After raising $625k in seed funding this January to pave the way for a unique social network targeting gay men and their friends, Jason Goldberg, formerly of Socialmedian and Jobster, opened the doors to his new site, Fabulis, today, appropriately, on his birthday. Looking to go beyond the skin-deep hookup-obsessed competition for gay male visitors, Jason and his team are hoping to forge a central place for this affluent demographic to "celebrate life" and provide a "gay take" on the world.

After knowing Jason primarily through the Web, phone and e-mail since early 2008, I finally met the man in person today, in Palo Alto, in the middle of what was surely an incredibly full schedule. Over lunch, we talked about how this launch, unlike those of Socialmedian and Jobster before it, is a very personal one for him. While I teased Jason that I was a little disappointed that I couldn't be as active a user for his new site as I was with his last one, the passion he has for the latest venture is real, and a for good reason.

As Jason and I discussed, finding good venues and products for gay men is more than finding gay-friendly businesses, but instead, finding ones with a good "gay vibe", ones that are trendy. The data all points to the opportunity being a very good one, with gay men earning more, on average, than their straight counterparts, being more likely to hold a college degree, going on vacation and generally traveling much more, while also displaying significant consumer loyalty. A review on sites like Yelp from midwestern grandmothers is much less relevant to the Fabulis target audience than one from their own background.

Jason by no means is on a plan to take out leading social networks, like Facebook. He recognizes that network's leading role, but thinks there is a very real opportunity to get the experience right for this important market - and their friends. He promised me the site would have value not just for gay men, but their friends. Of course, I am registered, which, according to the site, makes me Fabulis. You can check out Fabulis at http://www.fabulis.com.

For more on the launch, listen to the CinchCast Jason and I recorded from this afternoon. You can hear from his mouth directly the site's focus and goals. Wishing his new network the best of success.

On Tuesday, ReadWriteWeb and a number of other tech blogs (including Mashable) stirred themselves into a tizzy around a report from social media measurement firm PostRank, who reported that almost 90 percent of content in Google Buzz, the company's nascent social network, came from news feeds and other non-native sources. Their self-congratulatory conclusions, kicking dirt on the service which hasn't hardly had a chance to grasp for air following body blow after body blow after a stumble out of the gate around privacy, came with phrases saying Buzz had "fallen short of capturing the hearts and minds of the social web", and another, "Much of Buzz’s content may be hand-crafted — it just doesn’t originate on Buzz."

Oh dear! What a terrible thing! Prepare the wake! I would be honored to act as a pallbearer, if given the opportunity.

PostRank's data served only one purpose - to count the total number of entries from all individual services being aggregated by the downstream collection service (Buzz). It is no secret, and I don't think anybody has successfully ever argued against it, that every single network that has the potential to import Twitter entries can easily be dominated by updates from that service. It was true with FriendFeed. It is true with Ecademy. It can be true with Facebook, depending on who you follow, and there is also that potential with Buzz. Twitter entries are light, easy, and update often. Even the most avid bloggers post more entries to Twitter than they do on their own site - as they post their own blog entries in addition to other updates, so it is no surprise that many people see their own feeds dominated by their Twitter. Add in Google Reader shares, which are very well tied in with Buzz, and you can see how this so-called "automated" "bot" behavior can start to ratchet up the stat-o-meter.

But the data (and reporting) was an inch deep, and it very poorly associated the world of automated feeds with the world of automated non-human behavior on other social networks which is nefarious. (Twitter bots, for example)

Aggregation services are built to aggregate data from disparate networks. It's practically their core definition. However, many of them also offer the option to create net new content. Buzz lets you make very detailed blog-like posts if you like. It's a great engine for sharing pictures, or YouTube videos, or simply adding a link from a Web page, and adding your observations. These so-called native entries are what amassed the approximately 10% of all updates seen as non-bot behavior by the survey.

As I mentioned back in March, native entries to Buzz get the most engagement. Some people, such as DeWitt Clinton from Google, make fantastic high quality posts on Buzz, and can get dozens to hundreds of comments. So do native entries from highly-visible people like Robert Scoble, and very active supporters of the community, including svartling and Leo Laporte.

I recognize that the vast majority of my own updates on Buzz are feeds. I love feeds. RSS or Atom, whatever you like, I recognize they are great tools. I will not stop sharing my items from Google Reader on Buzz unless the community goes silent, or tells me to stop - but between my Reader shares and my native blog entries, my own 4 native Buzz entries represent a miniscule 2% of my last 185 Buzz updates (according to Buzz-Charts).

This doesn't mean I haven't supported the platform, and it doesn't mean people are not engaging. In fact, according to the Buzz-Charts site, the last 185 posts received 478 total comments, or between 2 and 3 replies for every single entry. Some got none, and others got much more. But every single share was originated by a human, and every single comment was a so-called native entry.

PostRank surveyed Buzz with the subtlety of a political pollster operating under payment by the Committee to Re-Elect the President. (CREEP) While it may be factual that many people imported their Twitter entries and other automated feeds to Buzz, the Buzz community knows to largely ignore those items, or to not follow those people who are using the service in a poor way.


Buzz-Charts shows a much different story. In their graph of actual replies (comments) on all entries in Buzz, they found that of 24,584 posts that gained comments, 13,520 of them were native Buzz entries, a full 55%, not the measly 10% created. In second place, Google Reader shares showed 3,978 entries with comments, or 16%. Add on Buzz Mobile's 1,572 active threads (6.4%) and those top three conversation starters represent more than three quarters of all active threads, more than 18,000 of the total 24,000.

In contrast, all those automated Twitter entries that PostRank said was 62% of Buzz? They only had 837 active threads, or just over 3% of active threads. That means more than 90% of all Twitter entries that hit Buzz are ignored. Given you can't really have conversations in Twitter in the same way you can Buzz, and the person's entries already seem disjointed, that's probably just fine.

So we now know the community can self-select and self-filter, and that Buzz users comment on native entries and Google Reader shares more than anything. But let's go back to what a "bot" is anyway.

According to Tweetmeme, that ReadWriteWeb story was retweeted 662 times on Twitter. Is that any different than making a share in Google Reader? Even if a human clicked that button, are those not 662 bot entries into Twitter? In addition, the main RWW feed (@rww) is dominated by entries from TwitterFeed. That very post about Google Buzz bots was fed by a bot to their Twitter account. So the underlying hint of "Buzz loses and Twitter wins" is dead on its face, if this is the measure.

Do I want Twitter updates in my Buzz? Not really. I can go to Twitter for that. Also, in March, I talked about the trend toward disaggregation and putting native data in native sites. There is a huge benefit of getting that right. I took Twitter out of my Buzz for a reason. But Reader shares obviously have a good role in the community, and they are part of my curation activity.

Want to get a real good idea of what is happening on Buzz, with real people? Spend some time with a statistical site that really knows Buzz at http://buzz-stats.appspot.com/. Run your own chart to see if you're as feed-crazy as me, or who the top 100 people are on Buzz for getting replies to their content. PostRank didn't do themselves a service with their shallow report, and neither did the guys who regurgitated their data, and then retweeted it, or let their bots do the dirty work for them.

This video was filmed with Ecademy Chairman Thomas Power and myself in February during a social media retreat in Silicon Valley. Expect more videos, prepared by YourBusinessChannel to trickle through. And no... I don't call myself a social media expert. They did. Enjoy!

You might remember Thomas from: Ecademy Chairman Says Limited Networks are "Flawed"

With the news last week that Blogger product manager Rick Klau was transitioning to a similar role leading the Google Profiles team, I have been doing some thinking around how Google could improve the utility of its Profile property, and the more I think about it, I really believe the Profile could be a major front in the company's battle with Facebook and other networks to act as the central hub for your online persona. Today, Google Profiles seem to be something of an afterthought, although their integration with Google Search and now Buzz in the last two years have raised their prominence. But given Google's mountain of data being amassed on you and your preferences, and the opportunity to build a new feature set, I see significant opportunity for them to get the content right and the deployment right. Strike early enough with our suggestions, and we just might actually have an impact on what they do as well...

At the end of 2007, in one of my more speculative posts, I asked, Will There be One Profile to Rule Them All?, highlighting three of the most prominent Web profile services at the time: Google, MyBlogLog and FriendFeed. Nearly 30 months later, MyBlogLog is practically dust, squished by its Yahoo! overlords, FriendFeed was similarly absorbed into Facebook, though the site continues to run, and Google hasn't changed all that much, to be honest, featuring the same collection of third party links that hint at who I am online.

At the time, I asked of the three services, "which one knows me best?" In the last 30 months, those three services didn't do much to answer that question, offering a minimum of personalization, and letting the content from third party sites tell the story. In their place, Facebook became the dominant player in the space, transitioning from a student-only site to one inviting all Web users to input information about themselves, their likes, preferences and connections. Now, the answer is obvious - Facebook is the dominant profile online, with others possibly answering LinkedIn, and a smaller percentage pointing to Twitter, assuming your one-line description, profile picture and tweets encompass the true you.

But Facebook's goal, thus far, has not been so much to encapsulate the entire you, built from content created on other sites. While you can pull in blog posts and bookmarks and third party activity, the majority of action is created from within what people call the walled garden, and unless you have connections with the individual, the data is not fully open and available. Google's approach, to have all profiles viewable, open, indexable and discoverable, opens up new opportunities to make the Google Profile the Web's reference guide for you as an individual.

Today, Google Profiles have six distinct sections:

1. About Me: Includes a short biography, which you write yourself, which can include links or e-mail addresses. It also has a summary section for "Where I grew up", "Places I've lived", "Companies I've worked for" and "Schools I've attended". Not too much detail on positions held there, or years served... just the basics.
2. Buzz: If you are populating Buzz, the content will be shown in a tab on your profile.
3. Contact Info: You can make your e-mail, phone, birthday, and address visible to contacts and friends, or keep it private.
4. Sidewiki: If you make entries in Sidewiki, they can be displayed on your profile.
5. Photos: You can display photos from Flickr, Picasa or other services below your avatar.
6. External links to social services: The same logo farm provided in many places, where you can customize what external sites you use.

Also included are some small random elements including "Something I still can't find on Google", "My superpower" and "Interests".

All told, it's a pretty casual approach, but not one that would have me returning often.

That said, the ingredients appear to be in place for Profiles to expand beyond their current role and possibly take a more direct assault on Facebook, LinkedIn and other personal hubs. In this scenario, a public site, built from Buzz entries from those you follow, take the place of Facebook's current newsfeed, and your profile becomes your Facebook Wall. Facebook Photos are replaced by Picasa photos, and the many connections you've found in Facebook are similar friend connections through Google, only in an asynchronous mode, not a synchronous one, a public one, and not a private one.

Does this mean that the experience of Facebook could be directly duplicated through some brilliant massaging of Profiles and the extraction of Buzz from Gmail into a more public, dedicated site? Of course not. For one, the work on Groups, Networks, Causes, and the many apps that have people coming back to Facebook, if for nothing else than doing battle on Lexulous, takes some work to replicate. Also, it can be assumed that one's social graph will vary from network to network, so those friends from high school might be your links on Facebook, but your colleagues might be linked to you through Google.

Google, seemingly caught flat-footed in the world of social for the last few years as Facebook and Twitter ran circles around them, is trying to win this game through following the Web's trends - toward open standards, public content and discoverability. Even if they don't get people to stop using Facebook, they can deliver an alternative that is a distributable URL that you can share with people to say "This is me" on the Web. I may use my blog for that, but for many, one's Google Profile truly could be the real "Me". They have an opportunity to compete and take visibility and share from these services by eliminating the holes in their lineup, and then innovating to go beyond what others are providing today.

The question is - are people interested, and does Google want to win this thing?