There is something about great sales people or deal makers that is entirely social. They are connectors, as Malcolm Gladwell calls them—people who know the interests, skills, and needs of everyone in their social or business circle and connects them together. If you are really good at this, like Sidney Weinberg (a legend who helped build Goldman Sachs), you are a super-connector.

Zentact has the modest goal to help you become a super-connector. It has a long way to go before it can do that. But it is starting with the kernel of something that is intriguing. At its core, Zentact is a browser add-on (for Firefox only right now) that helps you read the Web with the interests of your social network in mind. If you want to try it out, we have 500 invites for the private beta (but once you are in, you can invite as many people as you want by sending them a message through Zentact).

Here is what is supposed to happen once you have Zentact all set up. Reading an article about black labs? A box pops up to remind you that your co-editor loves black labs and lets you email him the article with a note right from that page. Run across a blog post that mentions a contact’s company? Same thing happens. You can forward that article or link and make yourself look thoughtful in the same way that setting up automatic birthday reminders in your calendar or Amazon makes you look like you went the extra effort to remember someone’s birthday.

“This is basically a karma points system,” says investor and adviser Eric Marcoullier, the CEO of Gnip. Marcoullier and Zentact co-founders John Sampson and Jared Brandt are all MyBloglog refugees. They founded Zentact with a few hundred thousand dollars. (Howard Lindzon is their biggest angel investor).

Before you can start using Zentact, first it needs to ingest all of your contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo Mail. Then—and this is its weak point—you have to tag each contact with their interests, company affiliations, and whatnot. That right there almost makes it a non-starter for me. Some people, I realize, will do this obsessive tagging (sales people, recruiters, biz dev types), but not most people. I have 2,318 contacts in Gmail. There is no way I am going to go through and tag those. It would be much better if Zentact could simply get all of this information from one of my existing social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, which already know all of my contacts’ interests and affiliations.

The software, however, does have a saving grace. Whenever you email someone in Gmail, a Zentact box opens up right in the email below the address field where you can add tags and other data in a piecemeal fashion. That makes the process a lot less daunting, and lets you focus on the people you actually are in contact with the most frequently.

Once that is set up, then the Zentact box is supposed to pop up whenever it reads a tag contextually on a page and tell you which contacts you might want to email the link with a thoughtful note. It acts a a surrogate super-connector brain in that way. Explains Marcoullier:

The vast majority of people get information, they process it for internal use, and then move on. Why not build a plugin that reads what you are reading and alerts you to the fact that it might be relevant to someone in your network?

That could be helpful or annoying depending on how often it pops up. You can moderate that based on the tags you use. The actual mechanics of Zentact are still a little bit buggy in my experience (although that could just be my dying computer or the fact that I imported way too many contacts). But this is a rough beta and there is a lot of promise here.

Once you’ve tagged a bunch of contacts, then you can click on each tag at Zentact’s Website and see all the contacts who share a certain interest. This could be great for organizing soccer games or biking trips or a startup, or that matter. It all depends on how good is your personal tag database. How well do you know your contacts and what they are good at?

Zentact will soon add the ability to actually connect like-minded contacts to each other, which is really what super-connectors do. When it does that and can automatically tag your contacts for you, then I’ll really be excited about it. But what I really want is for my existing social networks to do this for me.

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What does this mean for the average Twitter user? It means that more third party services will start to work better. Today, other than a handful of services like Summize (which was just acquired by Twitter) and Friendfeed, third party apps must talk to Twitter via their normal APIs. Those APIs require applications to send Twitter a request and then get a response. The two way communication creates a big load on Twitter in the aggregate.

With XMPP Twitter just sends out all of their data in a constant stream, whether you ask for it or not. The third party, in this case Gnip, takes the data and parses it for further use.

Gnip acts as an intermediary between applications that create social content and those that consume it. They take the Twitter feed, which is a list of usernames, Twitter status URLs and time stamps, and make it available to any third party that requests it. Both Plaxo and MyBlogLog are already using the new feed, and more partners will add it immediately. And every third party that takes data from Gnip doesn’t have to take it from Twitter, easing the overall load on Twitter’s servers.

For now Gnip is only sending updates for requested users, not the richer data that some applications like Twhirl need to build a Twitter-like desktop environment. Twitter may give Gnip permission to send additional data, like @replies and direct messages, over time (if that last sentence doesn’t mean anything to you, it means you aren’t a crazy-heavy Twitter user, just disregard it).

What this means is that Twitter is taking yet another step towards openness and leaning on outside parties to help them with scaling issues.

Battle Over: Twitter Open Up To Gnip. Read more at TechcrunchIT >>

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Following Michael’s post the other day about the future of social networking, we have heard of several more ways the mobile, location-aware nut is being cracked already.

One of these is an “experiment” by MyBlogLog started at eTech and SXSW that leverages Bluetooth technology to discover the people around you. The Java-based service, previously named “Meetspace” but now known as MBL Mobile, works on both Bluetooth-enabled laptops and Blackberrys.

Once you’ve installed the Java applet and bound your Bluetooth ID to your MyBlogLog ID, you will be able to see other MyBlogLog members within a range of about 30 feet who have also opted into the special service. Their avatars show up on a page that breaks people down into “People Around You” and “People Encountered Most”, the former being those currently detected near you and the latter being those you’ve found yourself near the most. You can click on users to see their activity streams and commonly shared groups.

This service obviously works best when you have a group of geeks huddling around the same areas, such as conference halls. As Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out on RRW, it also has privacy implications that should give MyBlogLog users pause before they sign up.

For other companies working on location-aware social networking technologies, check out Imity, Mobiluck, Aka Aki, and Loopt. The first three, like MyBlogLog, use Bluetooth-based detection whereas Loopt depends on GPS. LimeJuice and MeetMoi are two similarly intended startups that only require SMS. In the long run, GPS is probably the best technology for this sort of thing (provides much greater range and detail than Bluetooth), but unfortunately lots of phones don’t have GPS capabilities yet.

Also see our posts on an iPhone-only social network and the holy grail for mobile social networks.

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The service brings enhancements to blog comments that are not standard features in most blog installations, such as threading, spam filtering, comment/user ratings, and user identities. They’ve also integrated OpenID support through ClickPass. Disqus launched with a host of other commenting services around October of last year. IntenseDebate is a close competitor from a competing incubator, TechStars, as well. SezWho, and CoComment also provide some of the same support.

The overall trajectory of the Disqus and other commenting systems is toward building communities around blogs, similar to MyBlogLog (sold to Yahoo). The idea is to serve as an aggregation point for conversations across multiple blogs so avid commenters can more easily track what’s being talked about. They also want incorporate other feeds such as Facebook and Twitter into user’s profiles. While larger blogs might not like the idea of providing content for another destination site, co-founder Daniel Ha says that the service has already taken hold in verticals such as politics and finance.

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Eric is now preparing to launch a new startup, Gnip. Details are scarce for now – Marcoullier isn’t saying what the new startup will do other than a hint on the site itelf – “Web 2.0 Infrastructure,” and a message that the service will launch in May.

The startup is already funded, he says, with a $1 million round from Foundry Group and SoftTech VC. Foundry Group’s Brad Feld and SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier are joining the board of directors of the company.

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The new feature is an activity stream of recent activities by all users on various social networks – blog posts, new photos, bookmarks on Delicious, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc. The image shows the new profile page – mine is here, and I’ve added a summary widget below.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the startup feature du jour. Facebook first popularized the news feed in late 2006. Later others took the idea and opened it up, creating a news feed around activities on a variety of social networks. FriendFeed is the most popular, and recently raised a $5 million round of financing. Plaxo, Soup.io, Iminta, Spokeo, ProfileLinker, MyLifeBrand, Fuser, 30Boxes, Mugshot, Readr and Second Brain all have variations. Party planning site MyPunchbowl recently released its version. And now, Facebook is planning to open up their NewsFeed and allow users to add other services as well.

Yeah, I know. That’s way too many similar services to test out. If you’re a casual observer and just want to try out one service, go with FriendFeed (my account is here). People are flocking there, and starting to use it as a hub to leave comments and other content. If you’re already a Plaxo user, their Pulse product is just as good. Facebook isn’t open enough yet to really be called a competitor.

The new MyBlogLog features are a great addition to the product, but it’s not innovative enough to make a big impact. They do have a large community of loyal bloggers using their service, however (including me), and I’ll certainly keep an eye on the activity streams of the people I follow there.

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Zoli Erdos uses both MyBlogLog and BlogRovr and got a rather interesting message whilst trying to log into Citibank:

Could something you type into a secured site on Citibank end up on one of these services? If it’s a browser plugin that sends data back to a central service it could in theory track and record anything…although that presumes that these services would also be being used for evil as well, not just for occasional spamming like some services are.

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They aren’t new, and we’ve covered them before. The reason we left them out is that we’ve had some difficulty in categorizing them.

In many ways Sampa is a blog platform with a focus on privacy features, like Vox. But we’ve also compared them to easy site creation tools like Weebly, Synthasite and Jimdo.

But recently they’ve added new features to focus on family story telling and milestones. There is now a Geni-like family tree feature, and trusted visitors can upload photos directly as well.

And they’ve also added a MyBlogLog-type feature that shows visitors to the site – both their name and an avatar. Sampa sites have areas that are private by default, so only people you invite in see the site (they see it via an invitation URL, and subsequent visits are authorized via a cookie.

The hodge-podge of features results in a really compelling hang-out for families to tell their stories, celebrate weddings and births, and share photos and family tree information. The site is also free, although eventually users will be able to pay to have advertisements removed.

It’s a good site, and one of many startups that are doing a lot on very little capital – the company has raised just $310,000.

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Clavier, who has a degree in computer science, has been actively investing in startups over the last few years and has had notable successes such as Truveo (acquired by AOL for a rumored $50 million), Userplane (acquired by AOL for a rumored $35 million), MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo for $10 million), Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst for a rumored $30-40 million), Mayas Mom (acquired by BabyCenter for $7 million), Dogster, Kongregate, Edgeio and many others. In other words, he has an eye for winners. His investment philosophy will remain much the same, he says. He’s just now investing money from limited partners as well as his own capital.

He says he’ll invest the fund in a total of 30 to 40 seed stage startups with investments ranging from $100k – $500k. SoftTech VC will focus on consumer Internet.

Clavier has made four initial investments through the fund: Satisfaction Unlimited, Social Media Network, Grouply (which will launch at the conference today) and Active Athlete.

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The Feedjit traffic widget launched a month ago and is now claiming some fairly serious viral growth – 3 million impressions per week from the blogs that have added it. When installed on a blog, the widget shows people who enter and leave the site and, and where they are located. Neither the blog publisher nor visitors need to register for the service – the code just has to be on the site.

Feedjit offers two types of widgets. The first resembles MyBlogLog in that it shows recent visitors to the site. I’ve installed it at the end of the post. Tonight the company added customization features to let people set the size and color scheme of the widget via Ajax controls. “Arring Town,” shown below, is my favorite for obvious reasons.

The second widget, integrated at the top of the post, shows a map with the location of the last 100 visitors. Hover over any dot to get more information about a person.

This is an excellent widget and is much easier to use than MyBlogLog. If Feedjit can keep growing at this rate, though, perhaps an early exit is also in the cards for them. There’s only so much extra space on a site, though, and there are simply too many “must have” widgets. It’s all gotta end sometime.

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MyBlogLog, a distributed social network which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year, will launch a tagging feature later this evening that will allow users to add descriptive tags to the people and blogs (called “communities”) on the service.

The new feature serves a number of purposes, founder Eric Marcoullier told me this evening. The main use will be to categorize topics and people to let users find new content they might be interested in. If you read a certain blog, view it’s MyBlogLog page (ours is here) and click on a tag to see other blogs that are tagged with the same word.

The company is also asking users to help fight spam by tagging spammy sites with the word “Schmoe,” which they say stands for “Social Media Optimizer” (SchMOe). The team will review those tags and associated sites and take appropriate action.

Tags can be added by any user to any other user or blog community. Once a tag is added, others can vote it up or down which increases or decreases its size in the cloud. The owner of a profile can permanently remove any tag. The company is importing tags for blogs from Del.icio.us and Technorati to get initial content; they say they will add other sources as well over time.

The new feature is based on a Yahoo internal tool developed by Cameron Marlow at their Berkeley research center, called Tagsona. Yahoo employees use Tagsona to tag co-workers internally (sounds like loads of fun).

MyBlogLog continues to expand. Marcoullier says they are tracking 100 million monthly visitors to sites that have the MyBlogLog widget, and have 140,000 registered users. Just recently, he said, more people without blogs (readers only) started registering than users with blogs.

The service will be redesigned, and possibly renamed, later this year.

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I like the widget, which shows recent visitors to the site and builds out a social network based on who’s visiting what blogs. We’re glad to have it back, and look forward to the upcoming redesign.

The widget is on the right sidebar and is also embedded below. It’s good to see everyone’s smiling face, and the occasional spam logo, here on the site again.

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Like many blogs, we had the MyBlogLog widget on TechCrunch for months. We eventually removed it due to performance issues (it slowed down the site on a couple of occasions) and this incredible amount of spam that started to appear.

Some of that may be changing, David Dalka says. At a conference in Chicago yesterday, MyBlogLog community manager Robyn Tippins told the audience to expect several upcoming services changes.

Users should expect a rebranding and redesign of the service as well as a new widget for blogs with hover-over features. They will also be looking for a way to easily turn off presence so that users can hide the fact that they visited a certain site.

A redesign will be good. What will be even better is a commitment to 100% uptime. As a widget company it is not acceptable to slow down or take down partner sites. MyBlogLog’s first priority must be performance.

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Yahoo!’s recent addition MyBlogLog is making news again — and not for another security exploit (that was last weekend) or spammer gaming. Well, it is related to those two topics — Shoemoney, a notable blogger in the affiliate marketing world with a fairly large following of readers that like his insight on all things related to online marketing, has been banned from MyBlogLog.

The real funny thing is that the security hole Shoemoney blogged about had been discovered and posted publicly (in French language — translation here) over a month ago by eMich — yet as of this writing, that user hasn’t been banned. Founder Eric Marcoullier responded to this:

That is truly amazing and embarrassing that someone sent us details of this hack a month ago. I’ve checked my historical email (I receive all the incoming emails) and cannot find it, so it either got spam filtered or lost during my transition to a new laptop. Neither is really no excuse. As you may have heard, we’re hiring a community manager who will help ensure that this sort of oversight will not happen in the future.

There is no policy on MyBlogLog’s website to state when they would ban a member — ironically they stated earlier this week that they plan to create a Terms of Service (TOS), so that users would be accountable for breaking the rules.

Shoemoney has posted various exploits in the past, but it wasn’t til this latest one that Yahoo! decided enough was enough. The exploit he posted about was how you could surf the web acting as another user. Thus, you could change some code on your computer and visit a website with the MyBlogLog recent reader widget installed, and the avatar/profile of any MyBlogLog user you want to be, would appear in that widget. Shoemoney posted the IDs of some notables such as MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer, Jason Calacanis, and TechCrunch. By doing this, you could continue surfing your own website using Jason Calacanis, and then after 10 visits to your community (if that default option was still set in the user’s account), Jason Calacanis would be joined to your community — and that would give you some clout.

Getting the IDs isn’t hard — it’s referenced in every user’s avatar image filename (note: this was changed within hours of the Shoemoney post). However, MyBlogLog felt Shoemoney was exposing people’s data and then “urging readers to spoof them.” I wouldn’t say he was urging them, but more that he was showing off.

Shoemoney has been a fan of MyBlogLog — supporting the service with their widget on his website and recently posting a list of 10 things he wanted to see that would help improve MyBlogLog and reduce spam. A couple of these ideas have been implemented as a result of this past weekend’s exploits. Shoemoney isn’t the only user to publicly exploit flaws in MyBlogLog — Michael Jensen showed how easy it was to keep your avatar (which could easily be a marketing message or your logo) on webpages of a website — he did this to TechCrunch (we have since removed the MyBlogLog widget). Jensen wasn’t banned.

The backlash has begun with Internet marketing consultant Andy Beal boycotting MyBlogLog until they reinstate Shoemoney’s profile. He argues that anyone could have looked up the MBL data and that it was hypocritical to expect an email from Shoemoney first (pointing out that notable Yahoo! blogger Jeremy Zawodny didn’t email Andy prior to publicly accusing Andy of being a spammer). Photographer and CEO of Flickr competitor Zooomr Thomas Hawk and SEO blogger Graywolf have both removed their accounts in boycott as well.

Since being acquired by Yahoo!, the once loved independent darling of the blogosphere has been feeling the heat — and now gets lumped with any Yahoo! angst. MyBlogLog is no longer the independent underdog start-up it once was — that role has shifted to the new blood in competitors OthersOnline and Explode.

Editor’s Note: Post by Steve Poland, whose blog Techquila Shots brainstorms web start-up ideas.

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All he did was create a new account with the advertising he wanted included as the image. He then opened TechCrunch in the Opera browser and set it to autorefresh every minute or so. The result was that the “user” kept coming back to TechCrunch and popping to the top of the widget. Some of the traffic that clicked through to the user page on MyBlogLog made its way back to the destination site.

Given how easy this is to do, it’s certainly worth the effort. Jensen quickly expanded his test to include twenty other blogs. I hadn’t noticed this, but MyBlogLog founder Scott Rafer did, and pinged me about it. He says they’ll be blocking this kind of behavior in the near future.

There’s lots of other spam on MyBlogLog, although most of it is in the messages users can leave for other users on their pages. Not much harm there beyond a messy MyBlogLog site, and I’m sure they’ll be taking measures to limit that over time, too.

By the way, Jensen says he did all this just to point out the flaw in MyBlogLog, not to actually spam sites.

Update: I hadn’t seen this before, but in the comments below Richard MacManus points out that Emre Sokullu made a script to to this as well.

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MyBlogLog will be part of the Yahoo Developer Network and report in to Chad Dickerson (who reports to Bradley). The size of the deal is not being confirmed, although rumors put it at $10 – $12 million.

The fact that MyBlogLog will be in the Yahoo Developers Network is a good signal. Yahoo’s recent acquisitions have been handled pretty well from a user-care standpoint, and it looks like they’ll be taking a similar approach here. Bradley did say that eventually users will be able to log in with their Yahoo IDs, though. That will expand the potential user base significantly.

Congratulations to the MyBlogLog team. This thing took off like a rocket and never looked back, and we are a proud member.

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MyBlogLog has built the next generation social networking service. If Friendster/MySpace/etc are v1.0 of social networking websites, this is v2.0. The service has created a distributed social networking platform — allowing websites and blogs to enable social networking amongst their community of visitors.

Today, MyBlogLog has added support for MySpace profile pages. This is a way for them to infiltrate the MySpace market. MySpace pretty much offers what MyBlogLog has, except MyBlogLog has 2 things MySpace lacks:

1. MyBlogLog will show you who recently visited your webpage (only other MyBlogLog users) — this comes in handy for the curious cats that like to know who’s viewing their profile.
2. MyBlogLog is a distributed social networking system that allows you to communicate with not just users of MySpace, but users visiting thousands of other blogs/websites on the web.

How it works is that you create an account with MyBlogLog, grab a snippet of code, place that code in your MySpace profile, and then you can see what other MyBlogLog users visit your website.

The only qualm I have with the MyBlogLog service is the company name — it pigeon holes their business to blogs. In all reality, they should have partners such as NHL.com, NYTimes, and Slashdot — websites with communities of users that would love to learn more about each other and message each other. In my opinion, every website should have MyBlogLog — it allows your users to interact with one-another and builds community. I’m waiting to hear about the first marriage that happens as a result of MyBlogLog enabling two users to meet each other on a website that both had regularly visited for years, but never had a means of learning about each other (or other visitors of that website).

A couple months ago, I exchanged messages through MyBlogLog with CEO Scott Rafer, whom told me they have been looking for an alternative domain — do you have a suggestion Scott and his team?

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor. Steve is the founder and web strategy consultant for Vested Ventures, a firm specializing in website consulting, internet marketing, and high-end custom web development.

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In the second social media acquisition by Yahoo! story in the last 12 hours, news has emerged that Yahoo! has agreed to acquire MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog is a blog community and analytics tool used here on TechCrunch (see sidebar) and many other blogs around the web. Just recently out of beta, the site gained traction in a hurry. We first profiled MyBlogLog in October. The company is rumored to have gone for about $10 million. Requests for comment haven’t been replied to yet.

Last night we also learned that Yahoo! has agreed to acquire online contest site Bix, a company led by Epinions founder Mike Speiser. Katie Fehrenbacher reports that Yahoo! has also confirmed today that they have acquired Swedish mobile company Kenet Works in a deal that closed several months ago. We’ve been told Yahoo! will come out with a monster release at CES in January as well.

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MyBlogLog was founded by Fox-acquired IGN cofounder Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson. The CEO is now Scott Rafer, former CEO of Feedster and current chairman of WINKsite.

The service lets users associate themselves with their favorite blogs, build a profile page about themselves and send internal messages. By default MyBlogLog users join the community of a site using MyBlogLog after ten visits to that site, but you can increase that number or require manual joining. Blog publishers can show a badge on their site with pictures of the most recent MyBlogLog members to visit the site and can display the five most popular outbound links from their blog on the blog community page. Click on any of our readers’ pictures at the bottom of this post and you can see what an individual’s page looks like. Thanks for reading everyone!

MyBlogLog says it helps break down the hierarchy that forms when everyone knows about a blog’s author but none of the readers know eachother. Here’s the CrunchNetworks community.

There’s currently no advertising on the site but MyBlogLog sells subscriptions to click analytics for $3 per month or $25 per year. Analytics leveraging user demographics are the next level things can be taken, the company told me. That’s something that the big social networking sites are already able to use, why shouldn’t bloggers? CEO Scott Rafer told me that there are currently about 1000 subscribers to the company’s premium analytics service.

The list of sites using MyBlogLog is quite interesting. It includes all the blogs from USA Today, Gawker and Rosie.com. The company has deployed close to 100 million profile cookies, signed up 14 thousand blogs in their first year and more than 1000 blogs currently display MyBlogLog widgets. I asked and Rafer says the company is pressing to be Attention Trust compliant as quickly as possible, that’s important for a site like this. It’s a service that is easy and fun enough to use that it could build a large number of users.

After some more thought, I feel like I should ad the following to this post: It’s a little creepy to think that just because I’ve joined the community around one Gawker blog, MyBlogLog knows every other URL I visit on the web. They really need to take tangible steps to demonstrate trustworthiness with that information – and I need ultimately to be in control of the data. The Attention Trust recorder, for example, gives me a simple browser button to click when I want to turn off recording the URLs I visit. I know that any one of the many cookies I’ve got on my browser could be reporting back to anyone about anything, but it would be good for MyBlogLog to make a good faith effort in regards to this.

I really like the look and feel of MyBlogLog. In some ways they are reminiscent of StumbleUpon (our coverage) and they perform a similar function to Bordee, a URL anchored message board tool we profiled last month.

MyBlogLog has a strong executive team, a compelling user experience and a smart business model. Aside from the privacy concerns (in a world with almost zero privacy in general), I think this a service that’s hard not to like.

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