[Note, this is a repost of a post I did for bub.blicio.us]

I just got back from the Under the Radar Social Media and Entertainment conference on the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, CA. The conference series has been put on by Deal Maker Media since 2005. Thirty six startups were given an opportunity to present their companies to a panel of judges and an audience of peers, potential investors and companies interested in acquisitions.

Deal Maker did an amazing job putting the conference together. There was a quality group of attendees, judges that ranged from Charlene Li to Kara Swisher to Robert Scoble. For a full list of presenting companies and judges see the Under the Radar blog.

There seemed to be basically three kinds of companies at Under the Radar, and in the social space in general; ones that add to the noise, ones that insert themselves into the noise and ones that are attempting to consolidate and quiet the noise.

I have lately been thinking of the social web in terms of our physical universe. Let’s equate the social web, or Web 2.0, with the big bang. Suddenly the web went from being fairly dormant to exploding out into space. The “socialverse” has been expanding rapidly ever since. The proliferation of content and communication is immense. In my vision of the future of the social web, I don’t see all of these sites, all of this chatter going away, just being accessed in different ways, more to come on that later. There will still be a need for things like personal blogs, company blogs, niche social networks and various social tools, especially if they fill a need for a particular audience. Enter sites like Nesting. Nesting solves problems for busy families; it includes social networking and organizational tools for parents and organizations. Parents can do everything from schedule a play date to set up SMS reminders for dentists appointments to order prints of their favorite family photos right from Nesting.com.

Then you have the companies who are doing their best to embed themselves in what exists all ready. Let’s look at them as matter. They exist all over the place and follow the tide of the expansion and contraction of the socialverse. A great example of a company who is doing this well is MyTopia and their Real-time Universal Gaming System (RUGS.) It allows users, developers and advertisers to participate with existing communities of people on major social networks like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and hi5, with support for additional sites in the works. For instance, MyTopians on Bebo can play games with other MyTopians on Facebook in realtime. RUGS, the platform behind MyTopia, allows developers to automatically and instantly deploy content across the entire RUGS network. Galia Ben-Artzi, co-founder of MyTopia eloquently summed it up when she said “MyTopians play together in harmony across all social networks with gaming as their common language.”

Some physicist believe that the universe at some point will stretch to it’s max and like so many rubber bands everything will once again contract until it once again reaches Planck density, resulting in a “big crunch.” That, in fact, the universe does this in a cyclical manner and always has and always will. With many experiencing “social media fatigue” and new social networks and tools being released everyday it seems like a socialverse big crunch is imminent. But how will this look? The problem I see at the moment is that too many companies are attempting to be aggregators. Everyone wants to be that one place where we all go to check, update and maintain our networks. They are just adding to the clutter. What’s next? Aggregators to aggregate the aggregators? Some companies do seem to be adding real value and are focusing on solving the overload problem in unique and inventive ways. One such company that presented at Under the Radar was ffwd. Patrick Koppula, CEO, formerly of iLike set the stage by supplying us with an overview of his vision of the future of television and online video. Patrick believes that in the future, television and online video will merge. The set top box will no longer be 500 channels but instead will be a sea of 500,000 sources of video. I am inclined to agree. Certainly at the moment we are already there with the internet. Ffwd uses semantics, behavioral targeting and socialization to quiet the chatter and deliver video to users that they are likely to enjoy and appreciate in the form of customized channels, making watching video online more like channel surfing. The technology works across multiple screens, with current support for the web, the Wii and mobile devices.

It’s an interesting space-time! I love watching the socialverse unfold, expand and collapse back in on itself, most likely a pattern that will sustain itself in a cyclical manner, with exciting new technologies and platforms emerging in each incarnation. Congrats also to the winners at Under the Radar, to see a full list click here.