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Blogging & Social Networking: Who Cares?Blogging & Social Networking: Who Cares?Blogging & Social Networking: Who Cares? 05/22/2004 05:16 PM I'm speaking at the Churchill Club on blogging and social networking, June 3rd in Palo Alto. Should be lively event, moderated by Dan Gillmor and Tony Perkins. Other panelists include Jason Calacanis, Charlene Li, Mark Pincus and Ben Smith. These... This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)Blogging & Social Networking: Who Cares?Grok Headline matches for Blogging & Social Networking: Who Cares?Churchill Club Event: Blogging & Social
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 Recent reports of the demise of Social Networking Applications (SNAs), voted "technology of the year" by Business 2.0 just two years ago, are increasing. Most recently C|Net's Molly Wood reported on Five Reasons Social Networking Doesn't Work. While LinkedIn and eCademy are hanging in there, many of the other entrants into the SNA space are really struggling. I reported last year on what I thought was wrong with the first generation of social networking applications, and I haven't seen any significant improvements become mainstream since then. Wood complains that existing SNAs offer the user little to do, take too much time, don't provide a customized audience, are socially awkward, and don't provide much that other features of the Internet don't do as well or better. It's not clear what problem they're trying to solve, other than to provide a list of not-very-well qualified contacts for people online who are looking (mostly for customers, employers or dates). They remind me a lot of Chamber of Commerce meetings, with consultants and agents outnumbering 'real' businesspeople, five sellers for every buyer. I belong to several SNAs but use them rarely, since my blog provides me with a more robust network than any SNA could ever hope to do. The challenge, as with most business and social problems, is getting attention. Because good stories, useful, researched advice and helpful, informative conversations command attention, these are the tools of the trade in face-to-face networking events. Face to face meetings also provide a huge amount of non-verbal information that allows people to make considered judgements and to establish trust, which virtual forums can only accomplish awkwardly, and over time. The lowly telephone, and Skype, are an improvement. Most of us can converse iteratively faster and more competently in a voice conversation than in a message thread, and get past the awkwardness and misunderstandings faster as a result. I've had some excellent Skype conversations with people I have never met in person, and some ghastly ones. I have proposed a more robust, multimedia, multi-view Simple Virtual Presence (SVP) tool such as what is illustrated above. There are people more technologically competent and agile than I am who are achieving such presence using a combination of tools now, but for most of us this is still just a dream. SNAs are therefore inherently not very good for building relationships or for collaborative work. How are they at finding people for valuable personal or business relationships? Once again we're back to the too many sellers, too few buyers problem (it's the same with dating services, I'm told). Useful SNAs need to be under the control of the customer, not the vendor. They would be better advised to reinvent themselves as a kind of very detailed person-to-person 'yellow pages', to separate users' 'what I have' and 'what I need' personas, and to focus specifically on the former, in a lot more detail, with credentials and samples of offerings. In a way, that's what blogs do, providing a space for one individual to exhibit as much of himself as possible in as much detail as possible, which is why many recruiters are now starting to peruse blogs in the search for extraordinary people or matches for very difficult fits. So a good SNA could offer a condensed version of this: Who I am, What I offer, Who recommends me, and Samples of what I do. Then the buyer can browse this 'catalogue' and, if he thinks I might have what he's looking for (personally or professionally) he is given contact information (ideally with the richness of Simple Virtual Presence) to confirm through conversation that my offer meets his requirements. Simple as that. Forget about the discussion forums and the form-filling and all the other bells and whistles that just complicate use and chew up time. Just give me a yellow pages on steroids. Once some standards emerge on formats for this information, it could then be possible for people to post this information anywhere, in the agreed-upon 'SNA2' format, so that we would no longer have to post my information to each SNA 'yellow page' directory -- the SNA tools could go out and harvest it automatically wherever we posted it, so we would only have to maintain it once (perhaps on our blog-jacke t, personal website, or other online space).
What would really make SVP cool would be if we could meter it, so that the tool could track time we spent on each call and, with the agreement of the other party, automatically bill them and pay us for our time at an agreed-upon rate. Because it's the value you add person-to-person, helping them in their personal context, once the introductions are over and they know they've found the person they want to 'hire', that could finally realize the promise of online commerce. |
These folks totally groks it..... (their names
are Grant and Cyndie Berg.)
back and
forth over the social portal play. Zawodny on the point
missed: Stokes misses it not just once
, but twic
e.
Om nearl
y follows him off the "they just want my rolodex and why should I
give it to them" cliff, but veers at the last instant and manages to
strike a glancing blow at a worthy target by alluding to social
networking services embedded in client applications -- and spawns some
interesting comments.
Marc Canter's beating the FOAF drum
again. I'm looking forward to peopleaggregator's next
rev. Sifry's apparently working on FOAFing up Technorati, too. It isn't an
accident that Sifry's tagline is web services for
bloggers.
Anyway... back on topic...
Look, Friendster didn't get
$10m solely on the basis of its current business model. It sure as
shit didn't get it on the basis of its software / infrastructure [and
I hope they're spending some of that money on some
engineers].
They got it because, as Jon Udell and others have
pointed out (can't find link -- may be misattributing),
user-contributed data is a valid currency for the next generation of
online [web] service[s] businesses. And anyone who can succeed at
being a primary conduit for user contributed data which has bearing on
purchase decisions and product / technology adoption/popularity has a
great opportunity.
What Stokes seemed to miss, which Jeremy
alluded to initially and Marc re-iterates from another
vector:
"The place to make the money
is by adding value added, functionality, tools, services - what have -
AROUND these most basic of all instinctful notions. Not by charging
for the right to do them - in the first place!
So a
PeopleFinder or FriendRanking or Introduction manager or Private email
or IM enabler kind of platform - would be augmented with value added
tools - to become a new business model. This what I mean by 'new kinds
of tools."
... is that web services technologies
are going to enable a Friendster, an Amazon, and a Google to operate
in a unified manner delivering synergistic services to groups of
connected (define it any way you want) people with shared
interests.
This is what people are hopping up and down about,
and I think there's some solid cause [lineofsight - code + words +
pictures]
I'm feeling all warm and fuzzy. 2004 is looking to be pretty interesting.
I know I'm late to the party, but my recent experiments with LinkedIn and Friendster have got me all interested in the potential of software that bulids on top of people's own social networks. There's just one thing that's been bugging me, best explained by this quote from Om Malik:
The question I have is: why the F**K should I share my network of contacts with these commercial entities. They are like BlogSpot that does nothing for my brand equity and in many ways chews me out after making the network connections. Thus what I want is a "MoveableType" of social networking. Blogs took off because it was about one person - me. My social networks should be of my making for me. Lets figure out a way to cut out the middlemen.
Via John Battelle, here's the answer: Plink, a social search engine which uses information crawled from decentralised FOAF files. It's nicely put together and could be just the incentive I need to finally put together my own FOAF file.
Plink is also a nice example of the kind of thing the semantic web hopes to offer. People provide information in easily parsed formats, then others bulid third party applications on top of them that may never have been envisaged by the creators of the original standards. Feedster is another great example of this effect in action.
I'm sorry I disagree.....[read response after article].......
The next big thing in online social networking.
According to Reuters Social networking sites, which look to introduce friends of friends or people with common interests, have grabbed the attention of Internet users and venture capitalists but many are still looking for ways to make money.
Online dating siteTickle ( >2million profiles) launched a People Search service on its network that includes AskJeeves' . The partnership fuses the uncertain social networking phenomenon with a search model that has proven invaluable to both consumers and marketers on the public Internet.
Kolabora news expert Scott Allen blogs in his Social Networking News: According to Tickle CEO James Currier, “Search is a natural way for online social networking to move forward”. (..) "Tickle people search brings online search full circle, back to letting us find the right people to talk to.”
Reuters press release (April 22)
read more in the full articles quoted from three blogs
- Ask Jeeves Brings Search to Tickle (ClickZNews)<
BR>- Jeeves, what’s the next big thing in online social
networking? (Online Business
Networks)
- Education — the real "next big thing" in
online social networking (Online Business
Networks)
I'm certainly in favor of putting social networking into context - but search is not a context. It's sort of like getting it backwards.
It's not about bringing search to social networking. It's about bringing social networking to everything.
Really, read it for yourself...David Hornik (Venture Blog): All Social Networking Panels Are the Same. So in an effort to save you a bunch of time and aggravation, here's a transcription of this evening's event. I believe that it is essentially a transcription of all past and all future social software panels, so read it and free yourself of the need to ever attend such an event yourself.
LA Times on history of social software sites.. LA Times has a rehash on the history of Ryze, Friendster, Tribe.net and LinkedIn. Friendster founder Abrams signed up with a fledgling Ryze in August 2001 and helped with its first real-world mixer in Palo Alto. Soon he was talking to Scott and others about a site simply for dating that would echo the real-world way people meet -- through their friends. A serial entrepreneur, Abrams did a substantial amount of work on Friendster alone in his apartment. Then he raised money from several individuals. Among the first investors were Tribe founder Mark Pincus and his friend Reid Hoffman, who later launched LinkedIn. Both put down an initial $7,500 and now own 5% of the company between them. Friendster gets some revenue from advertisers and aims to turn a profit next year, though it won't say how. "Neither of us thought it was going to be a good investment," Pincus said. But that view changed this spring, when Friendster got him "a really good date," he said. "That made me a believer." [The Social Software Weblog]
The best part of this story is that Reid and Mark now get to find out confidential things Abrams is planning on doing, and do an 'end around' those plans. Notice how Reid and Pincus purchased the SixDegrees patent.
Now what's happening - each of these three guys is going in a different direction. What have they missed?
- Content plays with Social Networking (watch for Tony Perkin's AlwaysOn Network do get there first (by February) - with this HUGE new area)
- Mobile Mobs and Social Networking - ever heard of Midentity?
- Rich Media Interfaces and Social Networking - hhhmmmmmm, sounds like Laszlo to me
- Women and Social Networking - sounds like a job for iVillage - if you ask me
- Content Distribution Networks and Social Networking - I wonder what my friends at SpeedEra are up to?
Do these things have to suck? Damnifiknow. I know that there's a bunch of stuff I'd like from a social network analysis of my own inbox, voicecalls, and so forth. Today, I have an iTunes playlist ("Old friends") that just plays highly rated songs that haven't been played in the past 30 days. Why not a smart to-do list that reminds me to email old friends that I haven't called or written in the last season (credit: Alice)? Hell, how about something that gives me a distinctive ringtone for calls from out-of-touch old pals and the option to define attention-grabbing behavior (a chime, a prioritization, coloring) when they email?
Foe Romeo talks about how Google could have launched a YASNS that actually provided a useful service that end-users could still control but that Google could add a lot of value to: a FOAF explorer:
Google would not create its own closed social network, Orkut, but would instead make FOAF one of its quick searches, so that FOAF:Fiona Romeo would return my FOAF file as the primary search result, with friend and location filtering options. (Content about Fiona Romeo would also be returned but would be differentiated.)LinkPerhaps Google could add value by introducing a sense of authentication to FOAF, by indicating reciprocal links between FOAF files. I know that this result for Fiona Romeo is the correct one because her friends link to it. Oh, and I know that Matt Jones is really a friend of Fiona Romeo, because he says so too. (Plink, a FOAF search tool, gets this bit right.)
Orkut put up a special Valentines Day feature yesterday - which I used to it's fullest capacity!
It a really simple messaging system - which enables folks to attach an image, a pre-canned statement and colorize the background of this 'virtual Valentine. The nicest thing is that it appears on the top of your personal page - and is formatted perfectly! And normal messaging is turned off.
What this shows is that Orkut is actually breaking out of the mold of YASNS. Sure the spam feature is inane and may well 'cause it's demise, but at least he's willing to try something new!@ $%#^$%^%#$&%^#$#
As danah says - everything needs to be put into context and it's clear Orkut really DOES think of his system as a dating machine. Right on! Focus and context is key!@^%$&%^$
So what else makes up a NEXT generation social network?
Well make sure to check out Ludicorp's new Flickr system. I've been trolling around it this morning and I've YET to find anything wrong! Now I just need to get soem friends to exchange photos with and IM with.
Flickr is the first social net to intergrate IM and to use the social net for something BESIDES just mating or buying classified ads. Watch for a new generation of systems that treat social networking just as another crucial feature - just as Multimedia and the Internet are thought of today. I mean - who WOULDN'T build a system today without media or on-line built into it?
That's where we're going with social nets!
Comments at bottom....
Here's a post from Clay Shirky.....
Over at the Planetowrk Journal, Duncan Work has proposed a social networking bill of rights, elaborating on these 5 principles:
1. The right to know who is collecting what and for what
purposes;
2. The right to not participate;
3. The right to clear and, in some cases, irrevocable privacy
policies;
4. The right to control access to personal information and attention;
5. The right to participate in a global social networking system
without restrictive barriers.
It’s wrapped up in something that’s a bit too much of an ad for LinkedIn for my taste, but it’s an interesting start. #3, especially, will be interesting to see in practice, since the courts have usually allowed a wide degree of freedom for companies to unilaterally change their bargain with users, especially for businesses in bankruptcy, which triggers freedom from all manner of contractual obligations. Would be fun to write the contract that is designed to survive that sort of change of control for the data.
Duncan Work's company - NetDeva - was bought by Reid Hoffman and LinkedIn. It'll be intersting to see if this philosophy is personfided in LinkedIn's product and services.
securityfocus.com/news/7739
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No Business in Social Networking. David Coursey can't find the value in paying to find out who his friends know. So where's the business model for LinkedIn, Ryze and other business "social networking" sites ? [eWEEK.com Messaging and Collaboration]
Somebody please tell David Coursey to stop thinking that social networks are the answer. They're only the path to enlightenment. Yes people are important - but people as a business model is nto going to happen - and is a no-no anyway.
It's what you do WITH the people that matters. Why is that so hard for folks like DavidCoursey to grok?
Google Tries Out Its Own Friendster-Style Service: The social networking space is getting awfully crowded, capped now by Google's entry.
The launch of Orkut comes after Friendster's rejection late last year of Google's offer to buy the site that has become known as an online venue for hooking up friends of friends.
It also arrives as new social networking sites are cropping up at a frenzied pace, fueled by venture capital investments in companies like Friendster and the business-oriented networking service LinkedIn.
Still doesn't beat Dogster, which prompted Anil Dash to plead, "Please God, make it stopster."
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