atomkeep is a new Web application that tend to fulfill users’ demand of sync (synchronize) their multiple social networking profiles. If you’ve more than five (5) social network accounts, the features of atomkeep surely will interested you. To start sync your multiple social network profiles into one that to be appeared on atomkeep, you simply required to register with the site, and atomkeep is free and public available at this moment.

Currently, atomkeep rolled out support for LinkedIn, Facebook, Monster, Flickr, etc. altogether fifteen (15) social networking sites, at the time of my writing. You can start sync your accounts simply by link and add all of your social network profiles to atomkeep, and atomkeep will thus help you to import all the data from these accounts to the one you opened on atomkeep. In the process of synchronization, it is mighty hard to ignore the beauty of flexibility, users on atomkeep will always have the choices of adding additional data that they feel is necessary to be added into their profiles.

Like other social network profiles, atomkeep profile comprised of the column of your personal data, such as Name & Location, Contact, Relationships, Political & Religious Views, Education and Work background, Professional Summary, Career Info as well as Resume. Also, you can edit the data through the editor available, and you’re given options to either hide or make your profile publicize in the eyes of your prospective employers, etc. Once you finished filling up all the necessary fields found in each columns, you can start sync it back with all of the target social networks with a single click.

Apparently, with the help of this atomkeep, you’ll realize you’ll have the only one type of data that to be represented your own inner self, your identity eventually. If you found that there’s a big disparity on some data, put an example, “Summarize your professional experience and goals,” underneath the Professional Summary column, don’t be surprised. A lot of people still don’t know what they’re doing, and where they want to go from here, this might include me or you, sad to say this.

Profilactic is a social media aggregator that launched in the end of 2006. It is focus primarily in pulling all of your online profiles into one place. In other word, if you’ve Twitter, blog(s), Flickr, YouTube, etc., what you need to do is sign-up to Profilactic and then start to pull all of these activities under the accounts aforesaid into your Profilactic. On the other hand, you also can see everything that going on with your friends in all the sites they used, provided they’ve a Profilactic account. You can imagine it is very cool when you can interact with multiple sites at once. This type of aggregator or better known as lifestream mashup is pervasive now on the Web. In using this type of service, you also can create a badge, i.e. My lifestream and put it onto your blog, or some other social networking sites.

Social media aggregator is not a very special asset that can earn a startup supercompetitive for an unusually long time. FriendFeed also doing it, with the intense competition from Socialthing!, iminta, and Plaxo. However, Profilactic is trying to outstrip its competitors in a “number game.” They made a comparison with FriendFeed in March this year, in a post entitled, “Profilactic vs. FriendFeed,” with the statement that Profilactic is supporting 155 social sites. Now the number has increased to 186.

Hainei, another Facebook clone in China has a new feature this week. That new feature is the highly configurable poll system that give its users to post their questions and receive feedback from other Hainei users. Look at the picture I enclosed in the below, you’ll learn from other users on “what is the best programming language to develop a Web app?” and the answer from the Hainei community is PHP. Aha, I wonder it is the correct answer.

Hainei is a Facebook clone that was launched in end of 2007. Ironically, it was the second social networking project by Mr. Wang Xing, the founder of Xiaonei. Hainei was launched based on a careful review that China or Chinese users need another social networking platform, other than Xiaonei that was mainly targeting at the students, whereas Hainei is a social networking platform for the adults. Although the design of Hainei is different from Xiaonei, the features or functionality from sign-up till enter the user profile is similarly the same, besides this poll system.

Do Chinese users need another social networking platform other than Xiaonei or Facebook? I will become convince that the answer is yes if Hainei really execute the repositioning of brand and attract more Chinese users other than solely from China. I’ve a lot of close friends that did not join Facebook, they perceived Facebook as something to do with a community whereby users need to have a degree from some Ivy-League schools, or well-speaking English; and majority of Facebook’s Chinese users are those who are banana Chinese (who know speak and read English very well, but don’t know Mandarin at all and they keep on shouting to a lot of people that they love Facebook!). On the other hand, Xiaonei is purely occupied by China students. It failed to position as a platform for all the Chinese users to get along with and happily interact with each other there.

At this moment, I do not know what is the future plan of Hainei on how it targeting the Chinese working adults. But reading some of the open polls is really a funny thing to do. All the polls are restricted to registered Hainei users, and you can also read the detailed statistics, results display before the voting. By the way, those who create the open poll can set the expiry date of the poll.

The other day I talked about Xiaonei, a successful Facebook clone in China. It seemed that social network and the clone Facebook UI (User Interface) still a great deal in China, as the China IM (instant messenger) giant, QQ has launched its social networking service, a Facebook clone to its IM users few days ago.

This QQ social network is called QQ Xiaoyou, in Chinese mean “QQ校友,” i.e. QQ alumni. It is currently in private beta phase, and will be launched to the selected QQ IM users. In fact, QQ is claimed as the number one IM provider in China, combining a critical mass of its IM users: active users 220 million out of registered users 570 million, and the messages sending approx. 1 billion per day, QQ has built an unique stronghold in IM services in China. In China, every startups want to emulate the success of QQ or Baidu, but most of these startups are late starters in the race to build such a huge user base.

On QQ Xiaoyou’s landing page, you’ll notice it look exactly like Facebook, but QQ Xiaoyou use green color instead of blue to make it clear that they’re not another Facebook. Nevertheless, this move is its second attempt to break into the University or college students’ community, as QQ has launched its first social networking community called “QQ Campus” in July 2007, but eventually have neither profits nor much in the way of market share to show for it.

For private beta users to register their accounts at QQ Xiaoyou, they need to use their real names, not their IM usernames as usual. To verify their users, QQ Xiaoyou is taking 3 to 5 days for each registered users in order to inhibit the fake accounts fraud, as shown in the picture below.

Xiaonei, the China’s Facebook clone is announcing the launched of its developer platform. According to CNet China, Xiaonei is the first China-based social network to launch its first-of-its-kind developer platform. However, don’t get Xiaonei wrong, this initiative is not its move in facing-off with Facebook, it’s just follow what Facebook’s market positioning in order to attract more users, and Chinese developers.

Like many others who came across Facebook, but never heard of Xiaonei, it’s exactly a Facebook clone. On the landing page, it looks pretty much exactly like the Facebook home page. The user interface, design, width and length of the layout, a small icon “your online friend(s) located in the bottom right looks the same as found on Facebook, but the only difference you can found is the language, i.e. Chinese Simplified. It is important to understand that Xiaonei is one of the top social networking sites in China, according to metric such as registered users amounted to 20 million. If you want to register as an user, you need to submit your personal details, that’s it. Unlike some other sites in China, you need to key in the China identity card number during the login authentication process. I’m not from China, I faced this difficult situation like this all the time. However, on Xiaonei, what you need to fill-up are the name, password, email address, as well as the country territory you’re coming from (currently you can only fill-up that you’re from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Macau). Upon you registered yourself into the Xiaonei system, you can find your friends through MSN, 163, 126, Sina, or Yahoo! Mail. Additionally, you also can search and filter your friends through your email clients such as Outlook or Foxmail. One little caveat from Xiaonei is please upload your photo as well as use your real name, if you do that, you’re entitled to be a so-called “Star” user, and hence enjoy unlimited storage space on Xiaonei.

Facebook platform has been key to Facebook’s positioning, but I wonder the forthcoming Xiaonei platform will also become the greatest asset to Xiaonei. Nevertheless, this might served as a mental shift to a China startup like Xiaonei as one open up its platform, it will thus open up its user base to the third-party developers. Traditionally, user base is being treated as a confidential and yet very important asset to a Chinese startup. However, it is interesting to see that MySpace China and 51.com have also both agreed to open up their platforms to the developers.

Currently, Xiaonei developer platform is open to some beta developers, and is not a production-ready platform. All the applications developed will be tested internally, before this platform is fully launch in mid of June. All applications are built using Xiaonei APIs that appeared on Xiaonei user profile page are not from the third-party developers, but served as the local own applications of Xiaonei. This include My Blog, Photo Album, Group, Share List, My Classes, My Club, Gift, Market, Movie, Sports, Sanguo (as shown in the below picture). Users are allowed to install or remove the applications if they want to. And all of these can be found on the left-hand sidebar. So, at least for now, there are few applications for Xiaonei users to play around with.

Picture 1: Application Page

Picture 2: Xiaonei Sangou

Twine is one of the startups that is in my waiting list to be reviewed on TagEdge and I recently got a private beta access to it. It is a new Web application that applied the common semantic model, based on the fact that human experts are expensive, and users on Twine can provide valuable search and data information.

To understand what Twine does, and how it differentiate itself from any other web applications on the Web, you need to understand what semantic is. Semantic is refers to the computers’ ways to process the language or code, and understandable, experts usually correlate semantic to information management. But to understand semantic Web, the founder of Twine, has explained it, in a post, entitled, “On the Difference Between “Semantic” and “Semantic Web.” On Twine, what they do is to provide a semantic Wen Web environment whereby an user is given a profile page, and the ability to social bookmark any link or URL address as she like, and Twine will do the rest with the new approach or concept of semantic analysis. Semantic analysis exists in helping you to interpret the information you put on your profile page, categorize, tag, summarize, abstract, and even extract similar link to the data information you like.

Perhaps this semantic technology is highly automated, and apparently not been easily understand by users who never came across this technology. However, the semantic technologies in existence is for the sake of the public. Perhaps you can consider it as a technology to help users create a data information library, discover all the bookmarks that you want to find out, but couldn’t achieve it by one’s own effort. With this technologies, it will grouping all the interest things, stuff in an organized way, and thus, we’ll realize the real relationships of these things with our lives. But expect there is a huge volume of data information out there on the Web, it’s always impossible for us to expect Twine will perform well barely in categorization, classification and tagging automatically on all the data users enter to the site, but more advance this technology evolve, the more it will understand human language, the perception on human towards language or computer code. In short, Twine was trying to make their system “smart” about the environment, but in practice, there’s still a lot of improvement that Twine will need to do, in viewed of many positive feedback, and some are negative out there.

To use Twine, upon you’ve been granted a private access, you’ll be given a profile page. Simple Simply put, it’s like a social network, meet friends with similar interests, access to the data information collected from other Twine users, and join groups, etc. On the profile page, you’ve the options to talk about your latest status, what you’re doing right now, introduce yourself as well as list your own Website on the page. You also provided with a notification page when there’s somebody would like to “connect” with you, and a Twine Digest for you to read as your everyday meal of information.

I like the fact Twine has provided a “Twine This” bookmarklet (drag it to the browser’s toolbar) that provide users to directly add a Web page they like onto their “My Items” of their profile pages. The another way is to email your favorite Web pages through with your own personal email address. All the Web pages you bookmarked are private, only if you purposely create your own public Twine, and add the Web pages you like to the public Twine, the bookmarks will be appeared as public in both “My Items” and public Twine. To illustrate this example, I’ve created a public Twine called “Startup to Watch.” To encourage users to share knowledge or information they came across on the Web, users are welcome to create as many Twines as they like, but manage those strategically. And be cautious you can’t change the URL address of your Twine as it’s impossible for an user to do it at this moment.

The core of semantic technologies is to find and expose content. To achieve this aim, Twine also allowed users to explore “Top 100 Twines”, “New Twines”, and “Top 100 Members.” From the Twines you discovered, you can find the articles, news you’re looking for a long period of time, but couldn’t find it other than Twine provided here. You also will meet some like-minded people in this platform. Meanwhile, there are several public twines that interested me, including the one created by Nova Spivack, Twine’s founder, Ruby on Rails, and Facebook research.

Twine is a project of Radar Networks, a startup based in San Francisco.

CityIN, a new social network launched in last month that targeting the Hong Kong and China people is joining Google’s OpenSocial. As you know, OpenSocial is Google’s first plan to take on Facebook, with a goal to release application programming interfaces (API) that allowed developers to build variety of applications for a range of social networking sites. And the most notable high-profile partner was MySpace.

With the participation of CityIn in OpenSocial, it probably the first Chinese social network that opens its platform to the developers mainly China Web developers. Strengths of the participation in OpenSocial will help to increase the worldwide profile of CityIN, this can be viewed from all the reporting from the top blogs in the blogosphere. As a new startup, it’s probably the best way for them that draw attention to it. CityIn’s challenge will be to build a different social network as there are many among them in China, or throughout the world. As a new startup, that co-founded by young talents, it is currently undertaking the differentiation strategy and was nearly very brave to try out all the new things and developed a lot of new features on their site.

CityIN, co-founded by Simon Chan and Alex Tam, was first incorporated in Hong Kong, and later setup the main operation office in Guangzhou, China in 2007. Simon Chan, 26 and Alex Tam, 25, seemed to be the Internet enthusiasts. With their passion on the Web, and work experience (Simon Chan is a former E-Trade software engineer, reported by VentureBeat), they planned to make CityIN the best ever social network in China. The site is easy-to-navigate, vividly presented content such as latest users, latest events happening in Guangzhou, and a second-edition of recommendation engine, which they’ve planned to apply for the patent in the US, Japan, and Hong Kong in the later stage. Recommendation engine is broad in scope, but it is enough to build a strong bridge from its users of the site that belong to a same group of leisure interest to some friends reside in local areas they might interested to interact with. If they continually improve its recommendation approaches, it might make a lot of potential users to have that compel feeling to join.

Additional interesting feature found on CityIN is the automatic face detection for photo tagging. As one of the hyperlinks they’ve sent to me, as shown in the below picture, it showed how a hassle less feature for CityIN user to play around with. At present, CityIN wasn’t comprehensive yet, with the English proficiently level of its co-founders, it’s no surprise that they’ll launch a brand new English site to cater to the US, Europe, or some countries whereby Friendster is strong at, such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.

Also, in pertaining to its participation on OpenSocial, CityIN still does not have the resources to build proprietary add-on yet. In other word, CityIN will going to be 100% OpenSocial at the beginning stage. However, they’ve received some favorably response from the industry players in casual game sector.

CityIN currently has 11 employees and they’ve been angel invested for a undisclosed sum by Dr. Samson Tam in early 2007. Dr. Tam, who invented the first electronic Dictionary Device (Chinese-English), is the chairman of a listed company in Hong Kong.

Well done, Simon.

Picture: Automatic face detection for photo tagging

Source: available at http://static.cityin.com/images/screenshots/facedetect/steps123.png, accessed at March 22, 2008.

Ning, a platform that helped users to create their own social networks has raised a whopping $60 million in Series D of funding from unspecified institutional investors. This news was confirmed by co-founder Marc Andreessen in his blog and first came courtesy of VentureBeat. Marc Andreessen said this round of funding was based on Ning’s $500 million pre-money valuation. The company raised $44 million in round C last year, which at that time its pre-money valuation was just $170 million. Well, I don’t know the current Ning’s valuation at $500 million is overinflated, but it definitely provides an early proving ground of a far too much money chasing the Web 2.0 deals.

Marc Andreessen said, “We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter.”

via [washington post]