The basic pitch is that you get shares for signing up and once the site is the new Facebook these nominal 0.01p shares will be worth £££’s (sigh).

Is me2everyone a scam?
Is it a clever viral campaign and, as it claims, destined to be the next big social network?
Is it a spam harvesting exercise?
Is it a waste of time?

Well one of my aims for this blog was to do the research into these things so you don’t have too… I signed up with one of my mail.com accounts (no addr book for it to spam, no real details) that I use for testing such things.

Alarm bell 1

Both invites I received were suspiciously similar – despite one being from a mid-30s business contact and the other a 20 year old musician contact.

And, sure enough once I’d logged in if offered me stock emails I could send to all my friends, like this one:

Recommending your friends, family, work colleaugues and even complete strangers is a great way to earn bonus shares. At the moment we are giving you 200 bonus shares for EVERYONE who you recommend using the link given above.

This is a real world value of GBP £0.20 today: but by 2012, we are forecasting these to be worth GBP £0.58! So imagine receiving GBP £116 for every new member you find!

Plus EVERYONE you recommend today will receive 100 shares for registering here for FREE. SImple…

Alarm bell 2

Perhaps I’m being a snob, but the site is distinctly amateur looking, apart from the intro video, the T+C’s are copy pasted from a £15 service i had come across before (website-law).

Alarm bell 3

The about us for the website lists an address in Kent that is distinctly residential – see here if you really want to (google map).

Any REAL “new facebook” would surely at least have a registered PO Box or… an office!

Alarm bell 4

Once registered ALL of the text reads like a run of the mill MLM scheme, talking about levels of membership and share options.

Remember the plan to close off recruiting at 300,000 members?

Well 10 minutes ago one of our Founder Members gave us the green light to keep the recruitment process open. This is wonderful news as we begin to expand towards the first half a million members. It also signals a change to the way we do business here:

1) Later today the first 40 Global Exec members will be named online

2) We also let you know the leaders in our “10 MILLION SHARE CHASE”

3) We will also give you a glimpse of the new Beta test pages… a chance to see where m2e will be very soon!

4) We are looking at the prospect of meeting with members to launch the Customer Care Manager team

5) News will be coming online a lot more frequently from today.
PLEASE READ THE NEXT STORY TO FIND OUT IMPORTANT CHANGES TO THE SHARE LEVELS

Alarm bell 5

NONE of what I’d call the big 5 tech blogs have written about it, its not (as of 2200 GMT 16th March) on Mashable, Wired, The Register, boingboing or TechCrunch.

Me2Everyone in Summary

A clever, mlm kind of social network scheme, most likely not malicious in intent but an idea that plays on all the usual tricks of “get rich quick” type schemes, hell its the oldest chain email in the book! “Send this email to all your friends and you’ll get £100 from Bill Gates” – and those earned people… how much money again?

I call scam – avoid it.

…well, maybe… both have launched campaigns about how trusted they are, and like I said, it’s an important message in the current recession (or “downturn” as the BBC likes to phrase it…)

The key message from this seminar was: engagement = trust = sales – click through to see a copy of the slides.

Social Media Marketing in my opinion, is ALL about engagement it needs to be a primary sales message for most industries to rebuild confidence and make sales.

When change.gov adds comments, its interesting… when they use the IntenseDebate system as their comment system it is exciting.

IntenseDebate uses threaded comments and user profiles, with community ranking to ensure that quality comments are most prominent as well as telling you what a commenter’s reputation is next to each comment.

I have to take my hat off to Obama and his team for really embracing democracy in this way, enabling a real conversation where anyone can add their thoughts and by truly embracing community to manage those comments. Good work.

There is plenty of ongoing discussion about how to moderate comments on blogs and the legal issues around who is liable etc.  IntenseDebate doesn’t solve/answer all of those issues, but it does represent a great step forward – not only that, it supports OpenID and a number of other cool “2.0″ type features.

If you’d like to read more on change.gov’s use of this technology, see also techPresident’s excellent article.

Connect allows you to login to partner websites using your Facebook account and for information to flow from that site into your feed and friend information to pass back to the partner site.  This is part of a wider plan by Facebook to become the standard for social interaction.

OpenID set out to be the standard for connecting people across the web, plenty of big name partners supported OpenID but yet… outside the industry, who knows it exists?

There’s another important part of the strategy for net domination, that hasn’t received as much discussion: Facebook are taking steps to reduce the amount of people using ordinary Facebook accounts as a promotional tool. They are really clamping down on fake profiles and have put in places limits for how many group messages you can send out rather than using updates or advertisements.

The real strength in Facebook is in having 99.999% of users as real people, that is what makes it stand out from most other networks.

If Facebook can keep the balance of community vs commercial messages right, people will stay. A lot of users left MySpace when the volume of messages that were “hey you’ve never heard of me but please check out my tracks” overtook the messages between friends.

Sure some people will be put out when their profiles are deleted (after being warned) BUT it won’t cause the bulk of people to move.

This brings me nicely back to my talk, the social web in 10 slides – where I talk about the importance of interacting and engaging with the community in the right way.

If you (as a business) want to promote yourself on a social network, you have to be really clear to understand how that network works and how best to mobilise that network for your benefit whilst playing by their rules.

123people is a real time people search tool that looks into nearly every corner of the Web. Using our proprietary search algorithm, you can find comprehensive and centralized people related information consisting of images, videos, phone numbers, email addresses, social networking and Wikipedia profiles and much more.

Now I tried a few searches including myself, whilst it was kind of frightening just how much about me is online it didn’t pull up anything I wasn’t aware of.

It seems to be most effective for people in Austria, Germany, Switzerland and the US… so for purely academic purposes I tried searching for Jessica Alba which it suggested on its front page.

Wow.

Directory listings, Social Networking pages, Email addresses and phone numbers to suit all of your stalking reconnection needs.

Sure, most of this stuff was easily accessible anyway, its not doing anything really new apart from the way it presents the information and the accuracy compared with a google search of the same name.

Its only purpose is to locate people, so you avoid all the pointless links from other search engines and get straight to ways of getting back in contact.

useful, yes if you need to contact someone – scary, yes… try it, search for yourself…

That is 2% of the worlds population.

Think about that for a minute, if you take out those who dont use or have access to the internet – thats a high percentage of people.

We’ve decided to conduct a simple survey of 100 people who work in businesses around our area – how many use social networking, how many have a business strategy for it… now that’s something else to think about!

As soon as we’ve completed and compiled our survey, we’ll publish it here.

Yes, I did find google Chrome to be slightly faster on most sites, but in the end I stayed because of the quick start option on new tabs (where it shows you the most popular sites you’ve vistited in a nice lazy “click on me” style!).

True to form, firefox users can add this “speed dial” plug in to get essentially the same (which is also more tweakable) functionality.

That just left my one big gripe – the lack of active bookmarks in Chrome – why? Dear Google… what made you miss this out? I’ve found my browsing less productive as I prefer to use active bookmarks to a feedreader, chrome just couldn’t hack it. When… (assuming they do?) fix it, I’ll be back to Chrome in a flash… oh yeah and it keeps hanging in youTube… a Google site… FAIL.

I see this as a smart move by LinkedIn.  By maintaining control of the apps, they make sure they remain of a high quality and relevant to their users.  More interaction with the site equals more page impressions, along with a new revenue stream.  It’s certainly something I’ll be looking into in much more detail; if I can inspire others to look at my profile and create genuine new contacts while enjoying the site more than a simple contact manager then I’ll certainly be spending more time on it.  I’ll post with my findings soon

If you haven’t tried it yet, then I’d strongly suggest you do – its a fantastic web browser which is without a doubt faster than any of the others I’ve tried. (For the geeks – Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari)

How did I miss the fact it does not support active bookmarks? Wow.

Thats a big miss, not being able to view active bookmarks, no nice little icon that lets you subscribe – as is standard in all of the above.

Google – please fix this, its the only thing stopping me from moving to Chrome 100%