Social Networks « Uno de Waal Blog

Archive for the ‘Social Networks’ Category

Social news sites are more valuable than Facebook.

Monday, April 14th, 2008

If you take a look at the data that Facebook has on you, and the quality of that data you’d be able to see that they really don’t have that much qualitative data and can only target pretty rudimentary ads.

For making it easier, let’s split it in 2 groups: Profile data and activity data.

Profile data is the data that you fill in – Favourite books, movies, interests, music. Honestly I’ve never filled in this data and I don’t know of someone who has maintained that, it also doesn’t reflect your true preferences (typical case of “you don’t really know what you like”).

Your work details are in there as well – what you are busy doing and more or less in what field of business you are in. People don’t maintain that too well either. Then there’s also your network data – which shows in which area you are, but that you could probably get more accurate data on with IP targeting.

Last but not least – your relationship status, age and sex. Well golly gosh, ain’t that fantastic.

Up to this point, it’s really difficult to target an ad to a person. With this data, for e.g., would you be able to target an Audi ad to me, knowing that I prefer Audi over BMW? I don’t think you can target something specific to person with those details. Would you be able to know that I am looking for a vintage Mercedes Benz SL500 convertible? And be able to serve me ads for that?

I don’t think so.

But luckily, there is the opportunity to expand! We have a whole set of other data: Groups, photos, events, Friends, Pages and applications – which we can lump into activity profile data.

However, none of this data is structured enough to be able to give real value. Does Facebook know that I have an intense dislike for 7de laan if I have joined the following groups:

I struggle to think that they would.
(as a side note – there isn’t a Fan Page for 7de Laan…)

Similarly, the events that I attend are only tagged on a very rudimentary level, Facebook does not know that some of the music I listen to is nu-electro-afro-coochie-pop, but that I also like DJ Krush and really want him to come to Cape Town. Does it take into the account the nature of post-modern, ironic party organisers who label their Electro dress-ups a “Party – Barbecue”?

The photo’s we have of all our events and so are also not really semantic in any way – does Facebook know that I am wearing Diesel (and not Nike) sunglasses, or drinking Amstel (and not Windhoek) beer? Nope. Fan pages are a cool addition and it does allow me to specify the relationship between a product/person/music (i.e. “I like this”), but it’s still a very rudimentary system. Does it know that I like a genre of music (which I haven’t specified on my profile)?

My friends list isn’t too great either – I can’t get any more data out of there than I can from my own profile.

Applications has the best repository of info, but it’s in a data silo. Your last.fm application can’t talk too well with you Facebook profile and make you stop seeing “Beat Bladder Infection” ads along the side, and rather “Watch the new Justic video”. This data still sits in a silo and I’m thinking it sits more with the 3rd party app than it does with Facebook.

Still, at the end of the day I don’t believe Facebook could target me an ad for a vintage SL500 Merc.

Enter social news

Now, on the other hand, DIGG, or any social news site, has much more data on me. While they don’t have my profile data (like age and sex) they can find out what I like and don’t like much better. I click on links and submit articles, all these are in semantic form. If I’ve submitted articles on vintage cars, rated anything up or down, Digg would be able to better target an ad tailored to me. It’s because of that that I feel Digg (or any social news site) should have a higher per-user valuation than Facebook. That data is more valuable and deeper than Facebook could ever have.

Posted in Identity, Online, Social Networks | 2 Comments »

The problem with dataportability is with the providers, not services (duh)

Monday, January 21st, 2008

Going through my feeds this morning I once again came across the “bad user design” meme. A lot of people have been talking about it. Jeremy Keith, Josh Morgan, Brian Oberkirch, Dare Obasanjo, also even Paul Buchheit (the guy behind Gmail) and it was particularly explicit and loud when Robert Scoble went through that whole Plaxo/Facebook screenscraping episode.

Basically what people are saying is that it’s a bad idea to give sites your usernames/passwords when you sign up. This creates a bad anti-pattern and sets a horrible precedent for users who simply give their email user/pass to hundreds of different startups with dismal security standards making it very easy for hackers to get to your sensitive data. It’s called the “password anti-pattern”.

It’s not a new meme I’m proposing, seems like Simon Willison has wrote a bit about it as well, and it does seem like most people are proposing a similar solution – using OAuth to facilitate the authentication process. It’s exactly what I’m thinking, and I also think that we’re pointing fingers at the wrong people. At the moment we’re pointing fingers to a bunch of services, or new apps like Plaxo, Twitter, Spock, etc etc. It’s something we see in almost every new web app: “Import your friends!” And then we cry foul, blasting the service.

But, if the providers made that data accessable, through a properly secure API, would it not be possible to get around this? In my mind Flickr provides probably the best page-flow pattern. So I’m saying the PROVIDERS are making this anti-pattern possible. Facebook must make it VERY easy to export users, so must Gmail and so must Yahoo etc. This must be standardized so that containers (using Open Social terminology) can provide that data using some kind of token system, and it must also happen in a process that doesn’t ask for you user/pass. I believe that because it’s not possible, networks are leaving developers with no other option but to do screen scraping.

Hopefully now that pretty much every network has joined Dataportability.org we’ll see some of this stuff actually happening.

I realise that I must be missing the boat and that the tech is probably there. But being a non-tech I don’t know what’s possible. I’m just thinking that seeing all these services still asking for my user/pass is bad design, and that if all the sites haven’t adopted the token/authentication system, then there is something wrong.

Go OAuth! Go OpenID!

Technorati Tags: dataportability, portable social networks, password, anti-pattern

Posted in Ideas, Products, Social Networks, Web2.0 | 8 Comments »

Ego vs Object centered social networks

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

Two brilliant posts I discovered yesterday, one at Unit Structures and the other at Bamboo Project blog.

Both deal with the difference between object and egocentric networks.

Object centered networks

Networks are object centred if they have a social object around which users can activate. This is typically an element like a video (youtube), news (digg), photo’s (Flickr). If you take the social objects (photo’s, videos, etc) out the network would fall flat. If you took the profile data out of Digg all the news would still be there, it just wouldn’t have an anchor

Ego Centered

Networks where people are the social object and you connect around each other. If you take the people (profile data) out the network would fall flat

Typically, Object centered networks have started to move into becoming more Ego centered – like when Digg launched enhanced profile pages and friending. If you take a look at Youtube, it’s really not a social network, yet people love to call it that. It’s not. It’s a videosharing site with comments on the videos. How many casual users add friends and actively participate in the community? I don’t think it truely classifies as a social network, it’s a social site with networking features.

Now, here at 24.com we’ve had a few distinctions for a while. Elan Lohmann has been using the distinction between Content centric and Community centric networks for his presentations for ages – I first saw the difference in one of his slides. I would put them up here but they’re still intellectual property. These sites sit on a spectrum, with Content on the one side and Community on the other. It’s a very similar concept to the Ego/Object centered networks.

Now, a lot of this kind of thinking went through our thoughts with Utterbuzz. When I joined 24 it was to take a youth social network to market, but the product wasn’t near ready. In the time leading up further development, Facebook simply shot up in traffic and penetration. This shows what a ridiculous amount of traction Facebook has in the market. Our initial research showed that there were few 17-year old’s on Facebook – little enough for us to be able to go ahead and offer a competing product.

But this changed quickly. Within 2 months penetration rates amongst highschool kids shot up, so much so that we decided we had to change our strategy. We couldn’t offer a duplicate of Facebook – kids just won’t be interested. We’ve changed tack now, but not entirely.

What we realised is that Facebook is the ego-centric network of choice, and we shouldn’t try to compete with them head-on. It’s going to be a futile exercise. What we need to be focusing on is creating an object-orientated approach, offer something that kids can do on the site and interact with. We don’t want them to replace Facebook usage with Utterbuzz usage, we see this as more of concurrent usage. We’ve now changed tack to allow you to login to Utterbuzz with you Facebook account and take all your friends with you – in other words your friends discovery is still happening with Facebook, but your content discovery happens in Utterbuzz.

It’s an important distinction we believe will ensure our success. We are much less focused on people discovery (“Hey! All of my class is on Utterbuzz now I can message them!) – that happens in Facebook. People get really despondent if they have to fill in new friends on each single network they want to join. We want people to be able to say, “I’ve done all my friending, now I want to interact around content with them.”

Do you think this is a good approach?

Tags: ego, Identity, object, social design, Social Networks
Posted in Identity, Social Networks, Web2.0 | 2 Comments »

User Centric design and identity with Beacon

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Facebook Beacon has brought up a lot of issues – almost all bad of course.

What’s been happening with Identity 2.0 will hopefully solve this issue, and it also relates to personal information that other companies have. Jason from Bokardo started me on a thought process.

Personally, I have no problem with companies knowing my spending habits, but I want to know what spending habits they know. I want that to be transparent, and also changeable at any point. I want to have access to my user profile on Blockbuster (US example) and I want to know what data they are capturing. And this is for two reasons: I want to be able to see what dirt they have on me, and then I also want to be able to change that data so that Blockbuster can provide me with a better experience. In the case of movies, sometimes I rent only comedy’s, but I’m also actually interested in documentaries, specifically documentaries on street art and modern urban architecture and how public space facilitates discourse and society. But they don’t know that because they don’t stock it, and I’ve never browsed/searched for it because I know they don’t stock it. If I can tell them this somehow (I can mail them, but who does that? For all my services?) then perhaps they would start stocking these movies.

Back to user centric design
This is perfectly solvable with APML. What does APML do?
It’s great. Here’s what it does:

APML allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.

That is exciting. APML is nothing else than your own piece of market research, but the great part is that it sits with YOU. Not Truworths, Stuttafords, NIKE or Facebook. These services inevitably only have a limited view on your attention – they only track your interactions with their own products. NIKE has an APML file for you, but it’s only for you using their products. Facebook Beacon was an attempt to aggregate all of this, and they are in a very good position to do this – they already have a very good profile of you, and now they’re starting to gather market intel on you.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a pretty good argument behind how Google botched this up with their new Feed Recommendations. Why do I think? Because I didn’t have access to that Attention Profile that they have on me. I’m sure they have VERY good algorithms etc, but at the end of the day, me reading icanhascheezburger.com daily, every single update, doesn’t really mean that lolcats are high on my attention list – it’s only that one blog. And I think only I can tell you that.

It’s got 1565 of my RSS subscriptions, thousands of Gmail messages (32k unread ones, in fact), several Google Custom Search Engines, my GCal life history, search history and more I’m sure – all tied to my Google Account and all it can give me is 20 new sources?

Basically, I want to be able to control that data and construct my OWN profile, and know which sites know what from me. At the moment these attention silos are not being centered around the user, they are being centered around services that a user uses. Woolworths has a different profile of me than NIKE does, which is sometimes good, but they aren’t cross selling properly.

Back to OpenID and OAuth
Principles behind OpenID and OAuth aim to solve this. OpenID allows me to login to all these sites using a single sign on (in a strict sense of the word). OAuth allows me to tell these sites what I want them to know about me. So, I sign in to Flickr and it asks a bunch of details from me. I have already filled in all these details on my OpenID server, http://unodewaal.identitu.de. I then point Flickr to my OpenID server, telling it, get the details there. I then get asked on my OpenID server: Hey, Flickr is asking for a whole bunch of data of yours, what do you want to tell it? Name, Surname, Email, Country, Time Zone (cos that’s always a hack), etc etc.

All this data is transferred with a click of a button. But not only that, I can then manage what info Flickr has of me, from my OpenID server (not sure if Identitu.de can do this yet).

We’re trying to do this with Utterbuzz. You will have multiple profiles, on multiple sites, all managed from a single interface. So, you join a network for online dating, that has a specific profile that you play up (you’re taller, healthier, leaner, increased your salary by 10x and your breast by 3x), but you don’t want any of that data to cross over to the school network that you’ve joined. But it’s still managed in a central profile. Ning has done a similar thing with their profile management – it’s basic (you can set different profile pics for different networks), but it’s an idea.

OAuth is the technology behind all of this for standardizing the authentication process. Listen to this podcast on Oauth with Larry Halff, Eran Hammer-Lahav and Chris Messina for more:

Three of the minds behind the Oauth initiative join us to tell us about this emerging “open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.”

Back to Facebook Beacon
I believe the Beacon experiment shows that users want this kind of transparency. They feel pissed off to know that Blockbuster and Starbucks might be sharing data via Facebook. But, if you knew what data they had, and you could control that data, would it be different? I believe it would. Every time I access Amazon, it asks me: “Hey Uno, I have no idea what books you like. Do you want to give me access to your APML data?” I say yes, and I flag my APML manager to “Always allow Amazon Access” so that I don’t have to do this all the time. I also say, “Only give Amazon access to this data, not the other. They don’t need to know that.”

When I browse Amazon they create a profile set for me, kept on their servers. I want that kept on my server, or at least have access to that file, because when I go over to Blockbuster, I can say: “Hey Blockbuster, I’ve been looking at these books, do you have any similar movies?” And Blockbuster spits them out. I then flag Blockbuster as: “No, I don’t want to give Blockbuster permanent access or allow them to keep my data” because I’ve heard that they resell data to spammers. Also, I don’t want to let all my friends now about the products I’ve bought, that option should sit with me.

At the end of the day Dave Winer says it best:

Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that’s good!

If Facebook Beacon went the way that OpenID is going then we would have better Attention Data and we would all be better off.

Tags: APML, Beacon, Facebook, Identity, OAuth, OpenID
Posted in Identity, Online, Social Networks | 3 Comments »

What metrics and analytics to track with Social Networks

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

If you are community manager/owner, what kind of stats would you like to get from your community to measure growth and activity?

I’ve tried doing some research, but it’s difficult to find specifics.
Dave McClure has written a pretty cool summary on some aspects, saying that User engagement is a depth, not a Breadth, metric. What does he mean by that?

#Unique users or#Active users are a bad measure:
They don’t measure activity/interest and don’t tell you how active your network is.

Pageviews/User are good, but not great
Ajax wipes this metric out – you can have a high number of interactions on the same page.

Clicks count
How many times did people click on stuff on your site?

Now, I’m not thinking about metrics in the way that Dave is thinking about them. I want to know, as a community manager, how active are my users? So that this will make it possible for me to focus my efforts (do I need to offer incentives for interaction/different sections of the site)

I’ve figured there to be 2 types of stats, Fluid rates, and static rates. Growth rates are rates that would typically grow, as in user count, total time on site, etc. It’s only really User count that grows, and then anything up from there (as most are dependant on that)
Static stats are those that you’d want to keep constant, or as close to a variable as possible. Something like your Bounce rate for e.g. is something that you’d want to keep static and not grow (unless it’s downwards).

So some of the stats you might want to track:

Fluid
Unique Users
Sign ups
Page views/Unique (this is a difficult metric to grow – you’d ideally
want a LOT of page views, but realistically you should keep this low)
Avg Time/Session (Also something you want to grow, but something that is difficult to do)
Average logins/Week

Static rates
Bounce rate for Signups
Actions/Visit
Actions/Minute
Number of Referrals
Messages between Users
Comments between Users

My measurements are still a bit fuzzy, and there are overlaps between Static and Fluid, but it’s more or less what I’m thinking of.

Apart from these. What are the stats that you’d like to get from your user base? Imagine the Facebook Ads, but you can define the results.

Apart from the basics like Male/Female, Locations, etc, what are the other cool stats you’d like? Dead pages? Pages with high bounce rates?

Technorati Tags: social network, metrics, analytics

Posted in Online, Products, Social Networks | No Comments »

Sites that allow you to import your Facebook graph/profile

Friday, October 26th, 2007

Facebook doesn’t allow you to export your data out, that means you can’t take your social graph with you, or that when you have built up a fat profile (with all those likes/dislikes fields) you can’t take that with you.
This list below tries to aggregate the sites that would allow you import your Facebook profile. It’s sort of like a mini-OpenID kinda server. Armand first played around with the Facebook exporting tool a while back where he would manage to get your friendslist out of Facebook and show it in his OpenID server called Identitu.de.
Techcrunch recently covered the Facebook CSV exporter app, which is a good example of the concept behind portable social networks.

Take into consideration that there are quite a lot of limits posed by Facebook. You can take a look at the Techcrunch article (one of the developers of the CSV app talks about it) you can get an idea of how easy it is to actually export data, and the kinds of data you can get out. Apparently all that you can’t get practically the e-mail address. Ernst, Alistair and myself had a discussion yesterday on what you can and can’t get out, and why Facebook would allow that. Yes, as the one developer actually says, you could use all this data to populate an entire new network, with practically all the 30-odd million users that are in Facebook, but that would still not give you the relationships (he is my friend, met at school, etc etc) and photos, etc etc that give Facebook that much power.

What does make this interesting though is that it allows your social graph to be exported, albeit in a limited manner. Ideally now with all the other apps that are developing platforms you should be able to to sync multiple profiles across multiple networks and get more data out, to construct a more complete picture of yourself – and own the data yourself.

Networks that allow you to import your data:

Bluepulse – Mobile socialnetwork, mobile import works quite well. Also sends a Facebook message to people alerting them of the profile.
Jobster
Mobimii – Mobile Social Network (originally populated through the Nudgemii SMS app)
Cylive (a social productivity app)

That’s all I’ve found for now… If you can find anything else please add to the comments and I’ll update the post.

People talking about this kind of stuff:
Jeremy Keith
Portable Social Networks group
Google Search
Kevin Lawver
Brian Oberkirch
The wiki

And the other way:
Spacelift allows you to import your Myspace profile (if you still have one) to Facebook.

Check this out. It’s an Identity Matcher – an OS project that imports and matches social graphs. Pretty nifty!

Some things I’d like to see:
A Wordpress plugin that could potentially wipe-out MyBlogLog (imbed that into your blog and it grabs info off your FB profile – shows connections etc).

If you are interested in this subject, take a look at some of the other pieces I’ve written on social networks.
Platforms as commodities
Why Social Networks aren’t a bubble
Federated Social Networks

Technorati Tags: portable, social network, social graph, trends, facebook, export, csv

Posted in Online, Social Networks, Web2.0 | 6 Comments »

Product innovation : Muti, Laaik.it and other SA startups

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

The company I work for, 24.com, went live with their Digg/social news clone today, called Laaik.it.
You can read the “scoop” over at Charl Norman’s Bandwidth Blog.

While it’s not an entirely bold step (it’s not that big a deal to launch a social news site), it is actually quite a large innovation in the South African market for some lesser than obvious reasons.

There are quite a few players in this space already. Internationally there is Digg and Reddit, to name some of the bigger players, and then locally there is Muti. Yes there are a whole bunch of other ones, but Muti is certainly the market player in this space.

Charl asks the question: Will it be a Muti killer? and concludes that it won’t be. I don’t expect it to either, but for different reasons. I’ve written about Muti a few times and I’ve also predicted way back in January that a 24.com product will offer strong competition to sites like Muti (I specifically wrote about Blik).

I’ve also written about niche contents before. If we had a large enough target market we would probably see a Rugby Digg as well, and a Cricket Digg etc etc. But we don’t so we still have larger scale generic networks.

So why do I think this product is innovative?

Simply because 24.com is a market leader. 60% of South African internet traffic goes through 24.com. You can’t argue with that. So it’s not technically innovative, or even visually innovative, but that really doesn’t matter.

24.com also has one of the largest blogging communities in South Africa, but the technology behind it is crap, old and clunky. But do you think the community cares? No they don’t! They’ve gotten alot of people blogging who wouldn’t have had exposure to it in another way. We have to understand that most people inside our little frenzied community are early adopters.

24.com will be able to bring social news to the broader SA audience, something that Muti struggled to do. If you take a look at Muti’s top submitters this month, I’m struggling to argue with myself that there is a broad smattering of users… It’s the same guys. Opening this up to a broader audience will get more people to use social news – which is a good thing!

On another note, I’ve written way back that I think SA is producing some crappy clones. I’m not really changing that opinion yet. (the data on that article is old, but I still stick with mah guns).

Posted in Online, Products, Social Networks, South Africa, Web2.0 | 5 Comments »