Archive for January, 2009

Jaiku was never about microblogging

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

This post is a bit dated now – I had planned to publish it on the day of the Jaiku news but it slipped somehow!

I’ve never really thought that the sale of Jaiku to Google was because of being a Twitter competitor. Google isn’t in that game – they think alot more expansive than that. Jaiku is much more than Twitter as it has at its heart location and prezence – something that Google is pressing strongly in all of its apps. Taking this quote by the founder of Jaiku in consideration, we might just see the intended use of Jaiku.

In Jyri’s words:

Soon, anyone, for free and with little effort, will be able to install and modify the Jaiku code, launch it on App Engine, and run their own microblogging platform. Combine that decentralization with standards such as OAuth and the forthcoming activity stream standards, and what we’re seeing here is the accelerating trend away from microblogging being a destination to microblogging being a pervasive and ubiquitous part of the fabric of the web itself.

Let’s wait and see, but I for one am curious to find out.

Jaiku Founder: “We’re Not Dying, We’re Morphing”.

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Posted in Future Studies, Online, Products, Social Networks, Web2.0 | No Comments »

Building Constellations and not Destinations with social networks

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Dave Berkowitz piqued my interest again last night with the news from OMMA social. Dave was tweeting about the presentation by Angela Courtin – SVP Marketing, Entertainment & Content at MySpace. So while the rest of the presentation was pretty dull (apparently) one of the things that stood out for me was the distinction between Constellations and Destinations when talking about Social Networks.

Destinations
Traditionally, most companies try to become a destination in and of themselves. The produce or aggregate content, and then try get eyeballs to view the content. It makes sense – you monetize around the content. So the more eyeballs you have on your site, e.g. Huisgenoot, the better off you are as that’s where the money is. It doesn’t make sense to spread your content to different places, never mind your users! That would be sacrificing yourself!

Now though, we’ve seen this model being turned on its head in numerous ways, firstly your content might be appropriated and chucked into some aggregator (ala Digg), it may be repackaged somewhere else, and a user might consume your content without ever knowing that you were the producer of that content. Content has always been a difficult game to be, it’s just become a lot more difficult.

Constellations
Social networks have also been destination sites, until the launch of their platforms. They also still wanted people to arrive at their site, and stay engaged. This meant uploading photos, responding to events and browsing profiles – all the time staying on Myspace.com. But social networks have matured now and are expanding their reach. Platforms allow the larger SN’s to start forming constellations, with their service in the middle, and the race is on for the larger 2 or 3 networks to be the biggest constellation. I’ve recently blogged on how platform wars are spreading the reach of social networks further.

When people think of constellations, it is typically in the “my social graph” kind of constellation, but what’s happening is much bigger than that. While the social graph is a very important constellation, it’s still more a graph than a constellation, think of a wheel with spokes in between (and lots of them). The constellations that are happening are happening on a site and internet wide level. The constellations are being built out of websites (and not friends as was traditionally understood). Image a solar system with Facebook at the center. In the solar system we’ll find sites like Digg, 10and5, Techcrunch, etc etc, all sites who have adopted Facebook Connect. Just as the sun is the lightsource for many of these “planets”, Facebook becomes a valuable lifeblood for the sites – providing the sites with user profiles and deep social data.

User profiles and connections remain within Facebook (or whichever service is at the center) and allow the other sites to thrive with life – and relevant, contextual life. It might not be the best example as it would be possible for the sites to be successful on their own, but imagine the lifeblood that Facebook injects as being akin to the difference between Earth and Mars.

Brands
This holds important considerations for brands – you should be thinking how your brand fits in inside the constellation, and which “sun” you are going to adopt, if any. Different suns have different benefits and drawbacks. It’s important to know which one will be best for you. We also see so many brands and companies trying to “build their own social network” without the user context so many users want when they use a site.

Niche networks
Quite a number of people have also spotted that niche social networks are the big thing of 2009 (personally I think that kind of happened in 2008 and it’s going to kick in in 2009), but that’s missing the point. It won’t be a new social network, it will be the same social network but with a different context. You still want to connect with your friends on a mountain biking social network as it gives you context on that network, but Facebook will never build that out on their own. So they’ve effectively outsourced it. And the value for Facebook is that the profile that they “own” gets better and better. So while you might be browsing for social gym strategies at Gyminee.com, you are doing so within your own social network that you’ve brought over from Facebook (not yet, but imagine it).

Facebook failed quite miserably with their groups – who really uses them to organize around interest groups? Ning is a much better model. Can you imagine organizing kind of interaction on Huddlemind.net with a Facebook group? It was bad in 2007 and it’s still bad now. So now we’re seeing more social utilities outside Facebook, and sooner or later we’ll see even more of these utilities using one of the Connect utilities.

Steve Rubel has a good post on the topic, as does The IndyChannel.

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Posted in Identity, Online, Social Networks, Web2.0 | 3 Comments »

Of the platform wars

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Platform wars are interesting, mainly because the winner will potentially be in the hotseat for quite some time. Take a look at Microsoft winning the desktop platform war – they’ve had a very well entrenched position for a considerable amount of time.

We’re more or less at that point with the web. We were at the beginning of the wars about a year ago when Google launched OpenSocial and FriendConnect, and then Facebook with their platform and Facebook Connect. Having a well adopted framework is very important – developers typically want to develop apps for a widespread platform. This allows them to build once, and get multiple distribution on different sites.

From the outset, it looks like most of these services are very similar, but on closer inspection they do have some subtle and important differences, which I’m grappling with at the moment.

To sketch a background, I’m doing research on a pretty exciting portal project. At the risk of giving too much away – we need a portal that users can customize with widgets. It’s not too far off from something like Netvibes or Pageflakes. The scripts to run these sites are a dime a dozen and pretty easy to get hold of, plus it’s not so difficult to build them from scratch. They’ve almost become as ubiquitous as white label social networks, blog platforms etc. To use the lingo, they’ve become a commodity.

We initially did some research into white label networks to add a social element to the site. But this poses new problems though – will users need to sign-up to the site again, and find all their friends on the site? Wouldn’t it be cool if they could get a current list of friends already on the site, and potentially on the site right now? We honestly don’t want to build a new network from scratch. Cue FacebookConnect. We decided on Facebook Connect over Google Friend Connect for the predominant reason that we find the social profile of Facebook much more expansive than Google. Even though lots of people have a Google account, we feel the data in Facebook is much richer and also much more organized. There is the benefit of action injection into the news feed, as well friend linking and profile integration.

So we’re going to go the Facebook Connect route – we’re pretty excited about the one-click login for users as well. Now however, we’re posed with a different problem. We want to outsource the development of new widgets to the portal. It’s a similar problem that Facebook had a while ago, and the reason for the platform development (or definitely a large part of it). Facebook has effectively allowed for the outsourcing of it’s ecosystem – things which make the site useful. They first started with Events, Albums and Videos, eventually they expanded in the Marketplace. Soon enough it becomes apparent that they won’t be able keep up with new apps – what if they want to add a TV guide? And if they build a TV guide, how would they build a localized one – for us here in South Africa?

An easier route is to allow outside developers to build those apps – effectively outsource the development of them. Enter the Facebook Platform. This allows for hyper-localized applications (e.g. a TV guide for DSTV) without Facebook needing to build them, and also better applications. Facebook is going “license” the building of the marketplace to Oodle.

So what we’re going to need for our portal site is a similar platform framework. We could build our own platform, but that won’t make much sense. For one: we also want to outsource some of our development. Say someone builds a DSTV app for Facebook, we want that app to be available on our portal as well without the developer having to build the app again. Secondly, we also don’t want to go through the process of building an entire new platform – we simply don’t have the people to build a new platform, plus we want to play nicely with the other platforms out there (why build something that is already built?).

And we’re lucky here as well – we have actually have a choice! We can look at Google’s Open Social, or we can go the Facebook Open Platform route. But once again, we’re more partial to Facebook, also because we’re not to keen to go down a route where we need to figure out a way to integrate Open Social and FBConnect. Yikes. Plus the OpenSocial implementations that I’ve seen are pretty mediocre.

So now some problems start cropping up – I’ve never seen an implementation of Facebook Open Platform, plus I have no idea what we will be able to do with it once we have it setup correctly.

  • Will the Facebook Open Platform be compatible with our portal?
  • Will we be able to filter apps that will appear on our site?
  • Will we have access to the applications?
  • Will people be able to build an application once, and it be used on Facebook, and our site?
  • What happens to users who aren’t Facebook users?
  • Where are other examples of these same implementations?

These questions are really bugging me at the moment, and if anyone has any tips, we’d really appreciate some feedback!

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Posted in Facebook Friday's, Identity, Online, Social Networks, Web2.0 | 3 Comments »