Who’s Building the Social Web?

27 05 2010

It seems inevitable: The Social Web will eventually dissolve into the fabric we now call the Web. In my last post about the future of the social web, “Facebook – Still Defining (and Defying) the Social Web”, I started predicting the future of the social web. People and business will be drawn to the same patterns that drive the Web as the Social Web matures. The Web is distributed, standards-based, and easy to access. How will the Social Web become integrated?

In the Olden Times, people signed up for various online services to communicate with people. I personally had 2 such accounts: QuantumLink (the original AOL), and CompuServe. I also dialed into a local BBS that had good games (Q-Link had some decent offerings, but my friends all played on the local BBS). Why is this relevant? Because the evolution of AOL and the impact of the open Web draw a roadmap for the Social Web. Q-Link evolved into AOL, which became the 800 lb gorilla in the dial-up network space. Companies bought AOL keywords (keywords that could be typed into the search box in AOL and take you directly to a company’s page). Tell me when this starts to sound familiar (Facebook Pages, companies giving out a Facebook URL, every man, woman, and child having a Facebook account). Facebook has won a game in which the grand prize could be serving as a warning to others.

So what happened to AOL? The Internet and the Web happened. Geeks first started to question: If I can use any dial-up service to reach the Web, why would I pay a premium to AOL? Eventually, this wisdom trickled down to the masses (except my dad… I’m not sure why he still uses AOL). Now people use whatever provider they want for connecting, and they can use multiple email providers (so their email isn’t attached to their provider), AND they have multiple options for online publishing (I’m using one right now, but it’s certainly not the only one).

Leaders and visionaries emerged during this time to explain the “network economy” and how it was going to impact the world. The thing is, these rules still apply. It’s natural for one or two big leaders to emerge early in the game, but eventually the knowledge and power dissipates. And that’s a good thing for the web, because as companies and individuals start understanding that they don’t need to rely on the leader in the space, competition starts to happen. And competition is a driving force in making things better for everyone.

So, who has a chance at being a significant competitor in the new Social Web? First, let’s look at consumers (e.g. getting off Facebook). Facebook provides a simple social presence for consumers. You can argue all you want about Facebook’s privacy settings, the fact that it’s hard to change the look-and-feel of your social presence, etc., but that’s really just a distraction. What’s needed is options. Who is likely to provide them? Some of the big players, Google, Microsoft, and even Yahoo!, already provide a “presence” for people on the Web. Yahoo!’s move to partner with Zynga (the largest social game publisher) shows a move in the right direction. All three already have products for content sharing. Once they figure out the game has changed away from grabbing users to empowering users to participate in an open Social Web, any of these could be a contender.

How will these big players push into a more open Social Web, though? There are small(er) players who also have good assets:

  • Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. They provide other tools that are very interesting and promote an open Social Web. Take “Intense Debate”, their distributed social commenting tool. An Intense Debate user can start or participate in multiple “comment thread” discussions across the web and have a centralized dashboard of comments and responses. This is really powerful and provides a good model for how the Social Web will eventually work.
  • Chi.mp, who provides a social dashboard and presence, including a free domain name (you can find me at jkinner.mp). They provide a model for maintaining profiles and presence on the Social Web, and they support emerging standards like OpenID.
  • Brizzly, who has a great Twitter client, both for the desktop and for the web. I could imagine a social presence site that works a lot like Brizzly does. It also just so happens that the Brizzly experience is somewhat similar to the Facebook experience.
  • Acquia, who is the commercial arm behind the popular web publishing framework, Drupal. Business who want to participate in the new Social Web will want a modular plug-in architecture for building their web sites. Drupal is already a popular solution for web site building, and Acquia’s focus on “social publishing” will likely serve them well.

All these companies, both big and small, have work to do to build the new Social Web. Attitudes will need to change, and new monetization models will need to emerge to fund the transition. Disapora’s crowdsourced funding model (via Kickstarter) is one example. Enough people care enough about a distributed social web to fund a big project (at least a year, comfortably; I hope those guys go ahead and put off school for a year or hire people to do the work; either would be a wise way to use the cash). Of course, not all their motivations may be positive, but that’s not relevant to the technology.

Next time, I’ll post about what work needs to be done to get this distributed Social Web off the ground.


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Diaspora is the new LimeWire

20 05 2010

This may be a controversial statement in the coming months, but I’ll say it: I have friends who work at LimeWire. I personally have nothing against the technology, although I do believe that most of its uses have been illegitimate and maybe even illegal (I have no proof, no data; this is just anecdotal). BitTorrent, too. It took me a while to realize this, but I think Diaspora is getting backing because it attracts the same set of users.

Diaspora is a great idea. And there is genuine, legitimate interest in it. But why do more than 5,000 people back an obscure project like this? Because it tickled certain keywords. Like “peer-to-peer”. “Encrypted.” “Share.” Even “Seed”. (Note to self: these should make great SEO keywords for this blog post, too!). Gray-market sharing sites are like a floating crap game. Every once in a while, the game has to move.

The legitimate interest is in the legitimate uses of the technology. It’s the “right thing” for the social web to be more distributed. It’s the “right thing” for people to have the option of owning their data. This kind of technology can bring the social web out of the dark ages of everyone working the land to benefit Facebook and Zynga. It can make everyday users social web “land owners”. And I think Donald Trump would agree, owning land is where it’s at.


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Facebook – Still Defining (and Defying) the Social Web

14 05 2010

But Not Exactly How They Think

I tried to post these comments on a prominent blog, but apparently they didn’t make the cut. So, I hope someone else finds them interesting and useful.

The social web is evolving to be complicated. Lots of players have identified the potential in connecting people together. Companies like MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook have been pioneers in discovering the value of these personal connections. Consolidation was inevitable as network effects draw more people to a dominant network. Facebook is that network today, and they have massive scale and inertia that will buffer them from making some mistakes. They are splitting their efforts between being a consumer destination (a portal) and being a social platform for developers. Now they are starting alienating everyone at once.

Through the pressure cooker of public opinion, Facebook is shaping the conversation around social networking in a direction that doesn’t necessarily work to their advantage. Frankly, as a portal, they are acting like a 1980s AOL. In the 80s, AOL was how to reach people online. AOL keywords were all the rage. Until people figured out that AOL didn’t add any value and, in fact, just got in the way of the relationships companies were trying to build with their customers and partners. As soon as I started seeing companies advertise Facebook URLs (e.g. facebook.com/mycompany), I thought of AOL keywords. A vocal minority of Facebook users are concerned with their shrinking privacy, too. Generally, I don’t think consumers worry that much about privacy issues. But given a better alternative, they might take flight. Like they did from Friendster.

As a social platform, they are taking plays out of the 1990s Microsoft playbook and alienating people who are investing in their platform (and attracting users). They even have their own version of the famous “Halloween Memo” (written by a classmate of mine, incidentally). Zynga is questioning whether to continue their investment in the Facebook platform or to build their own destination site to host their wildly popular games. The total daily active user count of all Zynga games combined is nearly the total number of Facebook users (okay, they have 70 million active users overall; lots of people play more than one game). Zynga doesn’t want to pay 50% of their margins to Facebook. I’m not surprised. 50% of margin hurts. 50% of margin is a big motivation to start investing in your own platform.

I think of myself as more of a pragmatist than an ideologist. But it certainly seems that the pressure Facebook is applying to the system will either make companies and users collapse, or it will blow back against them, reducing their importance. We won’t know for another 5 years which result will happen. But there is visible, measurable support for a project by four NYU students. At this moment, it is 1400% oversubscribed for its “seed” round of funding ($10,000) on kickstarter. And they still have two more weeks to raise money. I’d be willing to bet that they will make it to $200k or beyond, rivaling the funding that we received at Ringside Networks from our Tier 1 VC. That is a sure sign that things have changed.

In my next post, I’ll talk about what attributes may make a solution attractive to companies and users in this emerging environment. I’ll also talk about how you might cope with the changes if you’re participating in social networks today.

Update: Diaspora succeeded in raising just over $200,000 (got that right!). That will buy a lot of Red Bull-and-pizza-fueled coding.

Update: VentureBeat just offered a similar opinion about Facebook being like AOL. I’m not sure (yet) that Facebook will dodge mediocrity.


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Keeping Users Interested

24 10 2008

Those of you who follow my personal blog already know that I am a fan of Joshua Porter and his Bokardo blog. I particular enjoyed the post from his archives where he discusses the usage lifecycle of a social web user. Today I would like to augment his excellent post with some additional thoughts.

The Interested user powers the social web. This possibility may be counterintuitive to most web site operators who have spent the last several years of their lives converting people into registered users. The reality on the social web is that only Interested and “Repeat” First Time users who are engaged with your web property are ever going to convert into Regular Users. From a social perspective, Regular Users are your “Mavens” or “Connectors” who have the highest probability for promoting your site, product, or service. They can move people from Unaware to Interested using simple tools like email, “share” buttons, etc. You can give them a lot more power than that, though, by enabling them to use their social connections to move people directly to the First-time User stage. Then, through repeated “First-time” use, you can increase the likelihood that that First-time User converts into a regular user. The key to this process is moving the “sign-up” stage to a later step in the process.

We all use gas stations or some similar service where the perceived value is pretty uniform and where there are a lot of places to go get the product or service. If you move to a new town and had to fill out an application form at every gas station, would you?

Along those lines, people who arrive at your web site via a social referral are basically arriving with an engraved invitation from the Maven or Connector in your community. They expect a key to the city, not a gate. In the best case, the Interested user has many of these invitations and would like to use each one to learn more about the product or service you provide. My advice: Let them. Use the social technology available today to welcome them with open arms and increase the chances that each and every one of those “Repeat First-time Users” will reach out to more and more of their friends, family, and colleagues to draw more and more of them in.


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