Mashable's Open Source Social Platforms

Here is Mashable.com's list of their top 10 social news, social networking, and social bookmarking open source projects for building your own social site.

Open Source Social Platforms: 10 of the Best

Lovdbyless Open Source Social Network

In reading about Insoshi.com I just found out about Lovdbyless.com, another open source social network project built with Ruby on Rails. It seems these things are just getting started. It is so good to know there is a lot of interest in using RoR for social networks. Thanks to all the contributors and the funders to these projects. Please support them with your blogging, money, etc.

Insoshi Open Source Social Network

I just found out about an open-source social network built with Ruby on Rails. I found out from the author of RailsSpace.com, Michael Hartl. The project is called Insoshi and is actively being developed. If you are developer you can help build it. If you want your own customizable social network, download it and install it. I hope these guys can make it, because RoR is awesome. Insoshi could become very hard to beat.

Business Use For Twitter

This 3 Minute Twitter Challenge video talks about how companies should be using Twitter to monitor everything that is being said or asked about their own company. The narrator talks about how he posed a question to a company and within three minutes got a response because someone who works for the company was monitoring all conversations about the company using such services as Tweetscan.com, Terraminds.com, Technorati.com, etc. I actually need to start using Twitter as well. They have some nice videos at Twitter.com about what it is used for. I can't get you the exact urls right now because twitter is down for the moment.

Mobile Coupons With Mobeam

You hate to clip out all those coupons you get in the mail or in the newspaper and then you even forget to take them with you to the grocery store. Would it be great if you could look online for the products you intend to buy and then see if there are any coupons for those products? Then send a collective barcode of those coupons to your cellphone and redeem them with a simple scan at the register?

Enter Mobeam.com. Check out their videos at:
http://www.bnettv.com/player.php?id=905
http://www.ecrio.com/products/mobeamdemo.htm

Gen Y Is Changing The Web

Find out why Gen Y is changing the web and how they are doing it. If you want to keep abreast of where the web is heading then you need to understand this group of people and what their expectations are.

Why Gen Y is going to change the web

Pose Question, Get Answers

Here is another site you may want to keep track of. It is interesting to read to know what kinds of questions are popping up. It seems one could ask the right kind of questions to get people talking about your service/product. You could turn this into a marketing tool.

Fluther.com

Most Popular Videos: How-To's

Make a "how to" video, post it on YouTube and you could get plenty of hits. That is a trend covered by the NYT.

Read the article "Making Money, The How-To Way"

Here are some how-to sites: WonderHowTo.com, VideoJug, Howcast, ExpertVillage, Graspr, and MetaCafe