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.