Posts Tagged ‘Identity’

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 »

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?

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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:

What APML 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.

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Posted in Identity, Online, Social Networks | 3 Comments »