Forrester Research CEO George Colony, speaking at the LeWeb conference in Paris, identified social saturation as the main reason underlying his poor prognosis of the social web.

“Social is running out of hours. Social is also running out of people,” he said.

Is it true that people are encumbered with social networks? Social media overload, you might say? Not only that, but is it also true that there are no new markets for social startups to pursue? Have we reached a point of saturation?

Here are a couple of his slides (based on Forrester research) showing social adoption in various locations around the world. As you’ll see, it looks like there simply isn’t a lot of room for new social startups. Whether it’s Twitter & Facebook or Sina & Renren occupying people’s time – the point is that there are already so many social services available that we’ve hit a point where the market simply cannot take any more.

In urban areas of places like India and Russia, social adoption is nearly 100%. Even in the countries with the least social adoption on the graph, nearly 3/4 of the population is active on some sort of social site.

Forrester predicts that the social bubble that we are currently in will soon burst. And when it does, expect lesser social networks to fail:

We are in a bubble for social startups. This is going to sweep away some of the nonsense, like FourSquare. We are going to move to a post-social world that’s a little like the Web in the year 2000. A lot of companies launched, but they did not survive.

Ouch, Foursquare.

Apparently, this all leads way to a “post social world.” And these are the types of startups that will rule the landscape once the bubble bursts.

What do you think? Is there any room for more social media startups? As a population, do we even have time for more? Let us know in the comments.

Google+ has had check-ins for months. They’re easier to access on the iPhone app than the Android app (interestingly enough), and Google has allowed you to check in using Latitude and Google Places for quite some time.

As you may know, Google also has Google Offers, its own deals product. It should be no surprise that Google continues to integrate its various products together. This will continue. It will certainly continue with Google Offers and Google+. It only makes sense that the two should be married.

Last week, Mike Blumenthal discovered a page discussing the check-in offers while perusing the Google Places Offer Help center. He quoted the following text from a page he found (which has since been removed):

If your customers have to visit your locations in order to do business with you, you can request that they check-in on Google+ in order to redeem your offers. They can choose to share the check-in publicly or with some of their circles, which helps spread the word about your business on Google+. They can also choose to keep their check-in private and still redeem an offer.

If your customers do not have to visit your location, for example if you serve homes or businesses by delivery or by callouts, you can keep this option off (set to “No”) and customers will not be asked to check-in when they redeem offers. We use the Service Areas and Location Settings setting on your listing to determine if you have a service area for offers that have already been created. When you create new offers, you can choose whether to allow a check-in during redemption.

This should provide businesses with yet another way to get more out of Google+. Google Offers itself still has quite a bit of expanding to to, in terms of spreading to more cities, but it has been expanding fairly steadily. This should continue for the foreseeable future.

Frederic Lardinois at Silicon Filter quotes Mayer as saying, “We think there are interesting ways we can monetize this, but also ways to help our users save money,” and says she indicated that Google is continuing work on other location products like Latitude.

Some have wondered if Latitude would disappear in favor of Google+. I’m still betting that it will go away eventually, at least as a standalone product, but it appears to be safe for now.

Twitter’s busy letting the world in on the sheer volume of apps that have been developed for the service and how they are going to help foster more growth in the near future. TechCrunch is convering the event and tells us

Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver just took the stage at LeWeb a couple of minutes ago, and shared some announcements with the audience about the future of the platform and the effect this will have on the ecosystem.

He also shared a milestone for the company: Sarver said 50,000 registered applications to date have been built using Twitter APIs.

The roadmap ahead:

Transparency: “we need to be more public about our policy and intentions”
Communication: “we need to be out there and let our developers know what’s going on”
Utility: “we need to keep providing our robust APIs and enable third-party developers to thrive”
Profitability: “when our partners succeed, we succeed” (more details coming early 2010)

Of course, since this is Twitter most people will laser in on the P word (profitability). Some of the significant ‘details’ around these areas is that everyone will have full access to the data stream in 2010 (what that actually means is TBD). Look for a new website for developers with dashboards and the like for the development community.

Also, as a sign that the development of apps is truly a big deal there will be a Twitter developer conference in 2010 called Chirp in San Francisco next year

The conference, which will be geared towards developers, is likely to be similar in some ways to Facebook’s F8 conference that is held each year in San Francisco. Not too many details were given but there is a landing page up already for the event (which is scheduled to take place sometime in 2010).

So Twitter continues to flourish and develop to try to handle the continued growth despite some concern about visitor fall off recently. I suspect that some of the developers are the very reason for this ‘concern’ as many people access Twitter through third party apps to begin with and those growing numbers are not tracked by these number crunching entities.

Looks like 2010 is going to be another big year for Twitter.

Comments

Reducing the amount of time it takes to find something other than a song you don’t like or an annoying kid is one priority.  "What we’re very focused on right now is content discovery technology and how to make the finding great videos easier for users, based on their profile and past usage," said Hurley according to Robin Wauters.

Also, Hurley continued, "We’re pleased with the mobile content consumption side of the equation, but I’ll be the first to acknowledge that we need to work on making uploading through mobile devices far better."

As for what won’t get a lot of attention, it doesn’t look like live video is going to be a big focus.  Hurley spoke about it in uncertain terms, only allowing for the possibility of once-a-month live streaming events in the near future.  And social features won’t come flying out of the woodwork, either.

So look for a smarter and more accessible YouTube to evolve over time.  Just don’t count on seeing any completely new stuff popping up soon.

Related Articles:

> YouTube Unveils Video Targeting Tool

> YouTube Wraps Up Another Content-Sharing Deal

> YouTube Gets Faster With "Feather" Beta

But that’s the kind of the point, too. We’re past all that petty, backwards thinking that causes us to find joy in stereotypes and oppressive (repressive) attitudes that demean and degrade us. Aren’t we?

Well, no. Not completely, and that may be why Loic Le Meur, blogger, entrepreneur and founder of Le Web, a conference for bloggers and entrepreneurs in Paris, has apologized for promoting a video called "Girls of LeWeb3."

Reportedly, the video, produced by ChaufferDeBuzz, "lingers on – the physical merits of the female participants in the conference…Shots of women who don’t know they’re being filmed walking away, talking on the phone, eating, scowling at the camera, plus giggling and reading out cue cards with the name of the startup which made it, with voyeuristic zoom shots of bums and so on" with Sean Kingston’s "Beautiful Girls" playing in the background. (Description courtesy of Meg Pickard.)

Le Meur chalks up the faux pas to being "too French." We take that to mean that he feels looking at pretty women is perfectly normal. And who’s to argue with that?

Guardian blogger Jemima Kiss, that’s who. Kiss called the video "embarrassing and creepy" as she called Le Meur onto the carpet for tweeting to everybody about it and posting it on the LeWeb homepage. Kiss writes:

"I’d love to know what the women in this film think of their attendance at a serious, well-respected conference being turned into cheap buzz marketing video that would sit well in the ad breaks on late-night Channel Five. All they’d need is the ‘text me to chat’ numbers at the bottom of the screen."
 

One of the women apparently in the video, perhaps a French one, bless her heart, didn’t seem to mind. Livia LaColare, who posted the now-defunct YouTube video on her blog, responded in the comments:
 

"I’d be offended only in case someone was actually mocking women’s intelligence in it. I think that the worst thing we can do as women is to make a big deal out of it. Come on, it’s just a nerdy video about girls attending a conference."
 

While Livia is obviously fine with it, public relations blogger Stuart Bruce thinks it was "a dumb move" that "makes the industry look like Neanderthal fools."
 

"His mistake is compounded by the fact that he quite correctly identifies that one of the main failings of Le Web 3 is that there were far too few women speaking and attending. Is this sleazy video by a ‘buzz market’ firm really going to help him improve it next year?"
 

Well, regardless of its effects on recruiting women, Le Meur was quick to act, deleting the video from Le Web in general and apologizing to Jemima Kiss out of what appears to be the Christmas spirit. Le Meur writes:
 

"I understand, sorry did not see it that way I must be too french sometimes. I am easy these days. I want to apologize for anything you might not like or have liked, just name it and I will apologize. I only want to send love for Christmas (and sometimes receive some too but that’s not compulsory)."
 

I guess Christmas spirit is what you call that. 
 
 

Amid Drama, Blognation Is Kaput

In short, it’s a total mess.

Sam Sethi, CEO and founder of Blognation blames TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington. Arrington, and lots of other people, blame Sam Sethi.

Bad Blood

Sethi worked for Arrington as editor of TechCrunch UK until December of last year. Sethi left TechCrunch on bad terms after he posted a negative review of LeWeb, a French conference. Arrington denies he fired Sethi, but had asked him to delete the review because of a conflict of interest involving a competing TechCrunch conference.

The founding of Blognation was to follow, and so was more bad blood between Sethi and Lee Wilkins, whom many credit with developing the idea for the company. Arrington says Sethi "booted" Wilkins, who lives in Romania, from the project, and that at one point the conversations got so heated between them that Sethi threatened to fly to Romania to "rip [Wilkins'] head off."

Wilkins went on to set up a similar blog network called MyKinda, which launched last month.

Show Me the Money

Earlier this month, Blognation editor Oliver Starr dropped a bombshell full of dirty laundry about his experience with Sethi and Blognation. In a post published both on his personal blog, and at the Blognation site (subsequently deleted), entitled "An Open Letter to Sam Sethi," Starr reports that he and other Blognation writers had not been paid since launch.

Also in the post, which spans 3,000 words and gets more emotional as it goes, Starr alleges Sethi repeatedly lied about forthcoming payment as well as venture capitalist funding. Starr describes Sethi’s behavior as fraudulent, criminal, and even psychotic.

"You made promises that people took to the bank and then you defaulted on them leaving everyone that trusted you to face the consequences," writes Starr. "I am not kidding when I say that there are people on Blognation that probably won’t have a Christmas thanks to believing in you.

"There are people that are going to be late on car payments and there are people that are going to have to think twice before they go to the dentist because they are out some $10, $20 or even $30,000 dollars of income that they were expecting, for which they HAVE A CONTRACT and for which you have an obligation because you told us that you had the money when in fact you never really did!"

A Blognation Editor Dies

Sethi responded in the comments section of a TechCrunch article that Starr had been asked to leave Blognation in November, implying the post was in response to that. Sethi also stated that a round of funding was about to be closed and that everyone would be paid:

"Marc Ochant [sic] and I spoke on Sunday when he blogged about Facebook. Marc along with the other editors are aware of the situation regarding the delays we have had in funding as they are in direct contact with the VC on our “private” backchannel.

"Just for the record EVERY editor has a contract and will be paid in full prior to Christmas."

That post was made on the morning of December 5th. Marc Orchant, whom Sethi says he spoke with Sunday, had a massive heart attack that same morning, and was reportedly unconscious through at least the 5th. Orchant died December 9th.

Though he’d be hard pressed to prove a correlation, Arrington suggests the stresses of nonpayment contributed to Orchant’s heart attack.

Sabotage or Royal Screwup?

Yesterday, Sethi announced that Blognation was kaput and that he would put the network up for auction, but not before accusing Arrington of sabotaging the company for fear of competition. Sethi blames Arrington for scaring off investors by publishing confidential emails and a "leaked" terms sheet from British investment firm Secora three days before signing.

While Sethi admits in the post that he’d lied to Blognation editors, he claims he was forced to because of Arrington’s FUD campaign to keep him from securing funding. The leaked terms sheet, he says, came from his email account and that Scotland Yard would be investigating who accessed it.

At this point, though, it’s rather difficult (nigh impossible) to determine what’s true and what isn’t from Sam Sethi. The Mobile Jones blog, which reported the Blognation shut-down a day before Sethi posted it on his blog, also reported on December 9th, that Sethi had apologized to Oliver Starr, admitted that he hadn’t fired Starr, and that he impersonated one of his blog editors to leave a comment on TechCrunch.

At stake here now would be sheer credibility, and at this point, Sethi’s credit has run out.

Translation: I agree with James Snell, who just made that point.

But here’s a challenge for social networks: how about you all add links to other social networks. So, when I look up Dave Winer on Twitter, for instance, I could see that he’s also on Flickr and Facebook.

For instance, I’m on Upcoming.org. If you visit me there you won’t have a clue that I’m also on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Yelp and a variety of other networks.

Plaxo and Pownce are two that are already letting me add links to other networks I’m on. I’m wondering if the industry could come up with some auto discovery protocols and/or ways to manually link things up?

Doing just this small step would greatly help us get down the road to some sort of federated system where I don’t need to fill out my information for each of my networks I’m on. It really is a pain in the behind to keep them all up to date.

Please? Pretty please?

Comments

You know, Europe – that landmass containing about as many countries as America has states.  Yet not nearly as many successful Web 2.0-type companies have come from Europe as America, and that’s one of the things the fourth annual LeWeb conference hopes to address.

The disparity seems to be largely due to funding – Conor O’Neill, the chief executive of Louder Voice, told Ewan Spence that European investors “perceive anything dot com as being very risky . . .”  On the bright side, he added, “[B]ut that attitude is changing.”

So what else is LeWeb about?  Loïc Le Meur, the conference’s organizer, allowed would-be attendees to more or less select the schedule, and they appear focused on succeeding through law-abiding and moral means.  “[H]alf the conference is about how to grow an Internet that has a solid basis, that is respectful of privacy, copyrights and people,” Le Meur said in an interview with Victoria Shannon.

Time differences aside, LeWeb began yesterday (Tuesday) and ends today (Wednesday).  Goojet, PLYMedia, and G.ho.st have been picked as some of the most promising startups, so while we wait for next year’s conference, these will be the companies to watch.