Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

For an exclusive 30% discount email Mark@sixdegs.com with “PaulWalsh” in the subject. Offer ends February 6th (tomorrow!)

The Social Networking World Forum will feature enough workshops, case studies and schooling on social media to make you truly sick of the subject. The event will cover social media branding, marketing, PR, measuring, monitoring, B2B, mobile and plenty more. Also include an exhibition and a great industry party on the first night. For more information, please visit the website: http://www.socialnetworking-forum.com/

Here’s a fun Web site that displays a person’s reach on Twitter. I scored 1,117,492. I’m not entirely sure what that means but I’m guessing from the wording on the site that it’s two layers down from me; my followers and their followers.

Either leave a comment or @ me on Twitter with your reach

It’s always a blast to hook up with Loren Feldman. Love the guy. In case you didn’t notice, we had a late night before this interview was shot - hence the delayed reactions.

I’ll post a comprehensive post about my entire trip to San Francisco soon.

Fire Eagle, a location enabler for social networks is now available to the public. (Don’t mistaken it, for a social network.)

As an end user, Fire Eagle is a site that stores information about your location. With your permission, it allows other services and devices to update that information or access it. It allows the use of your location to power friend-finders, games, local information services and stuff like that…

As a social network/friend-finder, Fire Eagle enables you to make use of, users’ location - assuming you, or another social network, can capture it on your/their site and store it on Fire Eagle’s. Confused? Just think OpenID and you’ll get it.

For Fire Eagle to be a success, Yahoo! must encourage application developers to adopt it and for developers to make doption for end users seamless. The latter I fear, will not be easy. Like OpenID, a social network must send end users to the Fire Eagle Web site in order to store their location preferences. This is likely to disorientate users as they get shipped off to another brand which has nothing to do with their task in hand. This is the reason OpenID is a great solution for early adopters thus far. Great technical solution. Crap user experience.

I could be wrong of course as I’ve never used it. I’ve only seen a demonstration from Yahoo! It’s the ’shipping off to another brand’s site’ that I dislike, not the technical implementation.

TechCrunch has published a good post about the difficulties of taking a social network from one country to another without thinking about their cultural differences. I agree with their position. Too many companies assume that their software (in this case, social networks) will work in other countries in the same way it does back home. However, they fail to realise the cultural and religious differences that borders impose.

Social networks have become integrative elements of modern American youth culture over the last years, shaping social patterns and changing the ways that people communicate. When taken abroad, these services have to deal with a large number of cross-cultural peculiarities by their very nature.

Societal and cultural gaps are particularly evident in the case of Japan. Market entry in this country with a “What works in the US must also work over there”-attitude is going awry for both Facebook and MySpace. It’s not a stereotype that communication tends to be nonverbal in Japan. The society generally puts more emphasis on the community rather than on the individual. Also, security plays a major role in many aspects of Japanese life.

I’d like to emphasise that it’s not just about translation. It’s about internationalistaion and localisation (I’m now hooked on Wikipedia thanks to Orit). Luckily, this is something I learned early on at AOL during the launch of numerous territories in the mid 90’s. AOL, for all it’s silly mistakes in recent years, did after all, encourage mass adoption of the Web across many countries including the US, UK, Germany, France and Australia. It took a while, but the US did manage to see the light, thanks to the strong teams/personalisties in the UK and Germany in particular.

This topic isn’t restricted to social networks by the way, it applies to any product or service. My advice is to partner with companies already in a similar space. If that isn’t possible, the recruitment of local staff to manage and controle the launch is imperative.

Read TechCrunch’s post for more insight.

This is one of the reasons Wubud is being developed in Hong Kong.