We wish you all a very happy 2010!
As a small gift from us we extended our Facebook Connect implementation 
From now on you can send all your posts in any sixgroups.com Community to Facebook and Twitter at the same time:
Post to Facebook and Twitter from sixgroups
Post on Facebook send from spielwiese.sixgroups.com
Post on Twitter send from spielwise.sixgroups.com
See this dense collection of facts why social media is a true media revolution. The video is inspired by the well known and truly eye opening “Did you know” , which you have to watch too, if you haven’t seen it yet.
A quick sumup of key points if you’re lazy:
Clay Shirkey about the new communication paradigms generated by digital communication & social media – brilliant.
Shirkey manages to picture and explain the impact of the internet on our social structures in easy words and with compelling examples.
“Internet is the first platform that allows both group-building/management & conversation”.
“Media that is good at creating conversations (e.g. phone) is no good at creating groups, media that’s good at creating groups (movies…) is no good at creating conversations. The internet is the first medium that has native support for groups and conversations at the same time (many to many pattern)”.
“The Internet also becomes the main carrier for ALL other media!”
Never thought about it like this before but it makes complete sense. The Internet is also a meta medium.
We kall now consumers become producers now, but I like Clay’s analogy on this one:
“It is as if you bought a book, they threw in the printing press for free”.
Using the last big Chinese earthquake as an example, he demonstrates why in a new media landscape, where the news is not only produced by so called “professionals” it will become increasingly difficult for countries to censor the Internet. “Media is produced locally, quickly, by amateurs and at an incredible abundance” which makes it practically uncontrollabel.
Times of classic sender and receiver models are over, we are increasingly in an environment where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap.
“Convene your supportters, dont control them”
Never try to hide conversation, e.g. delete negative replies. They happen whether you like it or not. So deal with them appropriately.
“Media is less sending a message to an individuum, but about creating an environment for convening and supporting groups.”
Well, I guess that sums it up nicely. I couldn’t agree more
“Social media is like teen sex. Everybody wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is surprise it’s not better”
Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist, Google
This presentation I just found explains why you SHOULD care about social media:
Contact us for advice on how to incorporate social technologies into your company
Last week we released another new version of sixgroups.com. As always, we have some cool new features for you:
New features for partner websites.
We think of our communities as networks of websites and people, that share a unifiying topic or passion for something.
Today’s release strengthens the role of the partner websites of a community. Partner websites can now share their content with community via RSS.
Website owners can now register their site with a community and add an RSS feed.
The posts from this feed will then show up on the community page and in all the content and livecommunity widgets on all other participating partnersites of this community.
Neat, huh?
If you are interested in creating a bigger network of websites around a certain topic, please contact Philipp (ps@sixgroups.com).
New Login process
We believe in open standards. From today it is easier than ever before to sign in to sixgroups.com using OpenID (Yiid, Google, Yahoo or any other OpenID Provider) and OAuth (Twitter).
If you plan to use one of these login methods for an exisiting account, you can do this in your profile settings. We are working hard to enable more cool things like this in cooperation with Yiid (e.g. a neat thing called “portable contacts”). We are really glad people seem to like it : Reactions on twitter by tfoe, mrtopf, weyandch
Enhanced spam protection
We added a spam report button to content pages and introduced a user friendly email verification process (hopefully you like it too). If users want to use some functions that proved to be attractive for spammers before, (posting on people’s walls or writing messages), you now need a verified email address.
Hey, wait a second. Our business plan says, this should have happened on 22nd February. We’re one month early… 
As you might have noticed, we have had connectivity issues on Monday and also partly on Tuesday. This is partly due to the fact that we are hosting two premium Livecommunities at the moment: Apart from the European Online Marketing Conference OMD which has been online for a few weeks already we are now providing a Livecommunity for THE ULTIMATE web2.0 conference, the web2.0 Expo NewYork!
Thanks to talks with the web2.0 organizers at O’Reilly by our advisor Stowe Boyd, we are able to provide the community network on crowdvine with an enhanced conference version of sixgroups.com. The Livestream is aggregating Tweets, Flickr photos, blogposts and YouTube videos tagged w2e_NY08 or web2expo a. Until today we already aggregated more than 1500 tweets related to the conference, as well as a bunch of other interesting resources.
Unfortunately one of our application servers crashed on Monday morning, and it took us way to long to replace it. Combined with the higher traffic from the conferences we were unable to cope with the requests coming in to our servers and thus were unreachable for quite some time – we are really sorry about that!
We worked hard to fix the performance issues and the team has basically forgotten what beds look like since… well… the application server has been replaced with a stronger one and the performance issues have been resolved – yay!
We also added a bunch of features in the latest release, of which most are also available in the standard version of Livecommunities.
Filters
You can now filter the Livestream of communities by a variety of filters to show only things you are interested in, e.g. only new images or tweets:
Featured Livediscussions
If you feel like something you said is of major importance and want to point others to your post, you can change the title and permalink of the post to something meaningful. Instead of linking to http://webexny2008.sixgroups.com/live/thread/392467/ you can now create links like http://webexny2008.sixgroups.com/live/thread/design-and-ux/
For conferences we also added a new feature that allows them to add a twitter hashtag to the room, so people can tweet their responses directly into that room:
Deeplinks
You can now deeplink to posts in your Livecommunity: http://webexny2008.crowdvine.com/#6g/live/thread/design-and-ux/
If you want to a post directly from your own page with a Livecommunity, add the class “sgDeeplink” to your anchors, to make them open in the overlay.:
<a href=”http://blog.sixgroups.com/#6g/live/thread/367257/” class=”sgDeeplink” >Mein Deeplink</a> , e.g. like this: Check out what Helge said in the Livestream
Follow discussions
Before, it was hard to get back to a post in the Livestream without bookmarking the permalink somewhere. Now you can do this with the new “follow” functionality. Click on the little heart on the right corner of every new item in the Livestream to add this to your list of followed posts.
You can then filter the Livestream to show only discussions you like:
Custom guest name
Guests can now pick a custom name:
Yesterday’s release brings some new cool features and one major bugfix to sixgroups.com:
Twitter-Backchannel
You can now send a copy of your Livecommunity posts to Twitter:
When sending tweets from sixgroups.com you can choose between eight different icons to express your current mood. We also use these icons to identify posts from sixgroups.com to prevent them from showing up in the Livestream a second time.
Global Twitter search
Up till today the Livestream would only show Tweets from sixgroups users. Now you can also chose to display Tweets from the global Twitter search.
Find your friends on sixgroups.com
Finding people on sixgroups.com you already know by email has just become a lot easier. Import your contacts from your webmail adress book (eg. Gmail, MSN, Yahoo, etc) and we will tell you, who of your mail contacts already has a sixgroups.com account. Contacts who are not on sixgroups.com yet, can be invited to join. Of course we do not store your email address or password for this service.
Safari overhaul
So far we have treated Safari as a second class citizen. With this release we have fixed some JavaScript issues and a login problem in the Livecommunities related to pretty strict third party cookie regulations in Safari. We are happy to announce that all known Safari bugs have been eliminated or worked around with the current release (tested on the Safari 3.1).
OpenID fixes for Yahoo OpenIDs
A bug with OpenID Login with Yahoo OpenIDs discovered by Bernd Schmitz on Saturday night , that made us precautiously disable OpenID logins in general for ~24h, has been fixed too. When people tried logging into sixgroups.com using only http://yahoo.com as OpenID URL, the system stored a wrong OpenID for those users. Instead of using the proper Yahoo OpenID URL, which the server returned after authenticating (e.g. http://flickr.com/photos/username ), http://yahoo.com got saved as their OpenID in the database. When these users then tried logging in with http://yahoo.com as OpenID URL, they ended up being logged in as the first user that was found the DB with this URL (in this case the user art99). Luckily only two users were affected, the error has been fixed and OpenID Login is now fully functional again. We are really sorry for the caused inconvenience.
sixgroups.com will be a media sponsor of the next Going Solo Conference, an educational web conference which will be held in Leeds, UK on September 12th, 2008.
Our advisory board member Stowe Boyd introduced the Livecommunity to Going Solo organizer Stephanie Booth who integrated the Livecommunity on the conference website yesterday. She also posted a really nice explanation on how to participate on her blog. sixgroups.com also offers premium packages for conferences. Feel free to inquire about these if you are interested.
The Livecommunity on going-solo.net will aggregate everything happening on major web 2.0 media services (flickr, Technorati…) related to the Going Solo conference. Just join the community and tag you photos, videos ang blogposts with “goingsolo” and use the Twitter hastag #goingsolo to make your media appear on the Going Solo website. We hope to provide a service, that will add to the overall experience of the conference and foster communication and interaction among its visitors.
Last weekend we deployed a small bugfix release that adds to overall stability and performance of sixgroups.com. The only visible change we applied is fairly small but has been requested by several users for quite some time: you can now set your forum and groups to private, so only members of your ommunity can access them. You can change these settings by clicking “Features” under the “Admin” panel of your community.
