The Future of Social Networking
Quite simply, the future goes to what works. Facebook works;
let’s explore others. Social networks are emerging like
mushrooms and earthworms after a rain; many will be eaten,
some will be trampled, and most will just live short lives before
giving way to another generation. “What works” means, it has to
immediately improve my life, without much effort and with instant
gratification. Conversely, it must not annoy me. Within the
confines of my own hedonistic use, it must create more value for
the community of users. If this benefit of community gains scale
exponentially for small groups, the site will grow explosively.
Lastly, it has to work financially for the site: the service can’t be
much more expensive to produce than the site is able to monetize
it.
Steve of Youtube, I’m talking to you, about your genuinely useful
site. What’s that? Oh I see, you can’t hear me because you are
talking to Larry and Sergey right now about how you really are
worth more than a billion dollars because you are so essential and
widely used, showing 100m videos a day, but that they need to
buy you this month, no - actually right now - before the next
bandwidth bill arrives, because if they don’t Yahoo, Fox or Viacom
will. Congratulations, Steve! And after your amazing 16 months
achievement, I’m glad you can say “It’s still fun.”
Let’s look at three similar, not niche, hot social companies, and
see whether we can evaluate their likelihood of success: Flock,
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Blueorganizer and Diigo, in the interesting order of decreasing
user commitment required. Significantly, this is also in the order
of increasing benefits of network scale. Alas, I show my hand.
Flickr, myspace and facebook are clear winners in explosive
usage. Many other sites have a core set of dedicated niche users.
We’re looking at these others less to review specific
implementations, and more to understand the space and the
future.
These three sites all share the ambition of creating community
around the browsing experience, and integrating people’s data
streams from disparate websites, for for the people’s convenience
and for their trusted friends to see. I personally see these
ambitions as extremely important, and I can’t overstate that they
may be the short term killer app of the Web 2.0 internet.
Flock is the social web browser. I met the founders of Flock at
OSCON, 2005 in Portland, Oregon. I was walking to a rock
climbing gym for a workout, and I met the founder of Plone
walking on the street, and he disclosed their secret location. It
wasn’t meant to be a secret, but that explained why the venue
only had about a dozen people in it. But that was okay, because
having a lot of people would have distracted the Flock dev team
from completing and publicly releasing their first beta version,
during the party.
I must first disclose that I have one financial interest in their
success: somewhere I think I still have a “Get Flocked” t-shirt from
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that party, and on the day they overtake IE, I will sell it. At the
party, I learned that the mozilla foundation gets a boatload of
money from Google for making them the default start page,
counted in the $10Ms, and that there is significant political
infighting over than windfall. I didn’t learn what was Flock’s
financial model for success.
Flock installs very easily, and the initial integration with Flickr/
Photobucket for photos is very simple. After that it seems to work
much like Firefox, and my photo stream is at the top. On the site
I have two hints of a committed global user community of
something over a thousand installations, as counted on their “map
of flockstars” and their “i flock” button downloads. So what is my
immediate personal benefit to using Flock? I’m not sure I’ll ever
find out. And I have at least the motivation that I want to write
about it, and not look completely ignorant. But I, along with the
rest of the mozilla-go-kick-some-IE-ass fan club, wish them well.
Regarding Blueorganizer, I must first disclose that I have one
financial interest in their success. Amazingly I was able to
register blueorganizer.org, weeks after the launch of the product,
and blueorganizer.com has a squatter from Wyoming who took
the domain 4 months ago. This doesn’t immediately give me
much confidence in their likely marketing success... did they just
not think of it? Or were they so married to the color blue from
their company name and their idea it’s an “organizer” that they
committed a launch to it even after they knew they couldn’t take
the dotcom address?
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TechCrunch gave Adaptive Blue a glowing review. Blueorganizer’s
structured approach to user information accrues valuable
benefits. The default restaurant and other commercial data they
show in the big left panel, from the moment I install them, is so
low quality and so irrelevant to whatever my mission is in the
main browser window, that I feel a strong urge to uninstall it.
While it is important to launch fast, do it with only a small enough
feature set that is truly compelling, and don’t force unready, nonuseful
features to early adoption. Adaptiveblue probably knows
their default content is not useful, so they are showing it as an
example of the great potential of the product. But unless it
immediately does something for me today, I (and everyone else)
will not go through the trouble of adding content to make it
useful to me tomorrow. Blueorganizer shows it’s potential loudly,
to cover for the immediate lack of any initial benefit. Speculate
about this form of service evolution: blueorganizer collects a map
of my friends from the facebook readonly API, and all of our posts
from every website imaginable, and display ranks them. In this
way it could become a personal publishing platform and friend
news service.
Diigo installs easily, but has the initial annoying habit of
preempting the Firefox double click text selector. The
advantages of scale most accrue when Diigo based annotations
become widespread enough to be the standard way of
commenting on websites. Indeed, this “alternate” web could be a
fun democratic alternative to simple web presence, allowing
visitors to effectively write graffiti on pages of disliked sites.
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Unfortunately, at this time, all comments have equal standing,
whether they are interesting or crap, and whatever the credentials
of the author and their relationship to me. Such useful ranking on
metadata will come. As will spam, and a spam comment I put up
on the “what’s new” core Diigo site page lived there for days.
The two best, winning features of Diigo are first that it works on
top of my current social bookmarking service (whether that is furl,
del.icio.us or something else), so easily I can cross-post to
multiple services, to show my activity to all of my friends
regardless of which one they are using. Unfortunately, it doesn’t
support Furl’s category, ranking or page clipping features, which i
use heavily. Second, it allows me to markup/highlight pages, and
send them to other people who are not registered with the
service. So my highlights are visible publicly or just privately to
anyone.
Diigo’s challenge is making sure everyone new to the site can
understand how they can immediately gain value from the site,
and get them to just do that, until they want to see more. Their
front page tries. But maybe people just don’t read. I didn’t. I just
got annoyed that it took over my text highlight functionality to
always show me a new diigo menu. With Flickr or Facebook you
are using the site in reader mode before you are ever asked to do
anything, and often the asking is done by your friends, not by the
site. The Diigo service is far from easy to start using at this time.
And if you kindly indulge me only this one in this entire book, I’ll
put my red hat on, and say I just don’t like the word Diigo; I don’t
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feel like Diigo’ing anything, or asking my friends to Diigo
something, whatever that means. If they help users slide into use
and few share my visceral aversion, and thereby they get critical
mass, this product design will really succeed to reach its lofty
ambitions.
Like these, Facebook is a prototypical Web 2.0 company, and I
can say this with complete confidence, because I will now
conveniently redefine Web 2.0 for my own purposes, just as every
other typist is doing. I can say that this social collaboration
explosion IS Web 2.0, so we are living in the very center of
internet evolution.
For me the key feature of Web 2.0 is distributed community, since
this is what the internet can uniquely do better than a desktop
application, and than a neighborhood street potluck. With Ajax,
scripting languages like PHP/Ruby/Python, application
frameworks like PHP/Rails/CMSs, and web APIs from just about
every major site like maps.google.com, new sites are now
naturally built as fast prototypes which integrate existing sites
and features. Facebook was born out of this soup, and it will
thrive as long as it keeps riding that trend.
Facebook looks properly committed here with the release of its
developer API, and immediate interest by over one thousand
developer users in the first four days. I don’t understand the
security model for protecting sensitive data, beyond the threat of
being shut down for abuse. Also, the valuable relationship data
stays property of Facebook, whereas some web 2.0 definitions
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would prescribe a more distributed ownership responsibility, or
one which rests with the individual user. Anyway, the API may
produce a flood of creativity like the yahoo and google APIs
inspired.
Ajax (used for example on the facebook NCAA March Madness
brackets) is very helpful to Web 2.0 because it makes it easy to
interact with web data services, which can be anywhere, including
on your own site. Even plain old javascript is nice in that it speeds
up the response back to the user, most noticeable in highly
interactive applications, and javascript frameworks like prototype,
make such development easier. Facebook doesn’t use prototype
or any other frameworks, usually preferring to do all application
engineering from scratch.
As noted earlier, Web 2.0 emerges as building a site is easier, so
the field is bustling and crowded. Social bookmarking services
like Furl and Del.icio.us, let me keep forever what I’ve found on
the web, and show me what my friends are reading (which is
usually much better than the daily news), and help me find other
people with similar interests, so I can see what they are reading.
Digg shows me what it important in the news like slashdot with
editors used to, but digg is more open to popularity cliques and
gaming, because there is no concept of friends, networks or
groups.
Let’s look at two other generalized social network competitors:
wallop and multiply.
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Multiply.com is an interesting competitor without a niche market,
and it is slowly growing up towards the Alexa 500, succeeding
because it focuses on “real world networks” of friends. At this
time, a lot of users seem to have exactly one connection
(themselves), but that vision is correct, and the site is seeing
active development. Interestingly, Multiply has enabled users to
categorize their friend relationships, a first step towards
classifying which friends are closer or more important. On this
point, Zuck has intentionally decided to collect Facts about how
users know each other in the Facebook social map feature,
instead of letting users make classifications. Facebook intends to
algorithmically compute relationship closeness based on Facts
and site behavior, more correctly and without the trouble of users
maintaining it themselves. Like Facebook and Myspace though, it
wants to own the user, providing more and more features (blogs,
photos, videos) all locked within the small pond of its own site. A
Web 2.0 trajectory would predict more cross site integrations,
those which appear natural to users, not necessarily those
indicated by company executive planned corporate mergers.
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Nevertheless, facebook is the clear leader in the serious social
network game63, and has an ambitious plan. The lead and
momentum are with Facebook.
Facebook is coming out of its summer lull, and with the new
freshman class infusion should approach 10,000,000 (10m)
members. Facebook, with the 2006 entry class, is amazingly as
high as ever, in the high 90% of target audience signing up for
and heavily using the service. While both Bebo.com (~25m) and
myspace.com (~70m) claim many more members, the real
question for a social networking site is how many active users a
site has, and how much the site has become a part of those user’s
lives. Of those 10m facebook members, over two-thirds typically
visit the site every day. Over 90% of users who have ever signed
up, continue to use the site today. Myspace.com and bebo.com
did not release those numbers to me, but I bet they are not as
strong. This says that Facebook _works_ for users who try it.
Will Facebook work for other non-college users? Will it continue
to work better for college students than any other, even new, site?
Every large, successful website has a powerful vision of service.
Google, Ebay and Yahoo all started with a simple, powerful vision
Karel Baloun 91
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63 myspace is the leader in pageview and members. but as an open network, i
don’t think (smart) people really feel to be themselves, so i believe they (like me)
are not genuine or serious on myspace. i don’t have evidence for this, yet. but
consider this - a facebook profile is tied to a single email address, so is inherently
valuable, while with myspace you can always start again. I’d bet you again,
without evidence yet, that a lot of those millions of members are in fact multiple
accounts.
on which they executed to a very high level of completion. Having
a simple story, executed well, is also a great way of becoming
bought, as Paypal and Overture demonstrated.
Facebook has a big vision, but it is more complicated.
Google's big vision: enable people to find stuff on the internet,
clearly the most important and challenging task on the internet
today. I heard during google's early days that the company's goal
was to make finding any information on the internet easier than
finding it on your own desk. Well, now with everyone’s desk
becoming clear and simple, they’ll need a new metaphor. Best
estimates say the search game is in the 2nd or 3rd inning, with
many more opportunities, but Google's success has come from
how far it progressed towards its vision.
Yahoo's vision, which I've never seen clearly articulated, is, i think,
to be everything to everyone, so that anything one wants to do a
lot on the internet, can be done through Yahoo. Even in Japan,
guess hoo helped me plan out my train itinerary, and our friend is
running her small japanese candle business on the Japanese
yahoo network.
Microsoft dreamed of a PC on everyone's desk, and may have
gotten there, but people now are seeing that we don't want a
windows PC on every desk. We'd rather have an Ipod in our ears,
synced to some laptop and cellphone, playing games on our LCD
TV, all enabled by linux based servers somewhere, taken care of
by someone else so that I don't have to worry about it. Oracle and
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Sun failed at their network computing attempts, maybe because it
wasn't their fundamental vision and passion. Apple is more like
Sony in that they can design any kind of consumer device, as long
as it's really cool, and the media savvy ipod happened because
Steve Jobs is a marketing guy with a foot in both entertainment
(from Pixar to being the largest shareholder in Disney) and
technology worlds.
Google is especially enthralled with the vision thing: “digitize all
printed books”, “replace email, IM and the telephone with gmail”,
“automate contextual internet text advertising”. It is easier to
have a vision about something that already exists or is undeniably
essential, such as a renewable, carbon-neutral alternative to fossil
fuels. Of course a vision isn’t enough - others could execute the
vision better, or the vision could be a threat to someone more
powerful than you, who plays Godzilla to your Bambi64 - buta
grand vision seems to be necessary if not sufficient, at least until
you are big and successful, so now Microsoft can drift and dabble
in whatever they want until their Windows and Office cash-cows
fade away.
Amazon and Google are constantly evolving beyond their original
visions, taking on new challenges and targets. How much should
Facebook adjust and evolve? Which way would you like it to go?
