NY Web Guy

After meaning to for a while, I finally attended the Social Media Club’s meeting on Tuesday. The conversation was about Social Networks - the current state of the industry, and, more importantly, where it’s going.

They had two panelists, Andrew Weinreich, and Peter Shankman, moderated by Howard Greenstein, the founder of Social Media Club, who had a lot of his own experienced to add.

• Andrew Weinreich is the former founder of the original social network, SixDegrees, and current founder and CEO of MeetMoi.
• Also, Peter Shankman, CEO – The Geek Factory, Inc., Founder – AirTroductions, and an advisor to a few social networking startups.

The conversation was fascinating, the three panelists had some very good insights. Here is a summary, or an article, really - with a few of my own thoughts sprinkled in.

Historical Overview and Some Anecdotes.

Andrew started out with a little bit of historical perspective. He started SixDegrees with the idea that people want to know who their friends friend are. He found out that while this is true, all social networks are dominated by dating. All of them.

He shared some interesting anecdotes about SixDegrees. For example, Facebook is the largest photo site, and sharing photos are a key part of why it’s useful. Back in 2000, digital photography didn’t really exist yet, so it was not really viable to put up pictures on the site easily.

In general, there have been several paradigm shifts in Social Networking. First, addition of pictures to social networking. Then, broadband service and rich media content started driving adoption as well. As more and more people get online, the value of social networking increases. The network law is that a network’s utility is proportional to the square number of its users. For example, if only one of your friends has a phone, buying a phone is not that useful to you. However, if all of your friends have a phone, then not having a phone becomes a problem. Now, the current paradigm shift is that the social networks are becoming an application platform.

All these trends caused an evolution of social networks.

• Six Degrees won the space because they were the first
• Friendster won the space, not sure why.
• MySpace won the space because it allowed people to express themselves
• Facebook won the space because it paid special attention to privacy concerns

Given that, there didn’t seem to be much concern that Facebook is likely to lose. The consensus was that they are smart, and know what they are doing, and doing similar things to other social networks that are trying to defeat them.

OpenSocial vs. Facebook API - Google vs. Facebook.

This led into a discussion of OpenSocial and Facebook API. In the industry, you typically see the leader trying to promote their own platform as being best, while people who are lagging often band together and try to push open standards. This is what is happening, in a way. OpenSocial is an open standard that allows people to build applications that can run on many social networks. This stands in opposition to Facebook API, which is supported by Facebook (they are also licensing it to other players, I think Bebo licensed it). Right now it’s basically Google (OpenSocial) against Facebook. Google does have strengths in this area. Orkut, for example, is the largest social network in Latin America.

The core point is that if Google (or somebody else) makes contact manager truly interoperable, then the value of a specific social network will decrease. We won’t be locked into Facebook, we’ll be able to easily switch between networks and social applications. People understand that, this is one of the reasons Plaxo is important, and why it tried to release an application to get friends information from Facebook recently.

After the contact manager is interoperable, then any social network becomes Facebook. You can create your own and have it be useful to you almost immediately. This is key to more and more applications becoming social. This way, the social graph is the operating system, and we write applications on top of it.

How do we know that Social Networking Arrived?

The panelists made fun of some of the popular applications on Facebook that allow various poking methods, throwing ghosts, and vampires. This is a sideshow. The social networking will have arrived when major companies start building applications on top of social networks, i.e. Amazon, eBay, SEARS, NBC, etc, etc. For example, if SEARS builds an app, and can get reviews from your first degree / second degree on this refrigerator. Because this is a greater context and greater relevance for reviews / other data.

When we no longer have to use the word “social networking”, that ’s when it has arrived. Sort of like we don’t say “search engine”, but just say Google. Somebody in the audience made point that for people who are in school or right out of school, Facebook has become such a big part of their lives, that for them it’s beyond comprehension that there is web without Facebook. For them, it HAS arrived.

Privacy & Personal Social Currency.

The panel agreed that privacy is a thing of the past. While we’ll have control over what we can share, there is a lot of data collected about us, often without our knowledge.

Peter gave an example of somebody who acted atrociously after a date with a girl he met online. Peter posted a post on it – How not to Act On JDate. This had tremendous repercussions for the person, he said he had to change his last name. Now, if you look up his name online, the article “How not to act on JDate” and a bunch of other posts related to that incident come up.

It’s expected that people will find out about you in job interview situation. We need to consider that. As professionals, we need to be aware of what comes up in a Google search for us?

This means that we need to manage information available about us, it becomes our social currency. How we choose to invest our social currency will determine the return we get on the currency. Peter, for example, said that his Facebook (or LinkedIn- don’t remember) profile has earned him 75K in business last year, partially because he made sure it has relevant content on it, and not a collection of superpokes and funwall posts.

Social Networks accelerate Social Behavior

Some people challenged panelists notion that social networks represent nothing new. Panelists clarified - it’s not like there is nothing new, but there is nothing new in social behavior. Technology providers who really understand human social behaviors, what instincts preceded internet, and build technology that facilitates and accelerates those interactions are the ones that are succeeding. Every company that tried to radically change people’s behaviors has failed. Companies that try to understand human behavior are more likely to win.

If anything, we’ve gotten closer to the core of the human nature. Internet has not spawned new human nature, it just made it easier to find answers to questions we always we wanted to know. One key difference is that we can do certain thing with more privacy (or perceived privacy, anyway). For example, we can look up a potential job prospect on the web without him finding out.

Social networking in the enterprise.

There is a lot of money being invested into bringing Social Networking ideas and Web 2.0 into the enterprise. One of the most obvious benefits relate to sales – using the trust network to find potential clients. However, within the enterprise there is also value in social networking as a way to find people who are facing similar problems, so collaboration can happen faster.

Some companies mentioned were VisiblePath, which can figure out the true social graph by tracking email activity, i.e. who is really communicating with whom. Also Spock was mentioned. Howard said that Microsoft with its Active Directory / Exchange could have capitalized on capturing of these relationships a long time ago, but missed the opportunity. Having done a lot of work with SharePoint, I know that they are investing very heavily into it now. A lot of people are trying to integrate with key Web 2.0 / SaaS providers like SalesForce.com.

The open source startup I work for, Alfresco, is releasing some interesting offerings around this, and we are finding clients (mostly large enterprises) very receptive. Here is a link to our CTO’s “Manifesto”. He is a former founder of Documentum, so he has a keen feel for enterprise space. I think we are well positioned for this space, since we come from another core Web 2.0 tenet, and that is “Data is Intel Inside”, or if I rephrase this a bit, “Content is the Intel Inside.” We have been innovating in this area, and recently released enterprise-oriented solution for Facebook, iGoogle gadgets, integration of our core content management offering with MediaWiki, and others.

Future of Social Networking

There was general consensus that going forward, EVERYTHING becomes LOCATION-BASED. Historically, there was a problem with location-based technology, it was dependent on the carriers giving access to information. After 9/11 the carriers are required to know position of each cell phone. However, they don’t give that information to small companies. Recently, Google did something brilliant, it
indexed locations of cell towers, and now can identify location without relying on carriers.

When everything in the world has an IP address. When this happens, our lives will be more connected, we’ll have more information. Information will be pushed as opposed to us having to pull it. We’ll just get relevant information everywhere we go.

Peter gave an example of a likely future. You land in London, text message sushi, get a list of five places, and also people who you know in the area. Possibly recommendations by your friends of the sushi places, so you can pick. The key here is phone.

In the next few years, everything you are doing on your computer, you’ll be doing on your phone. You’ll have the same functionality, plus add location-based services on top of this. Expect to buy several phones over the next few years. This is one of the reasons why both Google and Yahoo and Microsoft are making such pushes into the mobile space.

UPDATE:

Howard Greenstein put up a link to the mp3 of the meeting.

http://www.socialmediaclub.org/2008/01/16/social-media-club-nyc-meeting-11508/