Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

You’ve probably heard by now: the new MySpace is coming. It is not only redesigned, but it is the start of a completely new direction and strategy for what was once the world’s pre-eminent social network.

As we reported earlier this week, the new MySpace is supposed to be a transformation from “a place for friends” to “a social entertainment destination.” While MySpace profiles, friend lists and newsfeeds will all remain once the transition is complete, MySpace will no longer focus on those things. Instead, it will focus on engaging a “Generation Y” audience with the entertainment and entertainers that they love. New features like Topic Pages will help users follow their favorite TV shows, music artists, actors and games.

MySpace is also introducing a new type of user: the curator. Users that exhibit a following or expertise in a specific social trend or entertainment topic can gain curator status, which gives them access to an array of tools for facilitating content discovery and leading fans of a specific subculture. The company believes that when users connect with active curators, their engagement with MySpace goes up dramatically. This is one of the things CEO Mike Jones told me during a conversation we had last week about the redesign.

The company is focused on encouraging four core behaviors: discovery, collection, connection and creation. MySpace wants its users to quickly discover new and interesting entertainment content via Topic Pages, recommendations and the newsfeed. It also wants to encourage curators to facilitate this discovery with Topic Pages and Entertainment Hubs.

Connecting fans, curators and entertainers is the third key behavior MySpace wants to foster, while the final behavior, creation, is something users already do with their profiles. MySpace knows that most profiles are hideous abominations of good taste, so it’s encouraging users to switch to the much-cleaner Profile 3.0 design with some hip, artist-designed themes.

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Is “Social Entertainment” the Right Move?

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The redesign seems to be an affirmation of something we’ve known for a long time: MySpace’s strength is in entertainment, not social networking. It lost the technology battle long ago to Facebook, and only now is it realizing that it has to get out of its giant shadow in order to spark a turnaround.

MySpace’s new strategy has some major risks. The big one is that it has now established itself as a product of a smaller niche (entertainment for “Generation Y”). In other words, it has a smaller potential userbase than Facebook or even Twitter As I’ve said before though, MySpace lost the war with Facebook long ago.

As a friend close to MySpace told me earlier this week, the company had to “go for it.” Staying the course would have doomed it to oblivion. The new design is a realization of who really visits MySpace and why they’re really there. Today’s youth connect with each other through Facebook, but many of them still get their entertainment fix from MySpace. The company’s strategic focus on finding better ways to deliver entertainment content in addicting doses is refreshing and the best (and most realistic) strategy at its disposal.

While there are no guarantees that the new strategy will turn things around, the combination of a focused direction and a stylish design gives me hope that MySpace may actually be able to pull off one hell of a comeback. Its biggest obstacle will be convincing people to give it a second chance.

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Qwiki

Quick Pitch: Qwiki is a platform that uses proprietary technology to consolidate multiple data sources on search topics into an immersive information experience.

Genius Idea: Information is easy to come by, especially on the web. A simple search for a person, celebrity, monument, restaurant or destination via a traditional search engine will return a bevy of results, albeit results that are mostly lifeless.

Newly launched startup Qwiki aims to reinvent the way people experience information by providing interactive video presentations that are weaved together in near real-time from multiple data sources. Qwiki currently hosts upwards of three million rich and immersive presentations on a variety of people, places and things.

The slick animation in each Qwiki is generated on-the-fly via data pulled from Wikipedia (for narration) and thousands of media sources. Most elements in Qwikis are interactive. So, video clips can be selected and viewed in their entirety and clicked photos will bring up slideshows. Related Qwikis, maps and timelines in Qwikis are also highly interactive.

Qwiki is merely an alpha stage product, which means what you see now is a fraction of what the service is being built to do. Qwiki is today little more than a cool interactive reference tool, but the startup is actively working on a number of products and a platform strategy that will better showcase what its technology is capable of.

In an interview with Mashable, CEO Doug Imbruce explained that Qwiki’s next two products — one for social media users and the other for small businesses — are slated for release in the the first quarter of 2011. The first offering will let users create Qwikis based around thier social data in aggregate, while the small business product will allow merchants to aggregate reviews from third-party sites like Yelp and turn them into Qwiki’s.

These ideas are best experienced, and the company has released prototypes just for that purpose. The Qwiki on Asiate Restaurant is pulled together via Yelp data on the restaurant, the presentation on Keith Rabois is entirely comprised from LinkedIn info and the entry on Gregory Smith comes courtesy of information he’s shared on Facebook. Trust us, these are must-watch Qwikis.

Qwiki for moble is also a work in progress. The startup’s iPad application is the most mature of the bunch and is slated for release prior to Thanksgiving.

Even in Qwiki’s limited test tube stage, you can experience the startup’s impressive technology first-hand, but Qwiki’s ultimate goal is to become an, “ubiquitous layer that augments the traditional Web,” says Imbruce.

And before you write off Qwiki as just a visual talking version of Wikipedia, keep in mind that the startup took home the top prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt demo event earlier this year. Imbruce also tells us that Marissa Mayer, who formerly was the VP of search for Google, played with Qwiki backstage for over an hour and was super impressed.

Qwiki has raised a seed round of $1.5 million, but is currently fielding “substantial interest from the investment community,” and is actively participating in discussions around its next round, says Imbruce.

Want to try Qwiki out? The first 1,000 Mashable readers wanting insider access to Qwiki’s alpha service can do so by signing up here.

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Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

I know you say your media returns results better than anyone else’s. I’ve heard that before.

I know you say that this stock is a sure thing, even better than gold. I’ve heard that before.

I know you say you’ll work full time on business development even though it’s hard work and there are distractions everywhere. I’ve heard that before.

I know you say that your promotional strategy for this movie is huge and we should run more ads and promote it more as a result. We’ve heard that before too.

The reason that people don’t believe you isn’t that you’re a liar. The reason we don’t believe you is that the guy before you (and the woman before him) were unduly optimistic hypesters and we got burned. We believed, we leaned into it and we got stuck.

If you catch yourself making a promise that’s been made before, stop. Don’t spend a lot of time and effort building credibility with this sort of promising, because it doesn’t pay off.

Make different promises, or even better, do, don’t say.

Philip Crosby wrote a seminal book (Quality is Free) in which he argued that it’s cheaper to build things right the first time than it is to fix them later. Obvious now, but heresy in Detroit 1980. Quality quickly became not just a better way to manufacture, it became a marketing benefit as well. Not only was quality cheaper to make, it was cheaper to sell.

I’m struck that we need a new book, call it Efficiency is Free.

It’s cheaper to build carpets that don’t create poison gas than it is to do the easy thing and let people suffer later. It’s cheaper to build an 8 passenger car that gets 30 miles per gallon than it is to suffer the consequences of the 12 mile per gallon Suburban. It’s cheaper to design smaller, lighter and recyclable shipping containers once than it is to buy and hassle with billions of foam peanuts in the long run.

So why doesn’t everyone do this? For the same reason the quality revolution took a full generation to take hold–it costs more right now. It takes planning right now. It requires change right now.

Right now will always be difficult. But efficiency is still free.

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure to attend and share thoughts at several social media events. In more recent times, I’ve come to appreciate the regional events, as the crowd there is often quite different than our national experiences. It’s come to me just recently why that is.

The Kitchen Table

A kitchen table is often the heart of the home. No matter where you want that heart to be, where things really happen is often at that table. You do your homework there. You and your kids do homework. You and your spouse argue over money. You talk about what comes next, good or bad. The kitchen table is a place where we experiment with new things before we move to the next thing.

To me, social media events are a kitchen table of sorts. It’s where we go to feel supported, to feel nourished, to feel validated for what we’re going to do next. Going to BlogWorld or SXSW or any of a dozen other great shows lets you speak with the people who “get it” and spend time with the people who know what you’re talking about with such excitement and zeal.

But we can’t conduct all our life at the kitchen table. At some point, we have to take those experiments and that nurturing out into the world. We have to move on.

What Moving On Means

First off, we have to return to the kitchen table from time to time for nurturing and sustenance, so don’t let it seem like it’s forever. It’s a cycle. The kitchen tables of our lives have a reason for being there. They are the anchor of a lot of what feels right. So going to the various social media events to learn more, to affirm what you already know, to meet people who see things the way you do, is a big positive. Accept and appreciate that.

But then, what really has to happen is that you have to take what you’ve learned and bring it out of the bubble. You have to go back and embed in the places that need your help. You have to grow the idea from being “inside baseball” to “useful to the people that matter to you.”

Come Back, Go Out, Come Back, Move On

I guess, in the end, I’m just saying that it’s all a cycle. We all grow. We all try new things. We all develop.

I have so much stuff to talk about in the coming days. Sorry I was quiet. I had some things to take care of.

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Fast Society

Quick Pitch: Fast Society is a free iPhone app that groups contacts into an instant, short-term team, combining group text messaging and one-touch conference calling.

Genius Idea: Ever attended a crowded show with a group of friends, only to notice that John-Boy has wandered away to the merch table, Esther (who is shorter than the rest) has been lost in a sea of concert-attending ogres and Marcel has passed out somewhere in the corner? Well, Fast Society is the perfect solution for those crazed, crowded situations.

Fast Society takes the group texting experience to the next level with conference calling as well as geolocation. The other week, we covered GroupMe, a mobile app that lets you create an SMS chatroom on any phone. The app is awesome in its simplicity, but its use-cases are still up for debate. Yes, group texting is fun and useful for a brief period of time, but after a while it either becomes, 1. Annoying, 2. Forgotten and replaced with another diversion.

Well, Fast Society Co-founders Matthew Rosenberg, Michael Constantiner and Andy Thompson set out to fix that issue after attending a Bloc Party concert during which their friends kept getting separated. While group texting would have been helpful in this situation, Rosenberg and Co. wished that they could create a specific group (i.e. the Bloc Party concert-goers) that would be able to converse for a specific time (i.e. the duration of the show). Enter Fast Society.

Fast Society’s more advanced interface makes it a much more useful app than GroupMe. After downloading the app, start by choosing a time frame for your team to be in communication (three hours to three days), and then add friends by searching through your phone book or adding a number. You can add anyone to your team, even if he or she’s on another carrier. People receive text messages alerting them to the creation of the team, and they can choose whether or not to join (you can also leave at any time by texting “leave”). Upon joining, they enter a kind of text chat room.

During the allotted time period, you can text your team (a process that works much the same as apps like GroupMe), call it via an instant conference call service and easily find and share your location via geolocation. Note: Those using the app can see others as a pinpoint on a map, but geolocation is a lot more barebones when you’re on another device. Still, you can text your location to your Android-using friends as well.

Once time runs out, so does the group, leaving you with a blank slate. That way, you won’t have any annoying text chain forever active on your phone.

Again, it’s a shame that this service is currently limited to iPhone users — at least in the fullest sense of the experience — but Co-founder Matthew Rosenberg told us they’re currently developing apps for Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. Once this opens up to other handsets, we can see this service coming in handy for much more than attending shows. From work events to group vacations, Fast Society has the potential to be a real boon to mobile users.

Right now, the current iteration is free, which begs the question: How do Rosenberg and Co. plan to make money?

“The next version of the app is going to have what we are calling ‘powerups’ in app purchases to enhance your experience,” Rosenberg says. “Longer groups, more people, and some other fun stuff I am not quite ready to share.”

Fast Society itself is rather an ambitious effort, as it is currently entirely self-funded. Still, the app managed to snag the role of the official mobile partner of New York’s CMJ Music Festival, which is quite the achievement and gained the team direct access to their target audience: Young, concert-obsessed music fans.

Will you test out Fast Society during your next event, trip or speed metal show?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Bliz

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Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

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BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.