I don’t really much like Starbucks: I think there are too many of them, and I usually get sick off of their coffee drinks. However, I think My Starbucks Idea is a phenomenal implementation of an social voting and networking, Digg-like — using your customers to generate ideas on how to your company.

You can submit ideas, and other users can vote and comment on the ideas. From that, the ideas are submitted to Starbucks management. On the blog, the management actually asks for feedback on how to implement the idea, and if the idea is good and gets a great rating, the management gives credit to the users (what they should be doing is sending them at least a Starbucks for some kind of reward system).

More importantly, it allows Starbucks to evangelize to their customers, and build a devout customer base. There’s nothing better than empowering your customers to do your advertising for you.

Some of the suggested ideas are better recycling options, healthier food suggestions, and how to get people to refill their starbucks cards to save the environment.

Microsoft is testing a prototype of a social network built on SharePoint, and again, it won’t be the first. We’ve done a few (Paul Mitchell Connect, a few companies I can’t name of I’d have to shoot you ;) ), and SharePoint’s governance model lends itself very well to maintain such a network. Some of the issues of legality and privacy are actually limited within a corporate social network.

Looking forward to more companies going social!

One of the things we’ve been doing at the day job has been turning SharePoint on its head and using it for social networking capabilities. I know it’s one of those catchphrases that are popular now, but in our implementations, it’s done very, very well (and scaled well) in those environments. The Official Blog of the SharePoint Product Group has a great article and links to a white paper that talks about the use of knowledge within an organization.

With some of our clients, we’ve been talking to them about using SharePoint as the source of truth and establishing governance as part of that, and really analyzing their culture.

Just put it this way — MOSS isn’t just about intranets.

Advertising Age has a great article on social media. The key statistic is that 78 percent of marketers want to spend on social media, but only 8 percent have any spend decidated in their budgets to it. As part of the article, they link to a white paper by Smash Lab that goes over what social media is.

(I guess the next lesson will be “what is a blog” for marketers. Someone should tell Smash Lab that of those 112 million blogs, 108 million of them haven’t been published in a year, or a dedicated to “entertainment”.)

I have this standard joke because it’s my line of work, which really didn’t exist too long ago: “The internet’s a fad, it’s just going to go away.” While it might be dramatizing it, I do feel that it is if we don’t improve the user experience of applications and websites, like Facebook, so they aren’t just marketing spam. While end users may not be the brightest bulbs in the world, they’re not stupid, and they know when they are being fooled.

I like FaceBook. I’ve hired people off of FaceBook, and find it more useful from a profile standpoint (but less entertaining) than MySpace, but not as useful as LinkedIn. However, I had to do some housecleaning the other day, and I deleted over 100 applications.

Part of the problem is how most of these application developers design the applications, and nothing is a better illustration than what my online budy Andy Sternberg pointed out using an application on my own profile — that since I’ve installed an application, there’s this implicit “wow, Patrick must really like it.”

No, I don’t like it. My friends are selling me, and I’m not getting any of the profits.

A lot of these applications and even some websites, like Reunion.com (I’m not just bringing them up because I interviewed there years ago, but because I know the CEO knows better, and the David Lazarus of the Los Angeles Times also brought it up) are using shady ways to promote themselves, like harvesting friend lists and so on.

Note to application developers — if the applications are usable, engaging, and cool, people will use it in droves. They’ll tell your friends. They won’t worry about being forced to tell 10, or 12, or 20 friends. Facebook probably doesn’t know how it’s damaging their reputation, or if they do know, how to fix it.

That Scrabbulous application is engaging.

Texas No-Hold ‘Em Poker is engaging.

FriendFeed is engaging.

Selling friends is not.

Imagine if you could keep track of all of your friends and what they are doing on social networks, and at the same time your friends are notified about what you are doing? FriendFeed does that, and more.

You can share your notifications one of two ways:

• Enter the link to what you are working on manually, or…
• Link your social network settings, automatically, so when you do something at Yelp, it gets published on Facebook.

The setup was fairly easy — I did so in about ten minutes.

The list of networks they have so far:

Digg, Google Reader, Mixx, Reddit, Bookmarking, del.icio.us, Furl, Google Shared Stuff, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, Gmail/Google Talk, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Seesmic, Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Zooomr, Blog Blog, Tumblr, iLike, Last.fm, Pandora, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Amazon Wishlists, Disqus, LinkedIn, Netflix Queue, Netvibes, SlideShare, Upcoming, Yelp