social networking

It’s interesting to read the interplay between Scoble and Andreesen from yesterday about how Google’s new Friend Connect stacks up against Ning and, by extension, other build-your-own social networks.

If I actually understand Friend Connect correctly, and I probably don’t, it’s not really designed to replace the creation of social networking features even in corporate environments. We’ve talk to various potential clients about creating social networks of their own, and often a lot of the value (from a business standpoint) comes from owning the platform underneath.

Which is the opposite of what Friend Connect does.

Friend connect essentially extends the footprint of existing OpenSocial networks, much in line with the data portability steps that are going on at MySpace and Facebook.

So installing Friend Connect widgets on your corporate site instead of using a Ning or custom-grown or white-label social networking solution is basically ceding your business network to one of the existing players. I don’t think that will be an attractive solution to many companies.

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I ran across a post by Macteens Editor in Chief Daniel Hollister that explains, quite well, what killer functionality Twitter is missing. He’s right in in a lot of ways - Twitter is very bare bones and it doesn’t provide even the kind of functionality you find in other microblogging services like Pownce.

Twitter relies on its API and its users to develop features that are lacking. Hollister identifies the following gaps in Twitter’s feature set. Here’s how you can make them up with third party solutions (or, in one case, clever use of built in features):

1. Clutter

Hollister find the home page too cluttered, and the 20-tweet per page limit annoying. If you fail to check back quickly enough, you’re going to miss things.

I use the twitter desktop client Twitterific about 70% of the time. I use my iPhone about 15% of the time. I use the home page about 5% of the time.

Twitterific saves tweets on my desktop as it checks for them, which means I can scroll through a few hours worth of updates at a time without paging through.

2. Breadth or depth, but not both

Here he’s more right than with others. You can follow tons of people and get too many tweets, or you can follow very few people and miss a lot of the action.

I like to use mobile notifications to separate out those tweeters who I feel are particularly important. I can follow as many people as I like while selectively choosing whose tweets get pushed to my phone.

3. Archiving sucks

The web page does provide some pretty lame archiving features. You can jump through pages of 20 as far back as you want, but that’s about it.

The good news is that you CAN search twitter for past tweets. I like to use either Tweetscan or a Google search targeted at twitter.com (yep, tweets are indexed).

4. Nobody wants to use it & It doesn’t do anything

I know a lot of people who share this view of Twitter. I myself didn’t get it when I first started using it.

But the first part is just wrong (plenty of people want to use twitter, myself included) and the claim that it doesn’t do anything doesn’t really resonate with me. Nothing on the computer is really “doing” anything, if you look at it the right way.

Hollister says that if you remove all the features from Facebook except for the RSS feed and status updates, you have twitter. I’d say you’re still doing something.

One thing that I am 100% behind Hollister on though is this: Twitter is not a social network. Many people are starting to refer to it as a social network. I think that as a whole we (the blogosphere) have a tendency to play fast and loose with our terminology, and it ends up hurting us in the end.

Twitter, in my mind, is a social utility. One component of the growing feature set of the social web.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about platforms and services as platforms. The recent strategy trend in start up companies seems to be: become a platform.

That’s what Twitter is doing, that’s what Facebook and every other social network is doing. You build an infrastructure and an API and you invite people to play on your system.

But the one thing to remember is that the web is the ultimate platform.

I keep seeing the exodus of Facebook features, one by one, to the native web. Twitter is enhanced, open, archive-able “status updates.” FriendFeed is trying to co-opt the News Feed (what I give credit for popularizing the idea of the lifestream) and bring it out onto the open web. In many ways it is succeeding.

I think it’s inevitable that online community is going to end up as a disparate set of open services that work together instead of a closed system (Facebook) that offers all services.

The future of social networking is that everyone has:

• a blog (profile + notes)
• FriendFeed (news feed)
• Twitter (status)
• flickR (photos)
• del.icio.us or Google (shared items)
• etc., etc.

The smart way to go about “building a platform” is not to build something on top the web that traps users and developers, but to build something within the web so that it connects with everything that’s already available.

What’s the difference?

Facebook sits on top of the web, and it relies on its users and its developers to be content with only a base level of interaction with the greater web. When you build a Facebook application, you’re building a Facebook application, not a web application.

It’s the difference between wearing a Starship Troopers exoskeleton and working out. The exoskeleton is really cool looking, polished, and lets you plug in all kinds of gears and gizmos. But you’re not actually any stronger than you were. And your muscles aren’t really connected to it, even though it’s responding to your push.

Mashable posted yesterday about Flickr Code, the new — and rainbow-colored — site for Flickr developers. From there, you can easily access the Dev blog, monitor new Flickr deployments, discuss the API, work on the open-source Flickr Uploadr, or as Mashable put it, “snoop in on the Flickr dev team and see what tricky business they’ve been involved in.”

If you’ve clicked over to the site, you’ve probably noticed by now that this community site isn’t even a proper social network in and of itself. It relies on links to existing message and chat boards within Flickr, posts from an existing developer blog, and a random stream of photos from Flickr headquarters.  It’s not new content, but it’s presented in a new way, at a destination that’s just for the truly geeky coder types who build stuff around Flickr.

If your organization has a community of geeks or developers that work around your product, and you want to show them how much you care, it’s as easy as repurposing content from other sources — like your developer blog, or from certain threads in your forums — and putting it in one easy-to-find portal. If you don’t happen to have a fully-fledged social networking tool onboard like Flickr does, it’s pretty easy to build one with the free, open-source forum software known as Vanilla.

It’s been popping up here and there for a few days. The first time I heard about it was on Twitter, although for the life of me I can’t find that tweet now, nor do I remember who posted it.

Then I read about it in an article from USA Today yesterday, and now a mere 20 minutes ago on Jeremiah’s blog.

So what is My Starbucks Idea?

It’s actually a pretty cool resource into the “wisdom of the crowds,” and an extension of Starbucks’ newer attitude about serving a personal cup of coffee. The site invites people to sign up for an account (with a really dumb 8-character limit on the username…what’s up with that? why is Jasonp107 too long?) and then submit or vote, almost digg-like, on cool ideas that Starbucks should try.

And Starbucks says that the site is not just going to exist in a vacuum. They’re promising to take action on some of the more popular ideas. Right now, introducing a free drink punch-card (buy 10, get 1 free) is at the top of the list. I’ll be surprised if that takes long to get rolling. I just voted for it myself…right before the service became “temporarily unavailable.”

…Which is actually a good sign. Because it means there’s a lot of interest in the site

Regardless, I think this is a great move for Starbucks. It’s “Suggestion Box 2.0″ Start voting for Free Wi-Fi everyone (it’s in second place)!

Have you guys seen Myspace News?

http://news.myspace.com/

I’ve started to see these news pages show up in Google searches alongside Digg and Netscape pages. You can browse through the “hot” news articles in whichever category you pick and then vote on how cool it really is (there are gradients here beyond just “like it” or “not”).

It’s too bad that you can’t submit stories, though. Or at least I can’t figure out how, which amounts to more or less the same thing.

On the other hand, though, do we need another social news aggregator? Netscape works because there’s a meta-level that really sets it apart from Digg (and they have a slightly different audience). But what extra value do you really get from tying it in to a social network? Would it matter if a Facebook app provided this functionality? Would you switch from Digg?