Written by Ebrahim Ezzy and edited by Richard MacManus. Note: there is also a poll at end of this post, which we invite you to participate in.
MySpace is booming in popularity; Facebook is gracing the headlines again; Bebo is growing incredibly; Tribe relaunched; Cyworld, Hive7 and SecondLife are nothing short of a phenomenon; LinkedIn is becoming 'People Search'; ITToolbox relaunched with a host of social networking features; Friendster is now refueling itself to enter the market again.
Put simply, social networking is hot and there is plenty of money and action in the SNS space to prove it.
Social
Networks have a history almost as long as RSS. Aspects of social networks have long been
present in dating services such as Match and Classmates. The notion of social networking first
formally appeared on the Internet in the late 1990s, with services like FireFly,
eGroups/OneList, ICQ and Evite - which allowed groups of people to coordinate
certain kinds of interaction.
It was not until 2003 that
social networks became truly mainstream - with the advent of Friendster. Shortly
thereafter, there was a wave of social networks. Adopting small-world theory,
services like Tribe, Orkut, LinkedIn and Spoke emerged - allowing users to better
organize and expand their recreational and business networks.
Today, social networks are enormously popular. The benefits can be seen at the multiplier level - people mentor each other through the formation of communities; and they network and inspire each other by example and input. Social networks protect people from the vastness of cyberspace and offer tools to find each other, organize and share information, or just keep in touch with friends.
Social networking sites have proliferated in the span of the past year. While I don't have actual numbers, Wiikipedia tells us that there are at least two hundred social networks, with scores of new ones appearing each day. While some of these services focus on teens, others target individual professionals and some aim at organizations like businesses and graduate schools.
Venture capitalist David Hornik recently wrote about what he calls 'Social Networks 3.0':
"I believe that we are now in Social Networks 3.0. After a fair bit of excitement and energy around pure play social networks, it became clear that the building and management of a social network was not, in and of itself, a compelling consumer experience. In a nod back to the earliest instantiations of social networking, entrepreneurs have come to realize that social networks are enablers of other compelling consumer experiences. Thus, social networks are becoming an important ingredient of all sorts of consumer experiences...
I believe that social networking will be a crucial element of virtually all online consumer experiences going forward. And truly compelling online consumer experiences will always make successful companies."
(emphasis ours)
There are hundreds of emergent social networks, but I've shortlisted a few that are worth keeping an eye on (apart from the obvious ones, like MySpace and Facebook):
A great resource for finding talented, like-minded, and socially responsible people - upon whom you can network for work opportunities, contract jobs, sales or partnership discussions. There has been some talk about whether LinkedIn will expand beyond its niche. Co-Founder and Vice President Marketing at LinkedIn Konstantin Guericke commented recently that perhaps there is no need for that:
"LinkedIn has been profitable for the past six months, and revenues are growing very quickly. I'm not sure who else can say that."
CollectiveX is social groupware suitable for a user-group, special-interest group, or any other like-minded group of people who share similar goals. It combines certain team collaboration features - including group emails, shared scheduling, file sharing and bulk email services etc.. This sets it apart from other social networks. Michael Arrington's review supports my view, that CollectiveX is social networking "the way it should have been done in the first place."
PeopleAggregator [disclosure: Richard does work for them] is a meta social network system, meaning it enables you to connect other social networking services together. Perhaps the most important aspect of this is the Identity Hub, where you can login to other systems via PeopleAggregator. Another feature of PeopleAggregator is that you can import and export your data with relative ease - i.e. it's an open system, unlike MySpace for example. This vision is still being built out, but the idea is that eventually you'll be able to send messages, create relationships, join or create groups, and post content between social networks.
Wetpaint allows you to create free hosted websites, using wiki technology. It describes itself as a combination of "wikis, blogs, and social networks" and encourages people to create topic-focused sites. For example check out this wetpaint site devoted to dogs, called WikiFido.
Great for those who like the idea of sharing their lives, but not necessarily every facet of their lives. So privacy and user control are its main selling points. There is also a lot of granularity as to how users can define relationships - e.g. husband, roommate, business contact are some of the options. For more on these types of services, check out Ken Yarmosh's R/WW post Smart Social Networks. Multiply currently claims nearly 3 million registered users.
Allows sharing of all types of media content - blogs, photos, audio, and video. In the words of Wikipedia, it "has both a social network structure as well as a content browsing/filtering structure". In that sense it enables you to create a social network dynamically and in real time.
Does more members in a network make a users life better?
Instead of simply allowing the users to create and manage friendship flow charts, social networks need to enable them to do something. Users should be empowered to control and utilize their social networks in a meaningful and protected way.
What's the purpose of social networking?
Several mainstream social networks focus squarely on numbers - page views, number of members, hits etc. And there's nnothing wrong with that, it's a valid business approach. But social networks play on our desire to be a part of something big, which might never happen...
So social networking is great, as long as it can serve its purpose by connecting people in a meaningful way - and for a meaningful purpose.
Over time, I believe, people will get tired of the vast and generic theme of mainstream social networks - and move towards niche or vertical social networks that will serve their passions and interests.
So, will niche or vertical social networks take off?
Helping match people with content is a worthwhile pursuit. We're already seeing a new wave of niche social networks that are building social-enabled sites around content-oriented channels - e.g. pets, books, music, cars, shopping, travel.
But social networks require a critical mass to thrive. So it will be interesting to see how the smaller, niche social networks deal with their much smaller user bases.
However, due to their focus, they do seem prepared to tackle the potential social networking bust that lies ahead.
The value of social networking, in general, is diminished with each new
service entering the field. There's a need for some standards in the social
networking space, as it is difficult to maintain profiles at each social
network.
Many of the fun-seeking Myspacers may actually be the very same respectful businessmen at LinkedIn, just with an adjusted profile (and maybe an adjusted name to go with it). So what we require is a system that connects all social networks - that a user is a member of - and shares basic functionalities. This would allow users to choose a system with the features and approach that best suits them.
Or better yet, instead of being confined to one giant centralized social network, we should move to social groupwares - like CollectiveX and PeopleAggregator - that enable users to build their own meta social networks, based on their passions and interests. This way, numerous social networks will proliferate - each with unique form and function.
Thanks once again to Read/WriteWeb's excellent sponsors, who I'm very grateful to for supporting the aims and ideals of this blog. The goal of R/WW is to provide quality analysis about web technology - and we think this focus on quality reflects very well on our sponsors. It also (may I say) leads to insightful conversations in the comments! So thanks to the following sponsors:
A special thanks as well to Read/WriteWeb's regular contributers, Alex Iskold and Ebrahim Ezzy (whose next article is coming later tonight). If you're a web technology enthusiast and have a topic you want to explore on Read/WriteWeb, do contact me at readwriteweb AT gmail DOT com.
Last week at X06,
an Xbox event in Barcelona, New Zealand movie director Peter Jackson announced a new
games development studio called Wingnut Interactive - an offshoot of his highly
successful movie production company Wingnut. The new venture will develop a "Halo series"
for the Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. Full details haven't emerged yet, but the games will have
a movie quality to them and be interactive. They will almost certainly have an online
component too. Not coincidentally, Peter Jackson is also producing the forthcoming Halo
movie.
It was Jackson's description of the new games which provoked excitement:
"It's a form of entertainment that's not a game and it's not a film. It's a filmic game experience. I think we're on a threshold of a new way to tell stories. [...] I wouldn't even call these games in my mind, because I'm not a game designer. What I'm really interested in is taking ideas that could become films, but maybe they won't be films ... They'll be steered into this technology that the Microsoft Game Studios people have developed."
Peter Jackson at X06 - photo by
Rune Fjeld Olsen
It looks like XBox is ahead of both Sony and Nintendo in terms of online gaming entertainment - or at least moving towards the next generation Internet-based gaming experience the fastest. Xbox's "top man in Australia" David McLean recently gave some stats about Xbox Live:
"...since launch last November, there have been 57,000 downloads from Xbox Live, more than two billion hours of gameplay have been logged on the service and more than eight million games have been downloaded from Xbox Live Arcade. He also emphasies that the Xbox 360 will have a nine-month head start on Nintendo's Wii and will be a year ahead of Sony's PlayStation 3."
If there is a dark horse in
the online gaming industry, it is Nintendo and its upcoming Wii. The Wii user interface is designed around the concept of television
channels, accessible using the pointer capability of the Wii Remote. It will also have a
web browser - a version of the
Opera web browser for use on the Wii, which will be free for all Wii users until June
2007.
In terms of innovation, all 3 (MS, Nintendo and Sony) are worth watching. Microsoft has the muscle and now the talent (Peter Jackson), but I'm tracking the Wii closely too.
eSnips, an online sharing community, was launched last week at DEMOfall. Founder and CEO Yael Elish gave a great presentation - which you can now see in the DEMO video archive. We had a chance to chat with Yael via email:
Alex: What is your company about?
Yael: The company is about making it simple for mainstream people to share their interest, passions or creations online and to go one step further beyond sharing and socializing to easily sell and promote their creations online. eSnips is a one-stop sharing and social media site that represents numerous aspects your interests, passions and creations. Not only can you share and socialize, but you can easily sell and promote your creations online as well, using any media type, all in one central location. Unlike so many social media sharing sites, eSnips allows users to share every file type, not just photos, videos or links. From a single account, you can share things such as your thoughts, stories, artwork, photos, music, kids videos, flash files, presentations with business colleagues, party or vacation photos with friends, web research and tidbits you find on the web and more.
Alex: Why did you start this company?
Yael: We started the company because there was not one place where adults could easily share content about our interests. All the social sites were and still are dominated by teens, singles looking for dates, people obsessed with who they are and what kind of persona they want to convey. On the other extreme, content sharing sites like flickr or YouTube let you share just one type of file. There seemed to be so many options, but none of them fit pretty basic sharing needs for people to share by topic rather than by content . People do not only publish, they share too, and they have several networks not just one and there’s more...
Alex: Tell us what eSnips has achieved so far?
Alex Iskold was at DEMOfall last
week, but not only to live-blog the event
and do interviews for Read/WriteWeb :-) He was also promoting his own product blueorganizer, so I thought it's only fair to
turn the tables and interview him about DEMO - particularly as blueorganizer was
regarded as one of DEMO's highlights by both Techcrunch and ZDNet.
Also adaptiveblue has just released a brand new version of the blueorganizer. New features include the "autobluemark" (which automatically collects objects from the sites that users visit often), blogs collection with popularity ranking built in, smart filtering (which brings iTunes-like flexible selectors to the blueorganizer), a google desktop widget and much more.
Richard: What is your company about?
Alex: adaptiveblue was founded with the vision to build the next generation of smart browsing and personalization technologies. Our first product, the blueorganizer extension, is focused on bringing the semantics of everyday objects into the browser to make users more productive.
Richard: Why did you start this company?
Alex: I have been thinking about personalization and semantics for quite sometime. I saw that there was a gap between theoretical thinking about semantic web and practical steps to get to it and wanted to help bridge it. Ironically my previous startup, Information Laboratory (which was sold to IBM), was focused on the structure of complex systems like software, power grids and society. So I think that understanding of the structure can take you very far, but to build truly personalized online experiences you need to understand the semantics of things.
Richard: Tell us what adaptiveblue has achieved so far?
Alex: We have developed and launched our product in record time - just short of 5 months. We also created innovative and important pieces of infrastructure for blueorganizer. We leveraged XML and JavaScript to roll out new collections and actions in a very short time, without having to do JavaScript coding. Finally, we just had an amazing launch at DEMOfall. It has been a great success and we are very pleased.
Richard: What are your major challenges?
Alex: There are a couple major challenges. Number one is building the user base - standing out from the crowd. DEMOfall helped us address that in an excellent way. Another challenge is expanding and growing in the right way. We are here to build products that people use without expanding to be a 30 people company. Our challenge is to scale and we are going to address it by being smart about our software infrastructure and resources.
Richard: What are you going to build in the next 12 months?
Alex: We are going to add more collections like images, video and people. Expect support for microformats and more smart browsing stuff. We are also planning to start work and roll out some backend personalization technologies. But we can't talk about them yet :)
Richard: What is the most important thing for a start up to be successful?
Alex: Passion, closely followed by people, focus and agility.
Richard: What web sites / blogs do you use / read often?
Alex: Techcrunch, Read/Write Web, Peter Rip's blog, Headrush. Use Basecamp from 37signals a lot, and cvsdude to store our code.
Richard: Which 'web 2.0' things are noise and which are signals?
Alex: Signals are true innovations, noise are clones.
Richard: How did you find DEMOFall?
Alex: We found this show fantastic! The energy and the crowds were just amazing, We got so much out of it and were very well received. We highly recommend the show to all companies that are launching new products.
Disclaimer: not only is Alex a regular R/WW contributer, but blueorganizer is a sponsor too.
I've been hearing whispers that Google will integrate their social network Orkut with the mobile social networking app they acquired last year, Dodgeball. While it's not rocket science to make the connection between the two products (both are social networking), the reasons to join the two are becoming more compelling... Here are some of them:
1) Social networking has been the biggest thing going in 2006 (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc). And it looks like mobile will be big next year. So SNS + Mobile seems the logical sequel.
2) There is also the trend of meta-social networks, like Marc Canter's PeopleAggregator. It was actually the latest New Scientist magazine which rang a little bell in my mind about this. An article called Living Online: This is your space (full article not online yet unfortunately) concluded by saying that an individual's identity will be managed by a meta-network, which we will carry with us "in small wireless devices so that our virtual identities become seamlessly integrated with the real world." That online/offline balance is one of the main things mobile Web has going for it. So meta-SNS + Mobile is another trend I think we'll see emerge...
3) Peter Dawson pointed me to Mihai Parparita's blog, who has a great post entitled Facebook meets Dodgeball. In it Mihai writes:
"...I thought it would be cool to syndicate my Dodgeball check-ins into my Facebook profile, via their blog (i.e. RSS feed) to notes import feature. It worked pretty well [...] and it's sort of neat that these two social networking sites are open even slightly, allowing such co-mingling of data."
So co-mingling of SNS data, to borrow Mihai's neat phrase, is another trend that is hotting up.
4) Demographics are similar between Orkut and Dodgeball. All evidence points to Dodgeball being used mostly by young people. In Brazil, home to 65-70% of the Orkut user base, it is mostly 13-30 year olds who use Orkut. And in my recent Top Web Apps in Brazil post, it was established that Brazil is a sophisticated Web market (at least in the main cities).
In terms of mobile usage, Brazil is nearly at 100 Million users according to a recent report:
"The number of Brazilians owning mobile phones rose to 94.9 million in August, up 2% from July, according to preliminary figures released Monday by telecommunications regulator Anatel. Brazilian mobile phone ownership rose more than 20% when compared with September of 2005, when the number of mobile phones was 78.9 million."
While obviously Orkut + Dodgeball is not all about Brazil, it's probably a good pointer to how complementary the two services are. However I imagine Google will target the US market first, as they always do.
While there's no firm evidence yet that Orkut will merge with Dodgeball, I believe it's just a matter of time. John Battelle even kind of predicted it back in May 2005, with this comment: "What is Dodgeball? I dunno, but is seems like Orkut + Mobile done right, I think."
In any case, the high level trends point to it happening soon: SNS + Mobile; meta-SNS + Mobile; Co-mingling of data between SNS; similar demographics.
I guess this is a sign of the times - a site dedicated to gaming digg, called User/Submitter. But there's no reason such a site couldn't exist for del.icio.us, or stumbleupon, or netscape - or any site that relies on voting. Needless to say, I hope this site gets squashed ASAP - it's at the same pond scum level as the RSS Ripoff Merchants, in my book...
On the 'Submit' page, it states:
"Cost: $20, plus $1 per Digg.
After completing the form below, you will be taken to PayPal. Once your PayPal payment is received, your Digg submission will be given to User/Submitter users to promote on Digg.com.
User/Submitter users are then given the chance to digg your submission and other stories for $0.50. After your submission has reached your desired number of diggs, you will be emailed a report.
We cannot guarantee that your submissions will hit the front page of Digg. We reserve the right to reject or cancel any submission for any reason.
If User/Submitter is unable to fulfill your requested number of verified diggs within 48 hours, you will be refunded the amount of Diggs paid for but not received within 5 working days.
All User/Submitter transactions are private."
And on the 'User' page it has a registration form, plus a note: "Pay-out: $0.50 per Digg."
No word on how many users they have right now, but looks like it set up shop just recently. I seriously doubt it will work anyway.
Another busy week in web tech. Alex Iskold was at DEMOfall06 in San Diego - where emerging technology companies showed their wares - and live-blogged much of the action for Read/WriteWeb. A full list of his posts is here, but I thought I'd mention some of my favorites:
Alex's favorites were USBCell, BuzzLogic, Pluggd, Retrevo.
Two other DEMO wraps I liked were ZDNet's and Christine Herron's. Also check out Renee Blodgett's coverage of the final DEMOfall dinner, which "pulled a handful of media visionaries to discuss the technologies they saw unveiled over the last couple of days, what trends were important and why." While they apparently spent most of the time dissing young people and blogs, the final thought is worth noting:
"They ran through the companies and everyone agreed on the top cool factor companies – once again, the hardware guys. High votes went to the USB battery and the wireless rabbit, but BuzzLogic also got a plug."
So BuzzLogic and USBCell seemed to be the standouts for most people.
In other news this week....
Finally, do check out Alex Iskold's latest analysis article: Watch Out Google, Vertical Search Is Ramping Up!. This is excellent reading and the comments are great too.
A fascinating week, with lots of DEMO news - and we also seemed to focus on Google all week, for some reason. Two things I didn't get time to blog, but wish I had, were:
Roll on the new week! p.s. thanks for the comments last week, suggesting I create a new RSS feed just for the wrapups (for really busy people!). I will do that...
