Website monitoring startup WatchMouse is now monitoring the top 100 retail websites for availability around the holiday shopping season. The starup tested retail sites including Apple, Amazon, BestBuy, Borders, Overstock, Walmart and Zappos, for availability and performance during the month leading up to and including Thanksgiving Day, November 25 and Black Friday, November 26.

WatchMouse says that 27 of the 100 sites had 100% uptime; 15 came in at 99.99%, and only American Eagle Outfitters, GiltGroupe, Footlocker.com, and Fry’s Electronics landed in the “unacceptable” category. American Eagle Outfitters performed the worst during the monitoring period from October 25 – November 26, 2010 with nearly one full day of downtime.

Additional websites that experienced performance issues on either Thanksgiving, Black Friday, or both included Abercrombie and Fitch, Bulgari, JC Penney, Louis Vuitton, Office Max, Pottery Barn, Toys R Us, Williams-Sonoma, and Z Gallerie.

WatchMouse says e-retailers are particularly vulnerable to slow page load speeds because of the large number of components each website needs to load in order to optimize all of its product offerings and images. But latency and performance is particularly important for retail sites because users will abandon transactions.

According to a recent report published by Forrester Research and Akamai, two seconds is the new threshold in terms of an average online shopper's expectation for a web page to load. Other research conducted by Google and Microsoft revealed that a delay of only a half second can cause increased shopping cart abandonment rates, higher bounce rates, fewer pages per visit, and reduced revenue per site visitor.

With consumers expected to spend $32.4 billion online this season, retailers are under even more pressure to ensure that their sites perform over the next few months.

While more retailers were offering online deals this year on Black Friday, it should be interesting to see how retail sites perform on Cyber Monday, which is one of the most trafficked online spending days of the year.

You can access WatchMouse’s full list here.

Google TV might be in a bit of a pickle if a Best Buy and Sony sale is any indication. The platform launched a few weeks ago with the Logitech Revue and Sony Internet TV. Both are loaded with the same system and so both are suffering the fate of Big Media’s blockade. It’s a sad story, really.  Google TV aimed to bridge the span between subscription-based TV and Internet content, but so far said bridge is still held up by bureaucratic red tape nonsense.

Sony seems to be solving one of the platform’s biggest deal breakers: the price. Google TV units are crazy expensive. The Logitech Revue launched at $300 and that price is still holding strong even at retailers like Amazon amidst nearly site-wide Black Friday sales. It’s the Sony set-top box model that’s uncharacteristically on sale right now even though it’s less than a month old. This doesn’t look  so well for Google’s living room takeover plans.

The $400 Blu-ray Google TV mash-up dropped in the middle of October with a $399 MSRP. Traditionally Sony employs a pricing strategy similar to Apple’s in that they price it right the first time and significant price drops only happen when a successor is ready. It’s strange then to see the Sony Internet TV Blu-ray Disc Player’s price already cut by a whopping $100 bringing it down to $299. This doesn’t smell like a Black Friday sort of deal, either.  No, the price cut is everywhere from Best Buy to even the unit’s product page.

At least $299 sounds a tad better than $399 seeing how it’s sort of a gimped Blu-ray player anyway with limited outputs and a crazy controller. But it feels like $299 is still too high for either units seeing how most of the novel Google TV features are either controlled by big media or they’re not available right now like Android Apps. At least this price cut — if it is a permanent price cut —  makes things a bit easier for the average consumer.

Previously the Logitech Revue, the Sony Blu-ray player Google TV and the Sony LCD Google TV were all at different price points. Now, the set-top versions are $299 with the LCD embedded versions still commanding a premium over the standard sort. In my experience the Sony version seems to be more friendly with different sort of video codecs, but the Logitech Revue uses a somewhat better looking interface skin. Of course they both come with different remotes with the Sony shipping with a PS3-type controller where a full-size keyboard comes the Revue.

There’s still a chance that this lower price won’t stick around. Most of Sony’s Blu-ray line is on sale in the spirit of Black Friday but none share the 25% cut and the $299 price just seems like a natural position for Sony to place the unit if sales aren’t meeting expectations.

Price cuts never speak well to a product’s success and so Google TV may be in some serious trouble here. I already stated along with most every other reviewer that the feature set is half-baked, the units are overpriced, and now this lower price seems to say that consumers aren’t biting even though there’s a commercial for the Sony units nearly every 20 minutes during prime time TV. Sigh. If Google can’t disrupt big media, who can?

The UK’s High Court has ruled that news monitoring agencies will have to pay publishing companies to use their web content, effectively re-classifying headlines as separate literary works subject to copyright.

The moves follows a legal battle between the Newspaper Licensing Agency, owned by eight of the UK's largest newspaper groups, and Meltwater, a news monitoring agency. Meltwater plans to appeal against the decision, but if it’s upheld, you can expect a wave of more legal actions, claims that links are copyright and the break down of the UK’s internet industry. Well done High Court.

On December 8 and 9, the LeWeb conference will descend upon the city of Paris for two days of non-stop tech. This year, the event will have a bit more TechCrunch flavor, as several of us are going, and the startup competition has been tweaked a bit to be more like our own TechCrunch Disrupt competition. It should be a great time. But we realize it’s also expensive. So organizer Loic Le Meur has given us two tickets to give away to readers.

Now, to be clear, these are tickets to the two-day event, they don’t include airfare or lodging. But if you’re at or around Paris and/or you don’t mind paying for travel, this is a killer deal, as each ticket normally goes for about 2,000 euros.

We’ve done this sort of giveaway in the past, and the rules will remain the same. Just leave a comment below, giving us a reason why you absolutely need to go to this conference. We’ll pick the two best with Le Meur, and each will receive a ticket. Just be sure that they account you’re commenting from has some way to actually get ahold of you (website, email, etc), if you win. We’ll pick the winners on Monday, so you have the entire weekend to come up with something good.

This looks to be the biggest LeWeb yet, as there will be over 2,500 participants from over 60 countries. That’s basically double where they were just three years ago. They also just secured famous French DJ Bob Sinclar to play at the afterparty. The overall theme of the event is “Platforms”. And here are the 16 startups going head-to-head in the competition.

Hopefully we’ll see you in Paris in a couple weeks. And even if you don’t win one of the tickets, TechCrunch readers can still use this link to get a 200 euro discount.

Just like Steve Jobs said we eventually stopped making fun of and just plain got used to the word “pad” in the name of his magical device, no longer thinking of that other thing also called a pad whenever we pass by an Apple store. In fact, we’re already debating the hypothetical merits of the iPad 2 and nary an iTampon 2 or similar reference in sight. Until now…

Iselle Slome and the ladies of ArthurORMartha have created just about the most ridiculous parody of a computing product I’ve seen since MadTV’s extremely prescient Apple spoof. The best thing about this video? It highlights how uncannily similar those cheesy “Windows 7 Was My Idea” ads are to commercials for feminine products.

Warning: Not for the overly squeamish.

Industrious Briton Ben Marsh has taken advantage of the epic ten inches of snow forecast in the UK this weekend to bring his fellow citizens together. On his site UKSnow, users who tweet about the weather in realtime can now have their location coordinates and snow descriptions plotted on a map, as well as streaming in a sidebar. Many are including photos (like the one above) for an even richer experience.

@Emmzaa_X
Emily Norwood

Yes people, it's snowing. It does that in winter. Now stop making such a fuss #uksnow

about 15 hours ago via webRetweet

Users can get their tweets on the UKSnow map by tweeting out the hashtag #UKSnow in addition to first half of their British postal code. There’s even a “Rate the Snow” feature with a 1-10 ranking (7/10 or more -Blizzard!) as well as an option to add snowbank depth.

Marsh has also built a mobile version in case you are actually outside in the snow and felt the need to share. Thus far it looks like a lot of people are feeling the need as #UKSnow is now the #1 trending topic in the UK. No word on whether Marsh plans on expanding to other countries (like the US), but I’m hoping he does.

Because there really is something special about snow.

Above image: AngelOYS

It’s Black Friday, which means that many of you woke up this morning at the crack of dawn, shrugged off your Thanksgiving food comas, and made your way to the dreary parking lots of electronic stores across the country. Right about now, you’re probably just waking up from your recovery nap — and there’s nothing better to get your sluggish mind back on track than this week’s episode of OMG/JK.

This week, we talk about The Daily, an iPad-only newspaper from News Corp that will reportedly be launching soon. We also discuss the latest iOS software release, which adds a slew of features to the iPad just in time for the holidays, including the aptly-named AirPlay.

And don’t forget Gingerbread, the upcoming release of Android that seemed like it should have launched this month, but is still MIA. But don’t fret — Google CEO Eric Schmidt did tease us with a glimpse of Near Field Communication, which could well make it worth the wait.

So grab a slice of leftover pie and sit back for a recap of the last week in tech — now with more facial hair than ever!

Here are some recent posts that are relevant to the topics we discuss:

• What Should An iPad Newspaper Look Like?
• Apple Unifies The iOS Line With iOS 4.2 For iPad
• iOS 4.2 Update Wipe Out Your iPhone Music? Try This.
• Google "Nexus Two" Hardware Issue Delays Launch
• Android Gingerbread Supports NFC: Tap Your Phone To Pay With Your Credit Card

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Ten years ago, most VCs refused to invest outside of Silicon Valley. Now, most of them have funds in Israel, Europe, India or China– and lately many of those Chinese funds are outperforming the US counterparts. But August Capital is still sticking with the kind of local venture capital that built this industry, and David Hornik explains why in this week’s episode of Ask a VC.

But, Portland? Yeah he’d invest in a Portland company and answers a reader question about what the local ecosystem needs to do to get his and other venture capitalists’ attention.

Hornik also (sort of) answers one of the best reader questions I’ve gotten in a while: What’s the dumbest investment he’s seen recently in Silicon Valley? (Hint.)

Remember back in 2008 when there was a lot of talk about how the iPhone would flop in Japan? 91 percent of Japanese would not be buying the device, said one survey. By 2009, that talk inevitably turned to how it had already flopped. With some even writing about how the Japanese people “hate” the device. Then something funny happened. That kind of talk abruptly stopped. And for good reason. As it turns out, the iPhone is actually a massive success in the country.

Much like it did in the U.S., the iPhone is transforming the mobile landscape in Japan. Two stories today highlight this. The first, talks about the Japanese iPhone “craze” and details how app developers are rushing to get into the potentially huge market for Japanese iPhone apps. The second story notes how NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile carrier, is turning to marketing to make up for the fact that they don’t have the iPhone (it’s sold there by rival Softbank). Marketing involving yes, Darth Vader.

The Vader choice is a very interesting one. You can also see him waving his hand in the commercials and stating matter-of-factly, “there is no iPhone.”

But there is. And despite the early doubts and reports, it has become a massive success in the country. I was in Japan for a few weeks earlier this year, and while I didn’t see a huge number of iPhones at the time, I also didn’t see a huge number of smartphones — most people seemed to have the same flip phone device. Apparently, that’s now changing, quickly.

From The Wall Street Journal’s Japan Realtime blog:

The iPhone accounts for about two-thirds of the domestic smartphone market, making DoCoMo's efforts even more challenging in image-conscious Japan, where the iPhone is starting to become a must-have personal accessory among many young people.

And while I didn’t see a ton of iPhones, I did see a ton of iPods. And I do mean a ton. I feel like every other person I saw had one. So it makes sense that the iPhone would eventually catch on there. At first, there was talk that it was a matter of getting used to the touchscreen for character input. Again, apparently, that’s happening now.

From the Yahoo story:

Everywhere one turns, on commuter trains and urban cafes, people are tapping away at their iPhone screens in a relatively rare Japanese embrace of technology that isn’t homegrown.

Meanwhile, I can’t recall seeing a single Android device while I was there. Nor did I see any store advertising them (the iPhone, on the other hand, was everywhere). But that’s apparently changing now as well. In fact, Darth Vader’s campaign is actually to promote the Samsung Galaxy S, an Android device. And early sales have apparently been very good.

The next question: can Android use a similar strategy to mimic their U.S. success? Android has risen to power in this country thanks to a plethora of devices on a range of carriers. Many are quick to point to the fact that the single biggest factor of the rise has been that Verizon, the largest carrier in the U.S., put their marketing muscle behind the devices. That’s now what NTT DoCoMo, again, the largest carrier in Japan, is doing. And with The Force, to boot.

How will Apple strike back?

More: Darth Vader Calls Apple About His iPhone 4 Antenna [Video]

Well there’s at least one former Digg engineer out there that had a happier Thanksgiving. We’ve gotten word that John Quinn, former Digg VP of Engineering, will be joining luxury discount marketplace Gilt Groupe as VP of Engineering come next Monday. Quinn will be working out of the Gilt Groupe New York office under CIO Steve Jacobs.

Prior to Gilt Groupe, Quinn had spent three years at Digg and before that was VP of Engineering at Squaretrade. According to our sources, Quinn was instrumental in the problematic Digg v4 redesign and its bumpy move over to a Cassandra versus MySQL database. Judging by the Digg team page Digg has not yet replaced Quinn as VP.

Gilt Groupe CIO Steve Jacobs tells TechCrunch that the new hire will be focusing on scaling and that the company is growing rapidly, “Gilt is expanding into new businesses all the time and we’re making sure that we have the right people in place. People do not think of Gilt as a technology company and we are a technology company.” When asked about concerns that Quinn bore responsibility for some of Digg’s infrastructure stumbles, Jacobs said, “I’m not worried about that for Gilt.”

Gilt Groupe, which has $83 million in funding led by Matrix Partners, recently launched Gilt City, a local deals network that aims to be a more high-end niche Groupon.

It’s been less than one month since Facebook launched its new deals service on top of its still-nascent Places platform. But that hasn’t stopped it from lining up some of the US’s biggest brands in time for the holiday season. A few minutes ago, the social network posted a note that shows just how many companies have already climbed on board to offer deals over the holidays. Note that some of these have already been announced (including the charitable Southwest Deal that donates $1 per check-in to the Make-a-Wish Foundation), but seeing them in one place makes it easier to gauge how much traction the feature is getting.

So why is this important? As we’ve discussed before, these location services are in a race to snap up deals with as many national brands as possible, in addition to the longtail of local businesses. Some of these brands want exclusivity (they don’t want to be on the same location service as a competitor), and brands will probably work with one or two location services instead of taking a shotgun approach so as to minimize shopper confusion. And many people are just trying out location apps for the first time — if they start associating deals with Facebook (or Foursquare or SCVNGR or Gowalla) then that might the app they turn to first in the future.

Of course, Facebook isn’t the only service with big brands on board. Foursquare is currently doing some very interesting things, with Safeway and Pepsi, and had plenty of deals lined up with national brands for Black Friday today, with offers from the likes of Toys R Us and RadioShack. And SCVNGR recently signed up Coca Cola for a big holiday promotion.

Here’s the Facebook overview, via the note posted to Facebook’s Places page:

Southwest Airlines: Donating $1 per check in towards air travel to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Hard Rock Café: Donating $1 to WhyHunger to fight childhood hunger and poverty worldwide. Through December 31 (or up to $100,000).

JC Penney: Check in to receive $10.00 off $50.00 purchase towards an assortment of merchandise and services.

H&M: The first 2000 check-ins will receive 20% off any item of your choice.

Starbucks: Donating $1.00 per check in to Conservation Intl to help protect 5,000 acres of forest.

24 Hour Fitness: Donating $1.00 to KaBOOM! for every person who checks in using Facebook Places.

The North Face: Donate $1.00 to the National Park Foundation for every individual who checks in at one of America's nearly 400 national parks or visits a The North Face retail location.

REI: Supporting local conservation efforts, each time you check in at an REI store, REI will donate $1 to a local nonprofit.

The Palms Casino Resort, Las Vegas: Check in to receive an offer to extend your stay for one extra night at no cost. If you can't stay the extra night, receive a room upgrade.

TAO and LAVO, Las Vegas: Check in at TAO Las Vegas or LAVO Las Vegas and receive complimentary admission for you and one guest on your next visit.

Harrah’s: Offering a number of Deals at its various properties for people who check in at each location.
Bally's: buy one Jubilee! ticket and get one free.
Paris Las Vegas: buy one Eiffel Tower Ride pass and get one free.
Rio: get free admission to the VooDoo Lounge.
The Flamingo Las Vegas: buy one Paradise Garden Buffet and get one free.
O'Sheas Las Vegas: buy one drink at the Dublin Up Bar and get one free.
Harrah's Las Vegas: buy one Flavors Buffet and get one free.
The Imperial Palace: buy one Emperor's Buffet and get one free.
Caesars Palace: buy one Lago Buffet and get one free.
Planet Hollywood: buy one Spice Market Buffet and get one free.

Just in case you’re unaware of our affection for singer/songwriter Jonathan Mann, see here, here, here, here, or here. But the relationship didn’t start out so friendly. Initially, we ripped him for the Bing jingle song he wrote to win a competition. And Mann responded by writing a song about me. But it’s all good. We’re BFF now. And Mann keeps cranking out the hits. Now he’s trying to see if his song-a-day success can transfer to an iPhone app.

Songatron is an app that Mann and developer Iliya Yordanov dreamed up so that anyone could have fun with the songs Mann writes on a daily basis. Essentially, it’s a lot like Mab Libs, but for music. You load up the app, say a word, and pick a song you want to apply it to. The song then plays (complete with Mann singing and playing the music) with your word inserted in key points.

Sure, it sounds a bit simple. Maybe even dumb. But it’s actually pretty funny. And as Mann notes, it’s great if you want to let someone know that you admire them — or if you want to mock them. I mean, just listen to this and this and especially this. Yep, awesome.

Once you pick the version of the song you like you can easily share it via email, Twitter, Facebook for all to enjoy.

And while the app costs $1.99, Mann has included 10 different songs, and promises to add 5 new songs a month from his collection (many for free, but some via in-app purchase). Plus, as a Thanksgiving Special, the app is 50 percent off, so it’s only $0.99 now. Good fun for the holiday times.

Meanwhile, the regular music career keeps progressing for Mann. Besides the Bing jingle, he got quite a bit of publicity when Apple played his iPhone 4 Antenna song before their “Antennagate” press conference over the Summer. Likely as a result, Mann will now be speaking and performing at MacWorld 2011 in January. He’s promised me that “I’m MG Siegler” will be played on stage. And he sent me along a clip of him and his band performing the song live recently. They’ve converted it into more of a punk rock song. It’s actually pretty awesome.

Watch Mann describe his new app below. The app works on the iPhone, iPod touch, and the iPad. Find it here.

HopeLab is a nonprofit video game lab founded by Pam Omidyar, wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. That’s right, I said non-profit video game lab. It seeks to make the world better through video games, and it’s hoping it has a new hit on its hands with Zamzee. Zamzee combats sedentary behavior by giving kids and teens points for moving more throughout the day and those points can be used to buy virtual goods or exchange for gift cards.

Early research shows a whopping 30% jump in activity when people play Zamzee– the equivalent of running a marathon every month. HopeLabs has decided to spin the game out into a for-profit company to help commercialize the game faster. Richard Tate of HopeLabs joined us via Skype to talk about the game that may be a solution if your kids ate too much Turkey yesterday.

Social products are an interesting bird. For even the most experienced product designer, social products prove an elusive lover. While there are many obvious truths in social products, there are also alot of ways to design them poorly. Especially when you are deep in the moment making pixel-level decisions trying to remember what's important, things may not be so clear.

The only magic I've found in designing compelling social products that have the best shot at breaking through the noise and capturing people's time and money is in being extremely clear on how your social product meets a few key design principles.

1. Design your product to matter in a world of infinite supply. In 2010, people are inundated with an overwhelming number of people, applications, requests, alerts, relationships, and demands on their time. You love your product. The benefits of it are totally obvious to you. However, if you and every member of your team can't crisply articulate what emotional benefit someone will get from spending 15 minutes on your social product that they can't get on Facebook, LinkedIN, or Twitter, you've got work to do.

This isn't touchy feely stuff. Neither I nor the prospective people who may use your social product care about your features, your game mechanics, or how amazing your application will be when there are millions of people on it. I'm selfish with my time and you've got seconds to hook me in with something new. And I'm not alone.

To successfully use the fleeting moments you have, you need to orchestrate everything under your control to work together seamlessly under a single brand with a single reason for existence. Make it emotional. If your team can't tie back every decision they are making to the emotion you want people to feel when they are using your social product, then your reason for existence isn't strong enough to serve its role, which is to guide your team and the product decisions you are making.

2. Be the best in the world at one thing. To put an even finer point on the focus required of any social upstart, you need to be best in the world at one thing. For Lululemon, they've built a $450 million annual revenue business by focusing on the black yoga pant. For Twitter, it's the 140 character message. For Facebook, it is connecting you to the people you already know. Everything these companies do ties back to a specific thing they are going to be best in the world at doing.

It's not always obvious upfront what should be your best in the world focus and enshrining the wrong thing can be a problem. However, it is much worse to build a social product without guiding principles. When you are focused on the one thing your social product is going to do better than everyone else, all you need to launch is your one thing and no more.

Ask yourself and every member of your team what you are best in the world at every week. Even better, define it, agree on it, print it out, blow it up, and put it on the wall. This should be the filter by which everyone is making product decisions.

3. Seek out uniqueness. Today's social platforms and applications are fantastic at meeting people's need to belong. But equally important – especially in a world of infinite supply – is what makes us feel different and special. People want scarcity. People want exclusivity. This doesn't mean your social product should be limited to a niche. Frontierville was built for mass appeal – so that I could play with ALL of my friends – but it still finds ways to bring uniqueness into its social experience via neighbors, customization of your plot, and collections.

When people talk about exclusivity and scarcity these days, discussions of game mechanics are never far behind. I love game mechanics as much as the next person. However, if you are implementing game mechanics in the exact same way as everyone else, you've got a problem. It goes back to the issue of infinite supply. If there is an infinite supply of points, badges, and levels because they exist on every single social product out there, the minute you use them without being thoughtful, you are losing your shot at exclusivity and scarcity. A better approach is to figure out what makes people feel unique and special on your service independent of any specific game tactic. Then, selectively cherry pick the features that reinforce your emotional reason for existence for people. For uniqueness to work, you have to lead, not follow.

4. Focus on your most important interaction until you have it right. Once you have the critical features defined, there is typically one interaction that is clearly the most important to get right. It's the interaction that if you get right means someone comes back and, if you don't get it right, you can't realize your full potential. Take this interaction and be maniacal about it. For Twitter, this is the Twitter stream. For Polyvore, this is the set page. For Facebook, this is the news feed. For YouTube, it's the video page. For Dailybooth, it's the live feed page. It's the interaction where your magic happens, so give it the care and feeding needed to make it a star.

5. Choose your words carefully. The earlier you are as a social product, the more your word choice should be different and distinct from everything else out there. Early on is the time to have something important and different to say. In fact, all the great brands of the past 30 years have started out appealing to the passionate and rebellious first. Virgin? Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Apple? The 1984 commercial. Nike? The subculture of intense runners sporting moustaches. Facebook? A few still remember the original Scarface logo.

There are things to copy from other services and there are things to make uniquely your own in social products. Layouts? Do your best but pay attention to what is already working. Colors? Hard to be original here, but blue is pretty played out. Icons? A toss up. Terminology? Own it. Your word choice is the primary place for you to have a point-of-view and present not only what you want your brand to emotionally mean to the people using it but the kinds of relationships you want people to have as a result of using your social product.

6. Create a party, not a museum. Great social products are clean, simple, and fast. The successful ones have little design flare, so that the people, photos, videos, text, and comments are front and center. The more design you add from colors to treatments, non-web-fonts, and graphics, the less your social application will feel like a party and the more it will feel like a museum. Or a magazine. Neither are a great goal. You want your social product to feel like it is a living and breathing party, not expensive furniture you're not supposed to sit on.

7. Develop relationships, not features. Today, we have multiple personalities and different types of relationships with people in the real and virtual worlds. If you are going to design a new social product, it's not enough to just offer a feature, like photos, videos, or events. You need to look at how the relationships on your social product will be important and different from the relationships you and others have already on Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter.

Most people will say that Facebook Connect handle the whole "people" thing for any new social product. I would argue that Facebook Connect is a start but if you can't quickly show someone a new relationship dynamic or similar people in your social product in a way that is unique to your application, the value of people interacting in your new product will accrue back to Facebook and not you.

For example, I've found that on most new social applications I join I have the same 10 Facebook friends – typically my most prolific friends on Facebook already – on this new service too. In most cases, because these new social applications are just an extension of the things I'm already following them do on Facebook, such as sharing photos, events, lists, and videos, I don't have a reason to come back to this new application a second time.

For a new social product, you need to think about how your social product expands, deepens, and changes the relationships people have today online and in the real world. This isn't easy to achieve. The best example of a social product doing this well is Quora. Originally seeded with Facebook's social graph, it has quickly differentiated itself by showing you people you may care about because of their thoughtful commentary, experience, and expertise displayed on topics that are important to you.

It takes alot for people to care about new people in the context of a new social product. Spending your time and energy on what constitutes similarity or what new relationships you want people to have as a result of your application is time worth spent.

As I think about what's going to be created, discovered, invented, and re-imagined with social software in the next six months let alone the next five years, I can't help but be excited. These principles shine a light on the first few feet in front of us, but, with every new social product success there will be new ones. As Alan Kay timelessly put it, "the best way to predict the future is to invent it." I, for one, can't wait to see what's next.

Gina Bianchini is the founder of Ning, the leading online platform for the world's organizers, activists and influencers to create their own social experiences with over 80 million unique users each month.