I just spent an hour decompressing with Marc Canter about all the Open Social and Facebook stuff along with a TON of coverage of how the Social Media space is shaking out (I call it the Social Media Starfish).

He runs Broadband Mechanics, which makes social networks for a variety of businesses around the world including the Times of India and the Sacramento Kings basketball team. He doesn’t call them social networks, by the way, preferring to call them “DLAs” or “Digital Lifestyle Aggregators.”

Anyway, everytime I have a chat with him I learn a ton. Here’s an hour’s worth of Marc, in three pieces.

Part I, where we discuss Facebook and Open Social.
Part II, where we discuss Open Social’s impact on his business.
Part III, where we just continue the theme.

I’ll try to pull out the key things he taught me, but wanted to get these up ASAP.

Thanks so much to Darren Barefoot for making a much nicer version of the Social Media Starfish and saying nice things about my explanation behind it.

In other social media news, Jeremiah Owyang explains Open Social for your executives. Jeremiah is really becoming the leading expert on social media. I saw him at the Nokia event yesterday and he’s certainly seeing everything that’s moving on the starfish.

TechCrunch and others are reporting that Google and MySpace are joining forces on the open social platform that Google has developed.

Let’s just say this is HUGE and totally validates what I said in my social media starfish talk yesterday.

UPDATE: I’m at Google right now in the press conference and this is confirmed.

I’m sitting in a press conference with TechCrunch, BusinessWeek, Forbes, and many other press.

More in a few minutes.

UPDATE: Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, says “This will create the new defacto standard.”

PayPerPost is the company that Mike Arrington founder of TechCrunch (and me) love to hate. But today there’s reports that they are rebranding the advertising network to “izea.”

They are focusing less on gaming Google (since Google has rejiggered page rank anyway to penalize pay-per-link streams) and more on being an advertising agency for the social media starfish.

Wonderful. But here’s the rub: I expect Facebook or Google to start sharing revenues with bloggers and social media freaks like me in a new way. Real soon now.

Since Google’s ad salespeople are going to get the brands I like and trust (like BMW, Procter and Gamble, etc) I’m far more likely to go with an ad network from them or Facebook than one that wants me to peddle stuff I’ve never heard of.

Translation: Ted’s company is interesting to watch cause he pisses off lots of A listers but I’m still not sure he’s really going to build something disruptive. A company doesn’t change its name if it’s loved.

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.

So, I was reading feeds and just ran across Fred Wilson’s A VC blog (he’s a famous VC who lives in New York City and invests in a bunch of stuff that we use everyday). He posts that his favorite post was a picture done by the founder of Vimeo. Asks what does that say? About blogging?

It says to me that we’re all weird creatures and that we like weird stuff. Including a founder lying in bed pondering the future.

I put it on my link blog. Why? Cause I liked it too.

Translation: there’s something deeper going on on blogs.

1. Blogs have lost their humanity. Their weirdness. Instead we’ve become vehicles to announce new products and initiatives on.
2. We’ve gotten too caught up in the TechMeme games.
3. We’re bored. The interesting stuff is happening off blogs. This afternoon, for instance, I’m meeting Hugh Macleod and we’re just going to hang out in Palo Alto and have fun. Meet at the Apple store at 3 p.m. on University Ave.
4. Creative stuff and ideas and questions are getting spread out all over the place.

Anyway, hope you’re having a good weekend.

I’ve just put a bunch of stuff up on my link blog, including a report of what we were doing at Nokia on Thursday. Hey, there’s that Social Media Starfish again! Look for “NRC Palo Alto” or “Active Words” in the link blog and you’ll see the starfish.

Speaking of which, if you want to see just the headlines of my link blog, they are reposted over on Fast Company Magazine’s site and also on my Twitter feed for @scobleslinkblog.

There’s a lot of great stuff on my link blog. Joi Ito recommends PhotoPhlow. Fake Steve Jobs gives some interviews there. Microsoft’s Listas is discussed. B5 Media has a post about me being on its advisory board. Louis Gray talks about his love of FriendFeed. And on and on.

Why don’t you subscribe to the feed of my link blog?

Now that my player has been on TechCrunch and Valleywag I’ve been able to measure some new things about each of their audiences:

1. Audience. Just how many people visit their page (Kyte.tv shows me how many people are online concurrently. Valleywag has been averaging about 200 to 300 people, TechCrunch averaged around 1000).
2. Engagement. How many people click on links, or comment on items. TechCrunch regularly gets more than 100 comments. Valleywag rarely gets more than 10. When TechCrunch linked to me I got 1,000 visits. When Valleywag links to me it’s rare I get more than 100.
3. Loyalty. How many subscriptions do each site have on Google Reader and other feed readers. I use the example of Gizmodo vs. Engadget. Gizmodo has about 44,000 subscribers while Engadget has 350,000, on Google Reader.
4. Influence. % of posts that show up on Techmeme, Digg, my Link Blog, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, etc.

Anyone building a new metric based on these four things? If so, we could REALLY understand a LOT more about our audiences and advertisers would have a lot better information to choose from.

I’d probably add a fifth metric:

5. Concentration of people with intent. Does your site attract a lot of people who buy digital cameras, for instance? Then it’ll make a LOT more on Google advertising. That’s one huge reason why DPReview sold for a good sum to Amazon.

Anyway, this gave me a chance to dust off my old whiteboard. Oh, on my whiteboard is the Social Media Starfish. Yes, that’s a tease. I’m writing about that for Fast Company Magazine.

There’s a TON of new Facebook conferences/events coming soon.

Here’s a list of the ones I know about.

1. Dave McClure’s Graphing Social Patterns. I’m speaking, this one looks like the best one. October 7-9 in San Jose, CA, USA.

2. Noah Kagan is planning CommunityNext’s Platform, October 5-6 in Sunnyvale, CA, USA (only a few miles away from Dave’s confabb). Noah used to work at Facebook and this one looks great for developers.

3. Christian Perry, who plans the most awesome SF Beta events, is planning a conference for late October. It’ll be announced in a week.

4. Steve Broback, who planned the Blog Business Summits over the past few years, has started a new WebCommunityForum in Seattle in December.

Me? I keep thinking that all these conferences are missing the real action.

I am working on that. It’s called Starfish. Code name for what’s really going on in Social Media.

What’s funny is that I’ve been talking about my Starfish idea (sorry, not ready to discuss it in public yet) and nearly everyone who I mention it to asks me “have you read “The Starfish and the Spider” yet?”

It’s amazing how many people have read that book from a cross-section of the industry.

So, I was blown away when I ran into Rod Beckstrom, one of the co-authors of that book, while walking the halls at the Office 2.0 Conference this week.

We had a nice chat and we’ll definitely get together soon for a video interview.

He’s onto something. One of these Facebook events should hire him to speak.

Oh, and what else has he done? He’s the chairman for Twiki.net. One of the more powerful wiki environments around.

Anyway, back to my original question: how many Facebook conferences do we need?