Social Networks: There can’t be a bubble
Uno as Online, Products, Social Networks
Sep|27|2007
Social Networks will never be in a bubble. They can’t be. It’s impossible. A community cannot be in a bubble, there cannot be too many of them. What is possible is that you can get technology and companys that are in a bubble, but a community can never reach a bubble.
People often confuse Social Networks with Communities. At the end of the day, what we’re seeing happening on the net at the moment is the proliferation of a lot of niche communities, and the only thing differing these communities from those of the early 90’s is that we currently have much more efficient tools to show our social graph. Social Networks as we see them today are primarily technology driven - they use a certain core set of usability tools and features (profiles and friends).
How is Specializedriders.com different from Mountainbike Review Forums? It just has better technology, but at the end of the day it’s still a community. A social network has become the technology word for a Community. A forum is a community (look at deviantart). A blog is a community (look at the 24.com blogs). Social networks offer strong profile creation tools and better networking features, but that doesn’t mean that the community is worse off. I get more utility from the website www.xt660.com (a forum for Yamaha xt660 motorbike owners) than I do from Facebook, and Facebook would be a bad organising tool for such a group anyway (this post is coming up later, but you can read why Ning is better than a Facebook group).
So no, we weren’t in a bubble in 2003, nor in 2006, and even less in 2007.
As long as communities exist there will be a demand for social networks.
What isn’t sustainable anymore are generic social networks, ones that mean nothing and offer no value. I understand Vinny’s point, I just don’t think he has an understanding of communities. As he says: “I consider myself an online advertising veteran”. I don’t doubt these credentials one bit, but it’s like commenting on Physics when you’re talking in Art history language.
Communities don’t give a damn about advertisers (yes, the managers do). We want value to us. Half baked communities are doomed to fail, but in exactly the same way that ill-conceived products are going to. We still have a ton of unmined communities that don’t have a platform. What’s happening now is that we have a lot of people spending a lot of time in development because the tools and software out there for whitelabeling your product are still difficult to come by. Even though we see tools like Ning, PHPfox and a bunch of others, these are still sometimes difficult to use.
Once we see the emergence and acceptance of these tools, very similar to what phpBB and YaBB did for forums, we’ll see niche social networks being more sustainable as they are easier and more cost-effective to run. Taking a pure advertising look at communities is a limited view of what they offer.
Back to the managers. Community managers are the guys that run everything, and they can’t do this for free (it becomes a full time job sometimes). And naturally they need an income off this. If you have a niche community that is active - paid models are a good option to look at.
What Vinny is aluding to in his article is that Myspace is a cost centre for Fox. I severely doubt it. That, and that products are getting hyped up, not communities. There’s a difference here.
What communities need to do now is start making it easier to join, and that is where the identity 2.0 workshop and ideas start coming in - when you talk about Portable Social Networks.
Technorati Tags: social networks, bubble, products, web 2.0
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South African Social Networks - Guy Berger
Uno as Social Networks, South Africa
Sep|27|2007
Guy Berger has written a great piece on South African social networks, you can read the entire post here.
Build social networks around South African contentMost media captains are tightly focused on their business, meaning that they understandably don’t pay much attention to seemingly obscure stuff outside their silo — for example, the rampaging online social networking among online youth.But some remember that a once-unknown IT business called Google came from nowhere to feast on their erstwhile monopoly of audience time and advertising tribute.
I agree with Guy that the way to play now is around content, and getting your content to spread as far as possible. We sit with media companies that have ridiculous amounts of locally relevant content - something that major international players won’t be able to duplicate.
Take a look at MTV’s network for an idea how some of the larger media players.
Technorati Tags: South africa, social network, guy berger
Mobile Social networks
Uno as Social Networks, Web2.0
Sep|26|2007
Hey Tyler, take a look at these Mobile Social Networks:
Blu - The William Kentridge of Street Art
Uno as art
Sep|25|2007
Check out this amazing piece:
Technorati Tags: street, art, william kentridge, blu
MTV Think: What Youngblood5 should’ve been
Uno as Social Networks, South Africa
Sep|21|2007
Remember the Youngblood5 network that 5FM launched a while ago? I wrote about it here if you’d like to read.
Well now it seems that MTV has gotten on board as well with their new Think.MTV, and it strokes well with their other activities and socially concious philosophy.
The network looks good (clean design) and looks like the functionality could be quite high. You can network with other friends, upload videos around an issue and discuss. Your profile is also quite rich, showing which issues and organisations you support.
Think has quite a strong focus on profiles and you being in the spotlight - something integral to social networks. This is probably where Youngblood5 made their second mistake (the first one was to desig in flash).
YB5 Doesn’t have any kind of networking abilities - only the option to view according to space (which could have worked nicely with a Google Maps mashup). Profile creation is central to any identity in a social network and without it you don’t really have anything to build a community off of.
Well, lessons learned I suppose.
Technorati Tags: youngblood5, mtv 5fm, social network
WebPR isn’t PR and PR isn’t WebPR
Sep|19|2007
My girlfriend works in a great small, boutique PR company called Rabbit in a Hat. They have awesome clients like Biblioteq, Daddy Long Legs Hotel and the Old Biscuit Mill and also The Comedy Festival this month. A large part of their day is spent sending out press releases and communicating with journalists, bloggers and other media folk, yet they spend their time doing this in a non-productive way, or at least I think so. I’ve been trying to get them onto the web bandwagon, but not as a Web PR company, but as a company that uses the web to its advantage - using all the nooks and crannys available to better spread their message.
It’s a difficult situation sometimes - PR companies and places like CPUT that offer courses in PR (where the Girlfriend is currently studying) have no idea what’s cooking online. It’s a totally new and different ball game. We’ve all had the conversation before - it takes ages for a field of study to actually reach a proper maturity that it can be presented. And with things online it moves so fast that by the time you start a subject course, the material would be old by the time you finish it. So it is difficult for PR companies to stay up to date with what’s happening online.
Enter the WebPR company. In my mind a Web PR company does a number of things, almost solely focused online. It’s e-mail, SEO, PPC, ORM and a few micro-sites here and there. Most of the activities are focused on building the brand out online, you’ll see that there is a larger brand identity structured out by the traditional advertising company and then the digital part of it would be outsourced (or in the case of Saatchi and Saatchi, insourced) to a WebPR company. When I think of a Web PR company I think things like AccelerationMedia, Quirk and Play.
But this is different from traditional PR. Traditional PR is focused strongly on offline events, media releases, print publications and other areas that WebPR seldomly touches. Relationships are built with people and you get to know who you send what releases to, what events will work well with which brand etc. While advertising and PR do differ worlds apart, they sometimes share interesting overlaps.
WebPR and PR’s paths, however, seldomly cross… The difference is in the way that the different tools are used. With WebPR the medium is the message, with PR the medium is a tool. WebPR will run a PPC campaign to show up on all searches for alternative art books in Cape Town (Biblioteque), PR will send out a release to SL, 2OceansVibe, Visi, ArtSouthAfrica, etc.
Now where it becomes interesting is when PR starts using online tools like blogs, podcasts, online storage solutions and a whole bunch of other syndication tools.
Having a press room is something that is integral to any agency. Having a press room that plays nicely with all the syndication tools possible is even more integral. If I get a press release I’d like as much information as possible, but in an easy to manage way. A blog post does this nicely, efficiently and smartly. I can include a short synopsis (the traditional letter), a few images (in medium res, but with the option to scale to larger, print quality), a few links to other sites and an overview of other articles writing about this article (it’s called a trackback). Vincent Maher has a great little list on how he suggests using online for traditional PR.
Taking into consideration here that the image you’d want for printing purposes should be atleast 1MB large, e-mails can get to be pretty cumbersome when you start sending these babys around. Isn’t it a better option to send a link to the press release, or at least the images?
I might be completely missing the point here, and maybe I’m behind the times with reality, but how does it typically work in agencies these days? If you are a journalist, how do you often receive press releases that are in a difficult format?
Also check out Tyler Reeds post and the Shift Communications Press template.
As an aside - my girlfriend is really on it when it comes to these kinds of things and using the web in interesting ways. She’ll be finishing up with her internship soon and would be looking at a company with similarly cool clients (if anyone would be hiring 
Technorati Tags: pr, webpr, social media, rabbit in a hat
The importance of a good press pack
Sep|17|2007
Salesforce has been all over the web lately, mostly due to their exciting new product/platform offering called Force.com.
But what they’ve done is make it really easy for other people to blog about it, and in a standardized, informative way. I’ve been seeing this little image pop up all over the place:
At the moment I’m grabbing it off ProgrammableWeb, but you can also view this at Techcrunch, Innovation Creators and ZDnet.
Ain’t it great when things are easy to understand? How many times have I come to a product without any idea how to operate the blasted thing.
Yahoo Mash: Steps toward consolidating Yahoo web Properties?
Uno as Web2.0
Sep|17|2007
I got an invite to Yahoo Mash this morning (thanks InviteShare).
Apart from the other great features around it (read the Webware review) like the Wiki style editing, I saw an interesting little addition:
And more interestingly: The option to update All my Yahoo! Profiles.
Now this is a big thing. Yahoo has a lot of web properties - ReadWriteWeb lists the top ten:
- News
- Answers
- Flickr
- Pipes
- Messenger
- Music
- Delicious
- Mobile
- MyYahoo
Currently very few of the profiles speak to each other - all the data is silo’d in each property. While you can use your Yahoo ID to sign in to Flickr, you can’t do the same for Delicious. Yahoo has come far with their Single Sign On service but they are still struggling to bring everything in to one ID. The option above didn’t do what I expected it to do - it didn’t change anything in Flickr, Yahoo or Delicious. But it does give away a potentially cool idea.
Could Yahoo Mash be the start of a single identity server? I’d like to see a space that works really well with Flickr and Delicious. I’ve been talking about Identity for a while here, some people say OpenID is the way to go, others are a bit skeptical about it. But if Yahoo adopts some sort of identity server there is quite a large possibility that they could become a single identity server.
MyYahoo seems a bit sparse at the moment - maybe we’ll see Mash become the new MyYahoo?
On federated and niche social networks
Uno as Web2.0
Sep|14|2007
MTV networks recently launched a whole string of new social networks, from a dating sites to pure content sites (with networking features built in). Predominantly the networks seem to revolve around shows like the Sarah Silverman Program, Engaged and Underage as things like Indecision2008.com.
A lot of sites are asking, Why? And I can imagine that a lot of people would be asking the same. Why not simply build a Facebook application? Why not make a channel on Youtube or a Sponsored group ala Walmart and Target?
MTV has gone the different route, similar to what Red Bull did a while back for their BC One competition. I believe this is where we’ll see growth in social networks coming up, and also something that will start helping out with a distributed identity system - a discussion that has been boiling over in some circles.
With regards to growth - these sites offer something completely different to Facebook and Myspace, and a way for people to interact completely different with the brand and each other. Facebook is a pure social network while other networks offer more content over anything else. Facebook is used completely differently from e.g. Dogster, or even MPwH (a dating site where you can meet other people with Herpes, should you have herpes).
It’s about a community
When people think of social networks they think that everything has been done before, and that since Facebook is so popular, there is no use in starting anything else. But people forget that it’s about the community and a community is platform and technology independant. Take a look at Deviantart.com. The site has been around for ages (more than 7 years), it’s a pure social network built around it’s members. It has been a stalwart in the design community, yet the technology behind it seriously lacking. The feature set is limited and it doesn’t have nearly the cool features that Facebook has, but it’s been going strong and I don’t see it dying down anytime soon. Similarly, Myspace has horrendous technology, but they are the biggest social network out there. So how is this important?
The community is what matters most. If you rally enough people around a niche then you’ll have a sustainable model that will keep itself running, policing itself and going forward. That’s why Ning has found itself in such a prime position, check out some of their featured networks here - from a place for Readers and writers of crime fiction, to AdRants (which I covered here as well) and a Wakeboarding site. As well as a ridiculous amount more. These sites typically don’t have more than a few thousand (if that) subscribers, but they are small passionate communities that won’t be able to survive on a Facebook group (as these groups are way too limiting).
So where does this tie in with the MTV networks?
MTV have built communities around each of their brands and will now be in a position to dictate what content is shown and give more direction to the feel of the community.
Why is this federation so important and what does it have to do with identity?
Essentially the platform that they bought/acquired/have from Flux is a federated system similar to the model that Ning functions on. It works that you have a single ID and then join up to different groups. The groups in this case have more functionality built in. Ning doesn’t have social networking built into their base layer - you can’t add friends to your own profile, you can only join the networks and from there add friends etc.
What MTV is probably looking to do is build out each of their networks and then use Flux as the base layer-white label network that could perhaps rival some of the other larger networks, or atleast eat away at some market share.
If MTV decides to go with a federated Social Network model they could possibly enter the Identity Provider game as people have been discussion OpenID could do. The discussion around Portable Social networks is where this would be going. With this kind of federated network you could essentially choose which networks you want to join, with a single profile.
It’s just a pity that we still have it held up in a proprietory company.
Why will this be a big player?
MTV is a huge brand in the youth market and have a loyal following. Coupled with their TV advertising they could position themselves to be a massive player. I’d like to see them move into the mobile market as well where you would be able to sit on the couch, watch the show and go online on the network on your phone (you could probably do this with your laptop anyway).
Maybe we could follow the development of everything on the MTV labs blog?
btw, I’m loving the new Google Reader search.
Technorati Tags: mtv, social network, openId, federated identity, identity 2.0
Guy Mclaren Interview
Uno as South Africa, Web2.0
Sep|10|2007
A few of you might have followed the recent spat between some of the bloggers around spam on Muti. I’ve asked Guy for a condensed interview putting down some of his ideas.
More after the jump.