There are a few problems which startups seem to face in the process of rolling out invitations. In the case of Google Wave many people with an invite discovered they had non of their friends on the service to interact with. This is not beneficial for the user experience of your new service. Another problem is seasonality in user activity. Startups receiving a lot of publicity when a new invite batch is released.  Shortly after the buzz has passed user activity flattens with only some active users remaining.

Both problems can be solved by focusing on the social experience of users in the beta invitation process. Beta invites should be send out in batches of two, just like concert tickets in a prize giveaway. This can increase the probability of users to remain active by channeling their social behavior through your service. (I only became an active foursquare user after finding someone offline to share the experience with.)

Something to think about and which should be fairly easy to integrate in the invitation process on your website. What do you think?

Currently newspapers struggle with innovation, many seems only to focus on digitalizing their news product while not offering real new value to the readers.
I believe newspaper should add services to their product instead of just digitalizing their product. Internet and mobile technologies offer many opportunities for delivering information products, but also to economically customize products and delivery.
One of the biggest problems of the current web is information overload. My concept solves this problem and allows subscribers to receive customized news based on interests and the time factor they want to spend on consuming news.

If I pass the first rounds I’ll have more words to explain the concept, now it is more of an indication of the problem.

Many industry leaders have recognized that Twitter is just the start of a new web 3.0 era. A web that will be more human, real time and in which personal brands will play a major role. Andrew Keen held an inspiring presentation about web 3.0 at The next web 2009 conference in Amsterdam back in April. He beliefs that web 3.0 will have better business models were web 2.0 failed at this. Web 3.0 will be a place of great inequality, where people with more followers (or peers in their network) will have a much stronger personal brand. Khris Loux vision about web3.0 and decentralization of the web also adds to a better understanding of web3.0.

Opportunities and Personal profiles as data filter.

At the start of this new era where the new industry leaders still need to take form, there are great opportunities. Analyzing the developments of technology and the web, allows us to rethink systems. This is how I came up with the concept of using personal brands in a system to filter data.

Imagine the possibilities of using the profiles of your followers and contacts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkdIn and other social networks to filter data. This would be a perfect way to filter high quality information out of the information overflow of data that we receive from the internet. Such a human filtering system would allow you to choose filtering options based on your network. Who’s notes on a certain article you would like to read for example. If nobody in your followers list has any notes, tags, comments on this data you would choose to see the data filtered by someone with the strongest personal brand(most followers) in the category. To achieve this example you would need a system that connects Twitter(for the personal profile, network and followers count) with Wefollow.com(for the categories in which someone is specialized).

This concept could be applied to any kind of data. The filtering of data is already happening with web 2.0 by tagging, commenting and sharing. The addition of web 3.0 would be to bring in personal profiles and brands allowing better filtering systems to be developed. Imagine a search engine which gives you higher quality results by using your social network’s activities to filter it and rank it based on who you choose to give most authority to.

Who will develop the personal brand standard?

Many have written about online profiles. Chris Brogan, Khris Loux and others have suggested a standard that would allow users to control their own profile information container. On which social network site you decide to place it and remove it when you want to leave the site, giving control and property of the online profile back to the users.

So, who would successfully develop and set such a standard? Would it be Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or maybe MynameisE? This last one might actually surprise us. Currently they focus on sharing social profiles in the real world, but this might change in the future as they announced Khris Loux is joining their board of directors and he seems to share this vision of an open profile standard.

Only time will tell who are going to fill the gaps and form the new industry of web 3.0. One thing I’m sure of: It’s going to be some interesting times!