facebook. This is probably the stand-out feature and it does feel as if Orsiso is designed for this purpose. No other client, so far, allow user to search and view photos. You can search photo with keywords. You can share each photo easily on your social network e.g. Twitter and Facebook. View photo of friends, based on user-defined closeness filter.

Search and View Photos on Orsiso

Kinks and The Road Ahead

Orsiso is ambitious in scope but still far from perfect. Grouping is relatively inflexible. You can only group your friends, based on Closeness (using 1 to 4 scale). It would be great if it can offers the flexibility like Twitter List. I also find the updates streaming is not as real-time, as I want it to be. Although I set ‘check for updates’ to 1 minute, the updates stream (at times) doesn’t seem to refresh automatically. And no, it doesn’t have a refresh button. Orsiso’s Friend Merge feature enables you to combine the multiple ‘social’ profiles of your friends. This only work for some of my friends, but not others.

Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to more improvements in coming weeks, for it to seriously challenge social streams aggreggator like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop. On commercialization, Orsiso has banner ads on its Contacts’ profile page (although, I think, this is still in experimental stage).

Orsiso Is Getting Good At Aggregating Status and Photo Streams originally appeared on GreyReview on October 24, 2009.

Facebook with 250 million users and these users are sharing over 10 billion photos. YouTube is streaming 1.2 billion videos a day, worldwide. The number of worldwide unique visitors of Twitter catapulted from 19 million in March 2009 to 32 million in April 2009 and each day, Twitter users are generating roughly 18 million updates. And according to comScore, social networking penetration rate worldwide was 65% in the month of May 2009, or 734.2 million Internet users across the globe accessing at least one social networking website during the month.

Malaysians love Social Networking too

There are about 16 million Internet users in Malaysia and IDC Research projected Malaysian Internet users will reach 20.4 million by 2012. In March this year, the number of Facebook users in Malaysia surpassed the one million mark. Recently, a brief survey by YouthSays, Malaysia’s largest youth community website with over 160,000 members, showed 95% of a total of 900 respondents have Friendster’s account, 90% with Facebook and 38% with Twitter (This survey was presented at the recent Malaysian Media Congress 2009).

In Malaysia, the social networking penetration rate was 66.6% in December 2008 (see Table below), behind only to Singapore (74.3%) and South Korea (68%). See Table below.

In terms of Average Minutes Spent on Social Network(s) Per Visitor, Malaysia ranked second at 181.2 minutes after Korea (277.8 min) and ahead of Singapore (175.6 min), Hong Kong (127.7 min), India (110.4 min) and Japan (72.8 min).

Top Social Networks in Malaysia

Like elsewhere in the world, Facebook and Twitter are the superstars these days in Malaysia. Besides these two, what are the other popular social networks Malaysians spending their time these days? Alexa and Google Ad Planner can provide some answers. Alexa Traffic Rank measures website popularity and calculated using average daily visitors and pageviews over the past three months whereas Google Ad Planner is “based on an automated analysis of millions of search queries and site visits” and Unique Visitors refer to number of people visiting the site over a specific month.

Based on the Table below, Facebook is the top social network in Malaysia, followed by YouTube and Friendster. Twitter is the 8th most popular social network in Malaysia.

Top Malaysian Social Networks

Despite the phenomenal popularity of Facebook, etc., there are a handful of Malaysian social networks offering localized contents and services. Some of the notable local social networks are Ruumz, eKawan, GoEatOut, Circles99, FriendX, eMeiMei and Pacmee.

So, how popular are these social networks? For a starter, these social networks are nowhere near global social network brands like Facebook and Friendster, in terms of Malaysian users. Launched in February 2009, Ruumz is today’s most popular Malaysia social network, followed by eKawan (social network for Malay-speaking community) and GoEatOut (dining guide-cum-social network). See Table below.

Discussion

Facebook is replacing Friendster as Malaysian top social network; Facebook outranked Friendster in Alexa and also, Facebook with more unique visitors from Malaysia compared Friendster (Google Ad Planner). However, according to a Friendster Summary Fact Sheet posted on TechCrunch, the social network boasted a total of 2.1 million active users in Malaysia compared to 1.1 million Facebook users in Malaysia.

Malaysians are using global social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Friendster compared to local social networks. Only a few countries are dominated by homegrown social networks, namely Mixi in Japan, Cyworld in Korea, QiQi in China, Cloob in Iran, Maktoob in Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Dubai, Kuwait), StudiVZ in Germany, Hyves in The Netherlands, iWiW in Hungary, Nasza-Klasa in Poland, and Vkontakte.ru in Russia.

How do these local social networks compete? Sites like Pacmee, Friendx, eKawan and eMeiMei tied its social networks to mobile services and deliver value-added services e.g. posting photo via MM and receive status updates via SMS.

Ruumz offers different blend of value-added services on its social network. For example, online music subscription, photo printing and photobook services. With its unique brand positioning and services, Ruumz can differentiate itself in the local social networking scene.

But will it be able to dent Facebook’s armor? Quite unlikely in short-term. Rather than competing head-on with the social network giants, local social networks can thrive by offering different social networking experiences. Facebook and Friendster, for example, are typically broad-based type social network and offer culturally relevant experience is probably not their strong suit. Herein lies the opportunity for Malaysian social networks.

And maybe Malaysian social networks can learn something from the ascendancy of Old Town White Coffee, a Malaysian-based coffee chain. Amidst the crowded marketplace dominated by global brands like Starbucks and Coffee Beans, Old Town able to differentiate its offerings and capture marketshare in Malaysia (and elsewhere in Asia).

Conclusion

This article offers a snapshot of social networking activities and the popular social networks in Malaysia. The leading social networks are Facebook, YouTube and Friendster whereas top Malaysian social networks are Ruumz, eKawan and GoEatOut. Local social networks provide diversity in the social networking landscape and offer choices to Malaysians. Possibly, local players can eventually offer more culturally relevant social networking experiences with localized contents and services.

Snapshot of Social Networking in Malaysia originally appeared on GreyReview on July 28, 2009.

Exora, the newly launched MPV by Malaysian carmaker Proton, has two ‘voices’ on Twitter – @ProtonExora and @YouWillBeAmazed. The former is managed by Proton with first tweet dated April 13 2009; the latter is an unofficial voice and started on April 29 2009. To date, the ‘unofficial’ one has more of Updates and Followers.

Both using different tweeting styles. @ProtonExora is tweeting from first-person perspective (tweeting as Exora, the car) whereas @YouWillBeAmazed tweeting as third-person.

Twitter Pages of @ProtonExora and @YouWillBeAmazed

Observations

1. @YouWillBeAmazed is a better conversationalist.
   • The ‘unofficial’ tweets are far more engaging and informative. Out of 8 updates so far, none of @ProtonExora tweets starts with ‘@’. For @YouWillBeAmazed, 43% of its total number of tweets start with ‘@’. It’s broadcast versus conversation
   • There’s nothing wrong of using Twitter as broadcast medium. The hugely popular @CNNbrk (and many others) are broadcastweets. But in the case of Proton Exora (as a newly launched product and new brand), conversation would be a better mode of engagement.
2. In the laissez-faire land of Twitter, any voice can be as loud as the ‘official’ one. Unless a brand ‘owner’ initiate and manage conversations on Twitter (or in any social networks), others will fill the void and potentially become the ‘official’ voice of the brand.
   • For example, Coca-Cola Facebook Page is not originally created by the sugar water company but by two ‘fans’, Dusty Sorg (an actor) and Michael Jedrzejewski (a writer). The Page attracted 3.3 million fans and became the top brand on Facebook Page. It is only second behind Barack Obama, in terms of Fans. Now, the Page is co-managed by Coca Cola and the Page creators.
   • Currently, @YouWillBeAmazed is doing a better job in evangelizing the Exora brand and engaging Followers; Proton can learn a lot from it.
3. Comparatively, @YouWillBeAmazed page is aesthetically more appealing than @ProtonExora. If it wasn’t for the tweet that says ‘technically’ i am not the official tweet for proton!, probably many would have thought @YouWillBeAmazed is official voice of Proton Exora on Twitter.
4. For Proton, Facebook Page trumped Twitter. Fans on Proton Exora Facebook Page are ‘engaging’ the brand. To date, the Page has over 900 fans. The Page is populated by Proton-contributed updates, videos and photos together with Fans-generated contents.
5. Lastly, both ‘real’ and ‘fake’ voices of Proton Exora need to craft better ‘bio’. With the omnipresence of URL shorteners in Twitterville, posting full Facebook Page URL looks amateurish.

Conclusion

For Proton, it seems relatively easier to assimilate Facebook Page into its brand-building infrastructure, compared to Twitter. On Facebook, fans can communicate among themselves around a brand. On Twitter, its true potential is realized once the brand starts to engage actively in conversations. It’s about building and nurturing emotional attachment to the company through conversations. And it is quite challenging to achieve such goal if companies perceive social media as short-term episodic bursts of campaigns.

Let’s continue the discourse

Is building and sustaining a community on Twitter is harder compared to on Facebook Page? In the Malaysian context, considering there are over a million Facebook users in Malaysia compared to significantly lesser number of Twitter users compared to only less than 100,000 users in Malaysia (more 77,000 with with #malaysia in WeFollow directory). Is number of Followers or Fans the right metric to measure the effectiveness of social web initiative? If no, what other aspects should we measure engagements on social web? Leave your thoughts here or let’s converse on Twitter @limyh.

One Brand, Two Voices on Twitter: A Case of Proton Exora originally appeared on GreyReview on May 5, 2009.

Shoplette is a social network for shoppers to flaunt their shopping loots to others and also discover what others have purchased. Users post pictures (together with details like price and store location) of what they bought and others can view, rate and comment on the posted items.

In addition to shoppers, Shoplette allows merchants to establish presence on its platform. Merchants can setup Shops to showcase their products. Similar to all items posted on Shoplette, community members can rate and comment on items posted by the merchants. Currently, there are over 200 Shops on Shoplette.

Flaunt It on Shoplette

With its recently launched Shopping Cart Service, merchants can now eCommerce-enabled their Shoplette Shops. Some of its key features are order taking, shopping cart for buyers, PayPal or credit card payment system and also, simple inventory control and order management features. Merchants will be charged US$15 per month for the use of the shopping cart service. Shoplette plans to introduce more pay-as-you-use services in coming months, as part of its monetization strategy.

Shoplette Social Ads?

Besides services, social ads is probably another potential income stream for Shoplette. Peek at any member’s profile page, you can see his/her purchases, preferences and ‘Wish List’ – a potential advertising goldmine. By harvesting the information, Shopholics can deliver more relevant and contextualized ads to members of its social network.

Shoplette is a flagship initiative by Mobrick Pte Ltd, a Singapore-based Web 2.0 technology firm founded by Shannon Low. Launched in May 2008, the site today has over 1200 registered members with over 3000 items posted on its platform.

Shopaholic-Generated Content on Shoplette originally appeared on GreyReview on March 11, 2009.

UPDATE: This post became the Most Read article in a week, with over 11,000 views, at SocialMediaTODAY.

Twitter is now the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and MySpace (Compete, 2009). A year ago, it has over a million users and 200,000 active monthly users sending over 3 million updates per day (TechCrunch, 2008). Those figures have almost certainly increased since then. With the torrential streams of Twitter updates (or tweets), there’s an emerging demand to sieve signals from noises and harvest useful information.

Enter Twitter Analytics, or simply just Analytwits (in the tradition of Twitter slang). These analytics tools are growing in numbers; even Twitter is developing them.

Besides Twitter Search, the following 8 Analytwits are some of the more useful web applications to analyze Twitter streams. Each of these tools serve specific purpose. They crawl and sift through Twitter streams; also, aggregate, rank and slice-and-dice data to deliver some insights on Twitter activities and trends. There’s no single best analytic tool available but use in combination, they can extract interesting insights from Twitter streams.

8 Great Tools for Social (Twit)telligence

TWITALYZER provides activities analysis of any Twitter user, based on social media success yardsticks. Its metrics include (a) Influence score, which is basically your popularity score on Twitter (b) signal-to-noise ratio (c) one’s propensity to ‘retweet’ or pass along others’ tweets (d) velocity – the rate one’s updates on Twitter and (e) clout – based on how many times one is cited in tweets. Its Time-based Analysis of Twitter Usage produces graphical representation of progression on various measures. Using Twitalyzer is a easy; just enter your Twitter ID and that’s it! It doesn’t require any password to use its service. Speed of analysis is depending on the size of your Followed and Followers lists.

MICROPLAZA offers an interesting way to make sense of your Twitter streams. Called itself “your personal micro-news agency,” it aggregates and organizes links shared by those you follow on Twitter and display them as newstream. Status updates that contain similar web links are aggregated into ’tiles.’ Within a tile, you can see updates from those you follow and also those you don’t. Another interesting feature is ‘Being Someone’, which you can peek into someone’s world and see their ’tiles’; designed to facilitate information discovery. You can also organize those you follow into groups or ‘tribes’. You can create, for example, a knitting ‘tribe’ to easily what URLs your knitting friends are tweeting. In addition, you can bookmark ’tiles’ for future reference. Its yet-to-be-released feature, Mosaic, allows users to group together the bookmarked ’tiles’ and turn them into social objects – for sharing and discussion. At the time of this posting, MicroPlaza is still in private beta.

TWIST offers trends of keywords or product name, based what Twitter users are tweeting about. You can see frequency of a keyword or product name being mentioned over a period a week or a month and display them on a graph. Select an area on the graph to zoom into trend for specific time range. Click on any point on the graph to see all tweets posted during a specific time. One can also see the latest tweets on the topic. Twist also allows you do a trend comparison of two (or more) keywords. Its graphs are embeddable on any website. A simple but effective tool for trending, similar to what Google Trends is doing for search queries.

TWITTURLY tracks popular URLs tracker on Twitter. With Digg-style interface, it displays 100 most popular URLs shared on Twitter over the last 24 hours. On Digg, people vote for a particular web content, whereas on Twitterurly, each time a user share a link, it is counted as 1 vote. This is a good tool to see what people are ‘talking’ about in Twitterville and see total tweets that carry the links. Its URL stats provides information on number of tweets in last 24 hrs, last 1 week and last 1 month. It also calculates total estimated reach of the tweets. Another interesting site is Tweetmeme, which can filter popular URLs into blogs, images, videos and audios.

TWEETSTATS is useful to reveal tweeting behavior of any Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and present them in colorful graphs. Its Tweet Timeline is probably the most interesting, as it shows month-by-month total tweets since your joined Twitter (TweetStats showed Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, started tweeting since March 2006; 80 tweets during that month). Twitterholic can also show when a person joined Twitter but not in graphical format. Other metrics include (a) Aggregate Daily Tweets – total tweets, by day (c) Aggregate Hourly Tweets – total tweets, by hour (d) Tweet Density: hourly Twitter activities over 7 days period (e) Replies to: top 10 persons you’ve replied and (f) Interfaces Used: top 10 clients used to access Twitter. In addition, its Tweet Cloud allows you to see the popular words you used in your tweets.

TWITTERFRIENDS focuses on conversation and information aspects of Twitter users’ behaviors. Two key metrics are Conversational Quotient (CQ) and Links Quotient (LQ). CQ measures how many tweets were replied whereas LQ measures how many tweets contained links. Its TwitGraph displays six metrics – Twitter rank, CQ, LQ, Retweet Quotient, Follow cost, Fans and @replies. Its interactive graph (using Google Visualization API) can displays relationships between two variables. In addition, you can search for conversations between two Twitter users. This app seems to slice-and-dice data in more ways compared to other applications listed here.

THUMMIT QUICKRATE offers sentiments analysis, based on conversations on Twitter. This web application identifies latest buzzwords, actors, movies, brands, products, etc. (called ‘topics’) and combines them with conversations from Twitter. It does sentiment analysis to determine whether each Twitter update is Thumms up (positive), neutral or Thumms down (negative). Click on any topic to display opinions on the topic found on Twitter. In addition, it allows people to vote on topics via its website or mobile phones. The idea behind this app is good but still has some kinks to work out.

TWEETEFFECT matches your tweets timeline with your gain/lose followers timeline to determine which tweet makes you lost or gain followers. It analyze the latest 200 tweets and highlights tweets that coincides with you losing or gaining two (or more) followers in less than 5 minutes. This application simplistically assumed that your tweet is the sole factor affecting your gain/lose followers pattern. But, in reality, there are many other factors involved. Nevertheless, TweetEffect is still a fun tool to use; just don’t take the results too seriously.

Let’s Continue the Discourse on Twitter

Which of the abovementioned Twitter analytics you like the most? How can these tools generate revenue? Have you discovered any other interesting Twitter analytics? Share your thoughts on Twitter; find me @zhiQ

8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams originally appeared on GreyReview on March 3, 2009.

Snipd is building a social network around clipped web contents; Last.fm with music; Scribd with documents. For Phlook, it’s photos. Since its public beta launch on July 31 2008, Singapore-based Phlook (pronounced as flook) has released a series of improvements to its interface usability and socialability. The most recent ones are “favorite it” and annotation features.

Movable Social Objects

Phlook converted a ‘static’ photo into a Flash interactive one, which can be embedded on any website or blog. Now, this portable photo comes with rating, annotation and email features.

YouTube users can add commentary on videos with Video Annotations; Phlook allows its users to annotate on photo and the annotations are accessible by anyone. Users can also “Favorite” the photo. To try out these features, hover mouse over the burger photo below and slide-out menu will appear on the left. To view the annotations, click on the bottom-left of the photo.

Interactive Phlook’ed Photo

Users can customize a few parameters of the embeddable photo, namely:

• Size: photo display dimension
• View counts: track based “onRollOver” and “onClick”; view tracker can be turn off
• Add clip: appear on top-right corner whenever a mouse hovers over the photo
• Default menu: user access which menu whenever the photo is clicked

In addition to the photo’s social features, its embeddable Slideshow also get a facelift. The new layout and design seem to be more intuitive and responsive. In addition to Phlook website, users can also create Slideshows on Facebook with PicBox application.

Spanking New Slideshow Now Showing at Phlook

Phlook is founded by Wee-Kiat Ng and Justine Ho; funded by Thymos Capital LLP, a Singapore-based private start-up incubator.

Phlook Turns Photos Into Portable Social Objects originally appeared on GreyReview on February 21, 2009.