As Murti describes during our interview, targeting mothers is currently a huge opportunity on social platforms since many social applications are not targeted to them. That’s not to say that mothers is the only demographic to build applications for. XBox for example, continues to pay Peanut Labs for surveys targeted at the younger male gamer demographic.

We had the opportunity to speak about a number of other things but I’ll let you check out the podcast below to hear the rest of the conversation. Thanks to Murti for taking the time to speak with us!

While Lauren wouldn’t talk about the specific amount that the company is generating she mentioned that they have relatively strong monthly growth which is great considering the current economic environment. As with most other virtual worlds, WeeWorld generates revenue through the sale of virtual goods as well as advertising.

All of WeeWorld’s growth has been organic. I discussed the potential for integrating with Facebook Connect and other services and Lauren said the company doesn’t have plans to integrate. Currently WeeWorld users can share their personalized avatars across a number of services (including Facebook) with the primary distribution channels being AIM and Skype.

The various forms of advertising that WeeWorld has developed are pretty interesting. One of the primary advertising models is through branded virtual goods, something that we’ve seen Facebook adopt in recent years. For actual virtual good sales, the company is growing at a rate of 16 percent a month, the vast majority of which is taking place domestically.

Rather than outlining the whole interview, I’ll let you listen to my conversation with Lauren below!

The standardization of the services running behind the scenes on the social web are still being developed including things like activitystrea.ms and DiSo. If you are confused about the standards don’t worry because all of this information will be taking place behind the scenes. All the users need to know is that standards will soon make it easier for all of our social activities to integrate with any service that is connected to the web.

In my podcast with Kevin we talk about everything from the state of these open standards to what the future holds. Check out my interview with him in the player below!

It’s clear that social games continue to be the most popular applications on social networks. Earlier this week I wrote about a new company, Twofish, which has built a platform to track all activities within virtual economies as well as help monetize them. The Playdom team said that they already have a proprietary system that has been developed in house for tracking their virtual economies.

The company is actively looking for new employees which is why they just came out of the woodworks. If you want to learn more about Playdom, check out my podcast with them below.

As more content distribution channels open up access to their “sharing information”, I personally believe it will put more pressure on companies like Facebook to open up access to this type of information. While Tim couldn’t speak about the number of users that have accessed the ShareThis widget, he was willing to share that the company has over 80,000 publishers active using the widget.

While a couple hundred thousand have added the widget, only 80,000 are receiving any form of measurable traffic. The rest of the publishers are far down the “long tail”. We discussed a number of other issues related to the future of sharing on the web which you can listen to on the podcast below. I’ve also embedded a video of the updated ShareThis button below.

We discussed Meebo and potential integration with mobile platforms as well as how his product fits on the social web. Meebo offers a product which is nearly identical to Userplane and heavily resembles Facebook’s new chat client. I spoke with Seth about these similarities and what all of the recent chat services means for the future of chat on the web.

Check out our interview below to learn more about the future of Meebo and chat on the web!

I also discussed yesterday’s opening of Yahoo! Buzz with Chris and what he though the impact on Mixx was. He suggested that Buzz does not target the same group of users that his site does. Chris also mentioned that the site continues to experience spectacular growth, attracting over 3 million users this month. Much of the growth has been attributed to organic sources (friends telling their friends) as well as the launch of the new Mixx communities.

I asked Chris about their monetization strategy and received the expected “we’re not currently focused on monetization” response. This afternoon I also posted that this has become an all too familiar response. If the site can continue to grow by leaps and bounds, the company may be justified in their delayed monetization strategy. I also spoke with Chris about a number of other things, so I definitely suggest listening to the podcast below!

I also had the opportunity to ask Sebastien whether he thought social gaming deserved the separation from casual gaming. Sebastien argued that it does deserve a clear distinction and that the term means baking social into the game design and making the game an object of social interaction. The games also get incrementally more fun as you add more friends to the game.

The social gaming space has been heating up most recently with Zynga’s $29 million round of funding. Currently the cost of social games has been low in comparison to traditional video games which have budgets in the six and seven figures as Sebastien points out. It’s an exciting time to be part of the social gaming space and Playfish is definitely one of the leaders. To learn more about Playfish and Sebastien’s thoughts on the social gaming space, listen to the podcast!

The company recently surpassed 30 million users on their applications across all of the sites that the are on including Facebook, MySpace and their destination site iLike.com. iLike is also preparing to release a developer API that enables developers to embed the entire version of various songs. Hadi gave the example of an application that creates a wedding playlist. I’m sure there are countless other examples of applications that can be built with this new API.

iLike, which was originally built out from GarageBand.com, is now the most popular social music service on the web. Listen to my podcast with Hadi to learn more.

Update
imeem contacted me to informat me that my statement about iLike being “the most popular social music service on the web” is in fact inaccurate. imeem is also the largest social music service in the world based on rights, reach and traffic.

Additionally the company is looking to raise another round of funding to help expand the company’s efforts to become the social travel vertical across the web. I asked Michael and Craig about their thoughts on the new iPhone platform and they said that they are working on launching the first version of their iPhone application. I’d bet that most companies in this space are working at building something on the iPhone as well.

Michael also said that Where I’ve Been is looking for a new round of funding. Listen up VCs! Here is a chance to get some skin in the social web game. Where I’ve Been has over 7 million active users and they are growing daily, not bad stats for a company with $1 million in funding. I also asked them if they plan on tackling the Where Am I Going issue that a number of other web startups (such as WAYN) have already begun tackling.

They said that they plan on providing this service as well but under the amount of resources they currently have available it has been challenging. Listen to my podcast below to hear more about where the Where I’ve Been team is going!

While RockYou recently had one of their applications shut down on Facebook, they now operate in a much more stable environment driving over 1 billion impressions a month. Jia sounds prepared to adapt to the new platform changes and is actually excited about where the platform is going. I also briefly discussed RockYou’s expansion on to other platforms outside of the U.S. Jia said that they are currently on Xiaonei and things appear to be going well there.

I discussed much more with Jia so if you’d like to hear more about the future of RockYou and Jia’s thoughts on the Facebook platform announcements, listen to the podcast below!

One thing I brought up during the conversation was the recent launch of Meebo’s competing platform and what his thoughts were. I also suggested that AOL work on acquiring Meebo to integrate into Userplane. Mike couldn’t confirm that an acquisition was in the works unfortunately!

Mike took time to discuss some new features that Userplane will be releasing in the coming weeks as well as discuss his thoughts on how Userplane fits into the social application space. Listen to my podcast with Mike to hear more!

During the podcast, Ian and I discussed what the current trends are in the social platform space. We also briefly discussed the privacy issues facing social platforms and analytics companies in general. Ian stressed how Sometrics focuses on ensuring that user data is always protected and remains anonymous on their platform.

Ian also mentioned future plans for the company as well as some interesting news items that will be released in the coming weeks. Definitely listen to my podcast with Ian Swanson to learn more about Sometrics.

The podcast was probably one of the shortest one ever since Jim was very concise in responding to my questions. Earlier I asked people on Twitter, Plurk and Facebook what questions they would like to have answered and most of them were responded to. One reader asked if the iPhone works with the new MySpace Data Availability service.

While I assumed that the service works with pretty much any web-based technology, Jim confirmed that the new service does indeed work with iPhones. Does this mean we’ll soon see a number of mobile implementations? Probably but I’m not so sure how soon we’ll see this being implemented. I’ve already spoken with a number of mobile services who said that they plan to build software around the new services being offered by Facebook and MySpace.

Check out my interview to with Jim to learn more about the new Data Availability service.

In turn this means that their CPMs are closer to the bottom than the top but the bottom line is that they can fill inventory and in a world of limitless inventory, that’s an important role. Scott was very straight-forward during our podcast with Lookery’s model of generating revenue and what their business model is.

One of the things that stood out to me during our inventory was that Scott suggests that focusing on trying to target people with demographic data really isn’t working currently and this is something they aren’t focused on. While they do try to provide a basic level of targeting, they are not trying to revolutionized the advertising world with their business model. They simply fill inventory and fill it effectively.

Check out the podcast below to here more about Lookery’s business model and Scott’s thoughts on the future of advertising on the social web.

While Patrick couldn’t speak about Google’s intention in providing monetization opportunities for OpenSocial applications, it is expected that Google will provide their own monetization solutions for OpenSocial apps. During our conversation Patrick discusses the benefits of Google Friend Connect and OpenSocial and addresses some criticism which has arisen over the new standard.

If you want to learn more about the OpenSocial program and where it is headed listen to our podcast. Also here is one of Patrick’s recent presentations on OpenSocial and Google’s various APIs.

They have successfully executed campaigns for movie companies, TBS, Adidas and a number of other large organizations. The company is heavily focused on providing sales support for the developers that don’t have the resources to reach out to brands on their own. I have spoken on a number of panels where I emphasized that the best ROI for application developers will come from reaching out directly to brands rather than relying on the traditional CPM model that most developers are currently relying on.

AppsSavvy is surprisingly the only company which is currently focused on providing branded campaigns for clients. As Chris says during my interview with him, there is currently limitless inventory on Facebook and not all of it is being filled. Companies that are focused on continuously building distribution won’t win in the long run because there are already plenty of distribution channels.

This goes back to the developer dilemma that I spoke about on Wednesday. Chris and the AppsSavvy teaming are helping developers that build valuable applications connect with brands and they have continued to see growth since their company launched. Listen to my podcast with Chris to learn more. I forgot to mention one other thing: Chris and his team are currently seeing average CPMs of $8-$12!

The application has been used as a demo so that developers can see how to integrate MMS technology into their own applications. Throughout the podcast, Craig and I discussed the various challenges facing the convergence of social and mobile technology. We also discussed the various ways that businesses are trying to monetize applications in the space.

Just yesterday, Nielsen released statistics that in the first quarter of 2008, 1.6 percent of all mobile users in the United States had accessed a social network via their mobile device. While it is only 1.6 percent, this space is growing rapidly and could become one of the most dominant areas for social technology to expand into. Listen to my interview with Craig Dalton below to hear more about how the social web can leverage mobile technologies.

Additionally, Naval spoke to me about what types of teams he makes investments in and why. We also discussed the challenges of creating a startup outside the valley versus creating a startup in the heart of the valley. Naval is always a great person to speak with, especially when discussing social technology as he made a number of investments in Facebook application companies.

Naval also writes the Venture Hacks blog which recently launched a “Recommended” section which indexes venture capitalists as well as startups. The point is to help entrepreneurs find investors. Listen to the podcast to hear Naval’s insights on investing and what the best way is to approach getting funding.