When Shel Israel co-authored Naked Conversations with me we interviewed about 180 companies about how they were using blogs and how that usage was changing their business.

Today I’m watching companies and political candidates and seeing a new trend that I’ve written up as the “Social Media Starfish.” I just did two videos, one that defined the social media starfish and all of its “legs” and another that explains how Google is going to disrupt many pieces of that starfish tomorrow with its Open Social announcement tomorrow.

Some things in text. What are the legs of the social media starfish?

1. Blogs.
2. Photos. Flickr. Smugmug. Zooomr. Photobucket. Facebook. Et al.
3. Videos. YouTube. Kyte. Seesmic. Facebook. Blip. DivX. Etc.
4. Personal social networks. Facebook. BluePulse. MySpace. Hi5. Plaxo. LinkedIn. Bebo. Etc.
5. Events (face to face kind). Upcoming. Eventful. Zvents. Facebook. Meetup. Etc.
6. Email. Integration through Bacn.
7. White label social networks. Ning. Broadband Mechanics. Etc.
8. Wikis. Twiki. Wetpaint. PBWiki. Atlassian. SocialText. Etc.
9. Audio. Podcasting networks. BlogTalkRadio. Utterz. Twittergram. Etc.
10. Microblogs. Twitter. Pownce. Jaiku. Utterz. Tumblr. FriendFeed. Etc.
11. SMS. Services that let organizations build SMS into their social media starfishes. John Edwards is one example.
12. Collaborative tools. Zoho. Zimbra. Google’s docs and spreadsheets. Etc.

It’ll be interesting to see how deeply Google will disrupt the Social Media Starfish tomorrow.

What do you think?

Here’s the two videos:

Part I of Naked Conversations 2.0: defining the social media starfish. 22 minutes.
Part II of Naked Conversations 2.0: how Google will disrupt the social media starfish tomorrow. 18 minutes.

Venture Beat’s Chris Morrison has an excellent writeup on the event space sites that are out there. I’d love to see more shootouts like this one. There’s simply too much stuff to try in this industry and having people tear into a category and rate them really helps us all.

That said, I’ve looked into the event space too and I’ve found that Upcoming.org is WAY AHEAD for tech geeks. It’s not even close between Upcoming.org and everyone else. I’ve found that Upcoming.org has easily 10x more tech geek participation than other sites and has more complete listings of tech events, too. Just check out my calendar and compare to anyone else’s tech event calendar.

Keep in mind, though, that other sites are ahead in other genres like music and politics. But I really only care about technology stuff and in the industry I care about you gotta join Upcoming.org and you gotta put your events into Upcoming.org if you want the best people to come.

I agree with Chris that Eventful is ahead of the others in lots of other ways too.

Oh, and Chris left one huge site off: Facebook. They actually have more events, and more geek participation, but since everything is behind the garden wall I can’t link to it so I can see how Chris left Facebook’s events off. That said, I’d list my event on all these sites, but especially on Facebook and on Upcoming.org.

If you haven’t yet joined in an event site, why not?

Heh, instead of going to events today I stayed home and am playing with event sites. It must have been because of my visit to Upcoming.org yesterday (that’s my photo of Upcoming.org co-founder Gordon Luk). Anyway, Webware today writes about Yelp’s new events functionality, which focused my attention even more on the event sites.

I’ve been going through the two sites (Yelp and Upcoming) comparing their approaches to event listings. If you don’t know about Yelp, it’s a site for reviewing restaurants while Upcoming is a site almost wholly focused around events and conferences.

But before we get back to the event sites we should talk about the newest Web term to be passed around: bacn.

You know, we have spam and now we have “bacon” without the “o”.

What is bacn? It’s the emails that get generated by all these social networking sites (and other sites) when you sign in, or get a notification, or when you try to add friends (that generates bacn for your friends). It’s all covered on Andy Quayle’s site. According to Chris Brogan he was the first to use it. Anyway, that term has been showing up in tons of conversations I’ve been having lately.

So, back to the events sites.

Upcoming.org definitely has the geek events down. Search for “Lunch 2.0″ and you find a ton. But what if you want to do something a bit more, say, entertaining? Say Opera in the Park (Yelp) in San Francisco? Here’s the same listing on Upcoming.org.

What do you notice?

For me, Upcoming is colder. Yelp has links to restauants and has a more pleasing design. At least to my eye.

So, why am I not switching all my event stuff off of Upcoming? Two reasons:

1. Facebook. Yeah, yeah, I know you’re getting sick of hearing me talk about Facebook but it is now the MUST HAVE portal for my digital life. If you don’t have a Facebook application I’m not going to be all that excited about you. So get one. Upcoming has it.
2. My “friends.” I have more than 200 friends that I’ve hand picked on Upcoming. I don’t have any friends on Yelp. Actually, that’s not true. I just added a couple of people I know who I trust to bring me to good restaurants and events. But, still, that’s almost zero. Truth is about these kinds of sites that they really work a lot better after you get a bunch of friends onto them. So, I’m not likely to leave a site where I’ve gotten it all setup and working well and where I have a good group of friends I trust.

Anyway, more on Yelp over on TechMeme. Which one are you going to use? And, yes, I’ll add anyone as a friend who asks me. I’m Scobleizer on Yelp and RobertScoble on Upcoming.

I’d love to know how you like these sites in comparison to Eventful which I haven’t tried much yet or Confabb? UPDATE: I forgot about ZVents, which I’ve had a good look at but forgot about over the past year. Any other event sites we should know about? Yeah, I know there’s one built into Facebook but we’ll leave that one off the table for now.

For those of you who haven’t yet added me as a friend on Facebook you probably didn’t notice that I’m now using Upcoming.org as my social calendar. There’s a Facebook application which shows all my Facebook friends my calendar and where I’ll be. Oh, and we’re going to Portland this week. Search Upcoming.org for “Portland, Oregon” and you’ll find out there’s a Blogger Dinner on Thursday night. I’ll be there.

Of course, if you were a friend of mine on Facebook (I add everyone who asks) then you could see my entire calendar, just visit my profile page. Upcoming is a wonderful service.

So is Eventful, by the way. But I can’t find a Facebook application that’ll use Eventful, so Upcoming.org (owned by Yahoo) it is.

Now do you understand why every startup and Web service is struggling to get a Facebook strategy? I will support those startups that make my Facebook profile page better and more useful.