If AOL is smart, integration is the first thing that’s going to happen to Bebo. Charlene Li calls it right when she says that one of the most exciting prospects is hooking AIM into a social graph:
The foundation of my premise is that social networks will be like air, integrated into everything that we do. Let’s start with AIM and ICQ, in the case especially for AIM, leading instant messaging platforms. Most social networking sites already have IM-like capabilities built into them, but the reverse isn’t true. And yet, the buddy list of services like AIM reflect very well a key part of my social graph — the people with whom I communicate with in a very intimate, frequent manner.
I bet it’s been frustrating for AOL to own the top Instant Messenger network for years without finding a truly good way to monetize it.
Nobody has figured out a good way to monetize social networks yet, either, but I think that linking a straight-up social network (Bebo) with all of the other social connection points that AOL has (Netscape, AIM, etc), is a step in that direction. Especially if they allow third party developers to get their hands on an API that interfaces with all of these tools.
The conventional wisdom is that social networks will find their pot of gold when they figure out how to do two things simultaneously: sell really targeted ads to advertisers at high prices, and present those ads to users in unobtrusive yet compelling way.
I think that the answer to that lies less in traditional display advertising and more in influence and brand-based advertising. Don’t worry: even I don’t know exactly what I mean yet.
Regardless, if AOL handles it right, they could be building a very powerful platform.
If you haven’t figured it out from the title, the idea is that LinkedIn, by offering corporate solutions directly to big companies, is shuffling out 3rd party recruiters and replacing them with itself.
Hinson says in Facebook:
You, the community, build our content for free.
We turn around and sell it big companies, shafting the little recruiter, in the process.
Typical, but not unexpected.
That’s why every time I hear someone utter “community” I make sure my back is to the wall or I’m sitting down - and firmly grab my wallet.
LinkedIn may be robbing the third party recruiters of their corporate market, but remember that the community doesn’t really build the content “for free.” Each user is being “paid” for their contribution.
Here’s the trick: LinkedIn provides value to its users on both ends. People who list their information have an online resume in what amounts to be the world’s largest online database of professionals. It’s like being in the phone book used to be.
People who need to find talent find value in the service that LinkedIn provides: finding people that fit certain professional specifications.
While LinkedIn isn’t shelling out cash for anyone to fill in a profile, they are providing a service to its users without charging for it. This is because they’re getting value from the network elsewhere: corporate clients.
I read Nick O’Neill’s post about SocialAds earlier today with some curiosity. After all, SocialAds have proven themselves to be somewhat underwhelming since the announcement from Facebook on November 6th.
Nick is right that what SocialAds taps into is the online version of Word of Mouth Marketing, plus a bit of measurement as to a particular mouth’s influence. And he’s right that this is cool, and in concept, revolutionary.
But I haven’t seen it work so far.
It might revolutionize advertising, if it starts working.
But it needs to work first. Has Google revolutionized advertising with AdSense? Indisputably. Did Overture think of the concept first? Yep.
Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, studies the biological basis of the human need for information. His research opens a window into understanding why many people are willing to scan thousands of tweets a day, or to hover over a newsreader for hours ingesting many scores of feeds.
The answer is that humans in general are “infovores” and are wired to generate pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids when discovering new information.
“In other words, coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.”
Are Robert and many other bloggers becoming too dependent on these opioids? Is there a downside to being an information junkie?
“For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.
Just like the laser and the cat, technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.”
Regardless, I’d hate to see Robert change — from my vantage point he’s managing his anti-boredom campaign quite responsibly.
Sebastien Provencher proclaimed last week that Twitter is the new Facebook. I can’t say that I think he’s that far off.
I’ve already explained how I think that Facebook is not going anywhere, especially for it’s core user base. But the tech group needs something new to feed on. In Sebastien’s words:
Industry pundits are looking for utility and, for a while, it certainly felt like Facebook was IT. But not anymore. Has something replaced it? Yes. Today, I’d like to say it’s Twitter. It’s all anecdotal, mind you, based on my brain filtering a massive quantity of articles and blog posts I read every day. You’ll have to trust me on this. Should you still care about Facebook? A resounding YES!
So basically, he agrees with me. So I like him.
Twitter is, like most of the more interesting web services that are up and coming, more of an infrastructure than a service. Look at the things that have been built on top of it: twitterific (monetized with ads in the feed - which is likely for Twitter itself), Snitter, Tweeterboard, StrawPoll and so on.
Like RSS, it’s a push-based community technology. I think that’s exciting.
Today’s Facebook developer garage was a lot more satisfying than yesterday’s very scripted conversation between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Business Week reporter Sarah Lacy. Zuckerberg took the stage for a good 45 minutes to take questions from the crowd.
He wasn’t as open as I would have liked, but I did get more of a sense of who he is and what his vision will be. During a question from a gentleman who wanted to know why there is no network for Palestine, he revealed that Facebook will one day move away from top-down dictated networks and instead, allow users to build their own networks.
He also talked about Facebook’s concerns with regard to moving their service into China as they continue to internationalize.
Yesterday, I wrote that the problem with the Zuckerberg keynote wasn’t Sarah Lacy. The “conversation” between the two of them felt scripted because it was scripted. I stand by most of what I wrote, although I have to say that given his response to the Q&A today, I’d say that Zuckerberg may not love his bubble as much as I thought he did.
I had a lot of impressions throughout Zuckerberg’s talk, and I tweeted each of them. Here are my tweets — and the relevant tweets of my friends — in chronological order:
Me: Zuckerberg is taking questions from this developer audience. I asked him what he’d like to see developers build that would patch some holes
Me: Zuckerberg gave me kind of a non-answer. I want to know what he would like to see developers build that would really add value to his vision
Me: Still, even though he’s still being a closed book. I do appreciate the fact that he’s here and talking to us.
Eston Bond: @tetesegehen what holes? product holes or feature holes?
Me: @eston feature holes, like privacy stuff we were talking about last night. Or not being able to hold onto content that people share
Eston: @tetesegehen you couldn’t fix that kind of stuff through platform anyway. that’d be like trying to patch a windows feature by installin word
Me: @eston did you see what the drop.io guys were talking about?
@eston They’re building a private place within Facebook to share and permission information. That strikes me as a stopgap measure.
Me: What is the view on sharing information with the government? Good question!
Me: I’m really glad that Facebook is taking the China and privacy issue seriously.
Me: I love this Q&A, I have much more of a sense of who Zuckerberg is than from the keynote. His eyes light up when he talks about geekery.
Me: @scobleizer is asking Zuckerberg some very tough questions about people getting kicked off.
Me: Zuckerberg says that there’s a standard appeals process, he doesn’t think it’s true that people can’t get back into the site.
Me: Zuckerberg says that they’re going to allow users to create their own networks in the future. “Facebook Curmudgeons” network, anyone?
What I really got out of this talk — apart from all the geeky insights — is that Facebook is more open that it first appears. They really do care about reaching out to the developer community. The problem is that they are not yet reaching out beyond the developers.
Ordinary users — like some of my friends who are still in college, or older people — are fed up with all the application invites, multiple inputs and user interface conventions they don’t understand. Those are the issues that Facebook will need to increasingly connect with users over.
I went to a great panel at SXSW yesterday afternoon called “Getting Unstuck.” The conversation was all about designing and developing applications for the mobile Web.
I walked away with a better understanding of the fundamental tensions at play in this increasingly mobile world. One of the most profound is the desire to create frictionless experiences while developing for the widest possible audience. With so many different handsets, browsers and interfaces, it’s impossible to create a mobile tool that will serve everyone on every handset.
Since developing for everyone is impossible, developers are going to work with the platforms that allow them to distribute their applications to the most users. We are entering an era where standards for both social and mobile platforms are up for grabs.
Another salient point that came from the panel is that the mobile phone is an inherently different space from the desktop computer, and American consumers use the two tools differently. Mobile phones are very personal devices where information is accessed on the fly. Zumobi’s John SanGiovanni mentioned that as a Web developer, you want your site to be “sticky” — that is, you want tons of eyeballs for long periods of time. As a mobile developer, you want your site to be “bouncy” — users can get in, get out, and get on with their lives in the real world.
Online community geeks who want to build and evangelize their tools for users on the go have a lot of hurdles to overcome. But just as when you’re developing for the social Web, you’ll need to be iterative. All the panelists agreed that throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks is the best strategy for developing powerful mobile tools.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same wisdom being applied to social application development. Iterative, repetitive attempts at building good apps appears to be the best way to deal with these new platforms, especially when the dust has not yet settled on universal standards.
One of the main reasons I came to SXSW was to see Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speak. I thought he might reveal something new, or talk about something big, or even open his own kimono a bit so that we can get a sense of who this kid really is.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. The hour-long keynote interview was profoundly unsatisfying. The audience didn’t have to look far to find a scapegoat in the interviewer — Business Week reporter Sarah Lacy — but her presence on the stage and her style of interviewing seem to me to be symptoms of a much larger problem.
Mark Zuckerberg is almost certainly sweet, shy and utterly brilliant kid. But he hasn’t shown me anything yet that says he’s ready to be the visionary and outspoken public face that an organization needs in its leader. Quite the opposite, in fact. I get the sense that he likes to exist in a bubble. That’s where Lacy comes into the equation.
Lacy seems to value her relationship with Zuckerberg more than a reporter should — a fact she made apparent while onstage by referencing their friendship at every possible turn. This is obviously an age-old, fundamental tension between luminaries and the reporters that cover them. But Lacy and Zuckerberg take it much too far. She is “his” reporter. That’s why she’s allowed to get so close in the first place.
The true story of this keynote is not what was said, but why so much remained unsaid and unasked. Facebook has many fundamental technological hurdles to overcome, which I will address in a separate post. But their single biggest issue is the attitude with which they approach their community and the public: despite all the rhetoric about connecting people, the company and its CEO keep themselves at a distance.
Sarah Lacey, the author of a Newsweek cover article as well as a book on Mark Zuckerberg, appeared to spend more time discussing the personal moments that her and Mark shared before.
Also, Valleywag’s post on the keynote calls me a “typical privacy-and-sharing paranoiac” for asking when we’ll get better data organization and privacy control tools. But considering how many people came up to me after my question to thank me for asking it, I think that I tapped into one of the community’s major concerns about the site. It’s not wrong to repeat something as long as it continues to be correct.
Baratunde is a self-described “conference whore.” He makes the rounds of the geeky conferences every year because, he says gesturing back and forth between the two of us, “you can’t replicate this online.”
Companies looking to build communities online need to be aware of that fact. For example, I’ve long argued that the online “I Love My Dog” community built by Del Monte Foods — the makers of Snausages — to bring dog lovers together around their product needs to have a connection to real world.
If I were working for Del Monte, I would plug into the Google Maps API, and crowdsource my dog loving user base to build a map of every dog park and off-leash area in America. Then, I’d encourage users who had connected in my online space to find one another offline and arrange playdates for their dogs.
The investment here is about giving back to the community that has spent time and money reinforcing your brand. The return is increased customer loyalty and the power of passionate, word-of mouth recommendations.
Yes, things get out of control when online communities meet in the real world. (It’s becoming rapidly clear to me that the primary purpose of SXSW — as “Four Hour Workweek” author Tim Ferriss put it last night — is to get drunk with bloggers.) But in this brave new marketing world, it seems that out of control is where the magic happens.
I’ve seen a lot of ham-handed Facebook marketing of late. Just last night, I got a canned promotional e-mail from a PR person who doesn’t know me from Adam. I also got a friend request — with no note, I might add — from a company that had set up a profile for itself. I wonder how it did that…
But it looks like the folks over at Guinness have a solid idea of how Facebook works. They’ve been using it — and other social networking services — to encourage people to sign their petition asking that St. Patrick’s Day be declared a national holiday. The Facebook group they’ve started has over 15,000 members as of this posting.
This campaign is innovative because it leverages the already existent “activist” behavior on the social Web to promote a product. For example, Facebook users routinely join groups to support the causes they care about. Oftentimes, that’s the extent of their “activism.”
But for a marketer with a goal of better brand engagement in the run up to St. Paddy’s, that’s all you need to see.
Think you could do better running a platform than those slobs over at Facebook? If you’re in the area, you could get a chance to tell them face to face.
About an hour ago Facebook posted on their official Developers Blog that they’re going to start hosting Developer Roundtables to get feedback on their platform and to discuss “developing Platform applications, best practices, and monetization strategies.”
Getting yourself signed up to the roundtable means sending an e-mail to roundtable@facebook.com with your street cred (company, app(s), active users, etc). The list is in their post.
The part that caught my attention most in our pal Matt Mullenweg’s post about snarfing up BuddyPress is this bit here (emphasis added):
It’s clear that the future is social. Connections are key. WordPress MU is a platform which has shown itself to be able to operate at Internet-scale and with BuddyPress we can make it friendlier. Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.
OK, so I quoted the whole last paragraph. But you needed the context.
For those of you who aren’t up on the news, Automattic is hiring Andy Pealting, the guy behind BuddyPress, which you might call the “Social Network Total Conversion” for WordPress MU. See it in action at ChickSpeak if you’re curious.
Not too long ago I blogged about FriendFeed opening up functionality to the web that has traditionally (can I really use that word when talking about social media?) been the property of closed social networks.
I’m glad that the newsfeed concept is jumping into the unfiltered internet. I think it is the core social concept that will allow the inherently disparate blogosphere to build real social connections.
I’m also glad that Matt is thinking about making WordPress more social. To date, WordPress has been the most useful, adaptable, and stable CMS I’ve worked with. Giving it the tools (BuddyPress) to act as a social network infrastructure opens up platform possibilities for smaller organizations that can’t afford to develop expensive, in-house systems.
Overall an illuminating piece, but he gets one key element wrong IMHO:
“It would be difficult to analyze systematically whether the mountain of articles, blog postings and video segments tilts toward one candidate or the other. But the Project for Excellence in Journalism…”
In reality, there are scores of companies that will eagerly perform this task. “Difficulty” is not really the issue. Since the traditional services charge a lot for this kind of thing, Steinberg may have meant it was likely to be prohibitively expensive to analyze the media sentiment.
Consequently, the article only refers to frequency of Obama mentions, not sentiment.
What Steinberg and the Project for Excellence in Journalism didn’t know was that our Sentimine system can process thousands of articles, blog, posts and video segments a day and tag them with human level accuracy. This for a fraction of what most traditional services charge.
If anyone really wants to track sentiment (and not just volume) for Obama vs Clinton let us know. We could really sink our teeth into that assignment…
Jeremiah Owyang has posted some great insight about the fundamental tensions facing big brands who want to engage on the Facebook platform. The money quote:
In the presentation from BJ Fogg who co-ran the Facebook class at Stanford, they developed applications, that they estimated totaled $500,000 in revenue from the students efforts in advertising. They give out a list of learnings on what made them successful, often it included being flexible, quickly iterating, not listening to individual opinions or getting approvals, just launching them, and experimentation. It was very clear to me that that behavior is the opposite of large brands, who want safety, low risk, and pre-written plans.
Jeremiah suggests that businesses outsource application development, which might be effective. But I think it’s more important long term that all businesses learn how to take more calculated risks online.
AOL just bought Bebo for $850 million.
Should you still care about Facebook? A resounding YES!
