Over the weekend I switched my blog over to another server. Surprisingly it went relatively smoothly, or at least I think. I usually don’t have good luck with these types of things which is why I am a bit skeptical. PLEASE let me know if you have been having any problems. The other important item is that my contact email has changed! It is no longer brian at brianbalfour.com, but rather brian at socialdegree.com. I love to hear from readers so please feel free to email me at any time. I’m also looking to redesign my blog. I’ve heard from a few that they have had to pull...

After announcing another round of funding a couple weeks ago, LinkedIN has introduced a new feature called “LinkedIN Answers.” In my opinion they just dramatically increased the value of their network. With the Answers feature, users can ask a question aimed at professionals in specific fields, and other users with knowledge in the specific area can provide answers. By providing quality answers you can earn expert points in particular subjects. Your expert points are featured on your profile and you can appear on the answers homepage. Why is this so powerful? 1.ÂÂ...

UPDATE: Enter in the promotional code “degree” when buying your ticket and receive $45 off. NOTE: I am NOT getting paid or compensated in any way to promote this event. I wanted to tell all my readers about an upcoming conference on social networks and online communites called Community Next. The conference is February 10th at Stanford University. If you are able to go, I HIGHLY recommend it. The line up of speakers is great featuring entrepreneur extraordinaire, Guy Kawaski, Ted Rheingold founder of Dogster and Catster, Jeffery Kalmikoff from Threadless, and more. This line up...

Every blogger is throwing out their predictions for the year 2007, so I figured I might as well throw mine into the bunch. Here are some social networks that I think will be winners in 2007: Yelp: Yelp has one of the most active and dedicated user bases out of any community site on the web. The reviews and content on Yelp far surpasses the quality and usefulness of any other local review site on the web. In addition Yelp is one of the few social networks that is transfering online connections, to real world connections, through Yelp organized events for their members. Next time when you have...

Just got back from a very long vacation. Catching up with everything, so if you emailed me within the past two weeks I promise to respond very soon. 2007 is going to be a very big year for Social Networking, and I look forward to see what will happen.

Early this morning I received an email with a this link to an article claiming that LinkedIN is in negotiations to raise another $13 million in venture capital. This struck me as kind of odd. LinkedIN claims it has been profitable since March of this year which means they aren’t burning a ton of cash. It seems likely that before they turned profitable they would still have had money left from their previous venture rounds. In addition, it is unusual for a company to be publicly talking about this before the deal is done. So why would LinkedIN want to raise another $13 Million? I think...

Disclaimer: This information has not been confirmed by Facebook, only third party sources that I personally trust. Take this information with a grain of salt. Lately the blogosphere has been actively chatting about Facebook not interested in selling. Board member Peter Theil has been quoted as saying they believe Facebook is worth the equivalent to MTV, $8 Billion. In addition to these reports there have been rumors that Facebook is considering an IPO. This interested me to the point that I called up two close friends who work at seperate major Investment Banks. To my surprise, both of them...

I haven’t used Loopt.com service since I don’t have Boost Mobile phone, but from reading about the service it seems to have a lot of the elements of the next generation SN I have been talking about. Loopt is a GPS location based mobile social network available to Boost Mobile customers for $2.99 a month. From their website: “Loopt is a Palo Alto-based startup that has built a revolutionary “social mapping” service to change the way people use mobile phones to keep in touch with their friends. loopt uses GPS (and other location technology) to show you where your friends...

Many new founders of social networks, community, and Web 2.0 sites have seen the success of such sites as Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Craigslist, etc and are amazed at how quickly and relatively effortless they grew. I think this has lead to a mindset among social media entrepreneurs that if they build it, the site will grow itself. In addition, some might think the growth of those sites were just pure luck. In my opinion neither of these are true, and that there is some method to the madness of growing a community site. Growth can never be achieved 100% organically By organic growth, I...

My friend Noah Kagan from OkDork.com has a good post over at venturebeat on community. Go read it. If you don’t like the article, then you can at least see a larger version of this sexy picture.