Looking for a list of upcoming social networking websites aka Web 2.0 companies?  Want to develop the next big thing?  Or are you going to try and create a mashup?  Here are a couple of good resources for you:

First one is CrunchBase, they’ve got an excellent list of Web 2.0 and other tech resources – their directory contains over 3,700 companies and 8,000 individuals.

 TechCrunch blog is an excellent resource for information, like this (rather old) post on “34 More Ways to Build Your Social Network“

Another excellent resource is Go2Web20.net – that bill themselves as “The Complete Web 2.0 Directory”.  This site is great, but it seems to take forever to load-up — that’s perhaps because they display a log of all the Web 2.0 companies in their directory and there are just a few of them out there.

There is some great information you can find here, for example I came accross a site called Lucratives.  What’s Lucratives all about — well, although I did not intend to do a full-scale review of all the sites listed (too many) I did go through one of the many that caught my eye  The name of the company is lucrati.es and it’s billed as “The Exclusive Internet Marketing Resource”.  Here is what’s on their front page, followed by my mini-review of the service.

The Lucratives Community aims to fix this… It contains the Best Internet Marketing Links and Tips in an easily accessible and well structured format. All with one common goal – to help internet entrepreneurs become more knowledgeable and profitable online.

What makes Lucratives different?

Only contains articles that will allow you to develop as an Internet Marketer, not your everyday news stories.

Includes must read posts from various internet marketing blogs – All in one place.

Well structured site menu covers the different aspects of Internet Marketing, allowing you to easily find exactly what you want.

It’s self-moderated; we all decide what stays and what doesn’t.

So when I keyed in lucratives in Google, it found the .NET site, not the .ES site.  The .NET site reported an error:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare tpl_function_checkactionstpl() (previously declared in /home/lucrativ/staging/plugins/function.checkActionsTpl.php:2) in /home/lucrativ/public_html/plugins/function.checkActionsTpl.php on line 5

But when you click on the logo, the site resolves to the .ES (so the URL is http://www.lucrativ.es).

There is some great internet marketing information on Lucrativ.es, and as such we’ll be making more use of the service.  But it’s essentially like DIGG.

They don’t offer a widget or button, but a bookmarklet that you’d plop onto your IE or FireFox browser.

I went and tried submitting a story (mine, of course).  First thing that happened, is that their spell check did not work.  No worries.  I know I’m a good speller.

You can select a category from a pretty exhaustive list, and finally enter a trackback and click on “Preview & Submit”.  And that’s it, you’re done.  It appears that each new submission is automatically given 5 stars – I mean, you would flag your own entry as 5 stars, right?  So they’ve done this for you.

Your post shows up initially in “upcoming” and eventually would show up in their main site.

Here is what their User Control Panel looks like…

Will this fly?  Who knows… but as I went through the stories, there is some great internet marketing information available.  At the very least, if your blog is MMO, IM or along those lines you should probably be submitting to Lucratives and looking at the return — meaning, are you getting visitors from them?  If so, then continue on with what works.  If not, drop ‘em and try another method.  However as they are focused on Internet Marketing and Business you should see some successes from posting entries at the site.

Lucratives has 11 main categories:

1. General Guides
2. Web Products
3. SEO
4. Income Generation
5. Business Development
6. Content
7. Analystics
8. Personal
9. Outsourcing
10. Timesavers
11. Resources

Each also have sub-categories.  For example, under Web Products they list:

• eBooks
• Blogs
• Content Based Websites
• Online Communities (they spell it Communitys)
• Web Shops

All in all, the site is very friendly and easy to navigate.  We will continue working with Lucrativ.es to see if indeed it will be lucrative for me.

I popped on over to CrunchBase to see if they were listed there, but they do not show up on CrunchBase and unfortunately there is very little information on the site that tells you about the management, the team, when they started etc.,   They DID have a Contact Us form though…

It would have been nice to know what the process is; that is how long it takes for an entry to go from upcoming to published – but alas alot of crucial information is just not there.

If you’ve worked with lucrativ.es, can you tell us more about them?

What did you like/dislike.  Was it lucrative for you?  Did you see visitors streaming in?  Or are they more of value as they are getting indexed more often and as such the spiders will find your site?  Please do share your experiences with Lucrative.

 

 

Image is from http://www.learnit2.com/tutorial%20018/index.html

 

Technorati Tags: lucratives, social media, social networking, web 2.0

List of Social Networking Sites – Web 2.0 Sites

Wow.  Heavy title.  I want to point you in the direction of this great article on TechCrunch.  The post is fantastic, if you want to learn more about where Social Media is heading.

The story is from Morgan Stanley, and well worth the read and view of the slide show.

Here is some summary information:

• YouTube + Facebook page views > Google or Yahoo page views (and may be bigger than both combined)
• 6/10 top internet sites are social (youtube, live.com, facebook, hi5, wikipedia, orkut); none were on the list in 2005
• YouTube has 258 million users, 50% visit weekly or more
• >50% of Facebook users log in daily, 95% of Facebook users have used at least one third party application
• Skype revenue is $1.67/user/year, up 9% Y/Y
• 14 million photos uploaded daily on Facebook
• Google + Yahoo = 61% of U.S. Online Ad Revenue
• Google: $4.4b ad revenue in Q4, paid out $1.4 billion to partners
• Yahoo: $1.6 billion in ad revenue in Q4, paid out $429 million to partners

I think what is a shocker is the first point – YouTube + Facebook page views are GREATER than Google or Yahoo!  Wow.  Is that powerful or what?

IF you still need a clue it means you NEED to have a Facebook page and social media yourself to the world.

Even the 2nd item point should be leading you to taking advantage of social media — the fact that 6 out of 10 Internet sites are social.

The next step for you is use social media to build your business, and convert those visitors into customers of your products.

One of the comments left by a visitor should be on your mind:

Is the traffic and monetisation potential from widgets (and API’s) being underestimated as a trend here, eg, where do RIAs such as Twhirl using Twitters API fit in?

In fact one traffic technique that is most popular is traffic gained from individuals that give away their plugins/widgets for various platforms – WordPress, Facebook etc., With these types of products, it does not necessarily need to be “new” or “unique” — but even significant improvements on what’s out there could spin your sites visitor count like crazy.

A few posts later on there is another fantastic article on Widgets.  The author of the post, Michael Jones makdes an valuable statement – “The top widget providers are proving that widgets can be big business.“

I don’t agree that widgets are the “cure” to the recession - but learning to how effectively monetize widgets will help companies build additional income streams.

He also goes on to say:

In April 2007, comScore estimated that widgets reach 177M people every month, or 21% of the worldwide online audience. Currently, only a fraction of widget traffic – perhaps as little as 0.5% – is being monetized. And that 0.5% is being monetized most frequently through traditional CPM models. In order for widgets to pay off in the long term, however, new models are required that will drive revenue beyond the top few widget providers and generate significant returns for all customers investing ad dollars.

…anyway have a read at the story and the comments, they are just as interesting as the story is.

Technorati Tags: morgan stanley, social media, techcrunch, the future of social media

Future Outlook on Social Media – Web Two dot OH!