Are Chinese social networks falling behind?

Landscape of Chinese social networks:
#1 - 51.com - myspace clone in China
#2 - xiaonei.com (means "inside campus") - facebook clone in China
Catchups: 360quan.com (yet another myspace clone focused on 15-25 demos); heinei.com (yet another facebook clone by the same founder of xiaonei.com after its acquisition); yiqi.com (founded by a high-profile Chinese Internet veteran and made big noise, combined many current social app features copied from US).

Here's Alexa analytics (not quite accurate but there's no reputable data available from comScore or Quantcast for China)


Obviously, the Chinese facebook clone falls behind the myspace clone at this moment. Notice that 51.com has been missing media centric characteristics of myspace (music, film, video distribution).

Interestingly, when we check out the growth of myspace and facebook, the Alexa chart shows the similar trend of the two major social networks in US before 2007. Facebook is way behind myspace before it actively expanded its reach beyond campus and opened its social platform in May 2007.

In the social network evolution phases, Chinese social networks are mostly in the first or second generation based on user adoption. The big question is, given the culture difference, will Chinese social netters evolve into the third generation? If the answer is true, instead of the blooming of facebook clones in China, passive and behavior social messaging such as Twitter and FriendFeed clones in China will take off eventually.

Broken longtail

The longtail theory by Chris Anderson quickly becomes the bible when many web2.0 startups pitching their business models. One common misuse or misunderstanding of longtail is ignoring the cost of creating longtail channel.

The longtail channel is the mechanism to aggregate and distribute longtail items (content, services providers, merchandise, etc). The channel is not simply a web2.0 site. It is about how to move the items in and out of the site. Google, Amazon, Ebay now rely on branding to retain their longtail channels. Building brand is costly huge effort. Yelp aggregates longtail by leveraging users (crowd sourcing) and focusing on San Francisco restaurants initially. Without carefully crafted channel creation strategy, longtail channel will be broken and the longtail model will never work.

Web2.0 is global tribalization

It is much easier to talk about web2.0 from technology perspectives such as round corner css design, ajax javascripting, RESTful APIs, RSS/ATOM feeds, CDN, cloud computing, or the social application buzz words like wiki, blog, podcast, SNS, etc. However, it is difficult to reach consensus on the wikipedia definition. Tim O'Reilly coined web2.0 for "web as a platform". The immediate question could be, what the heck is the "platform"? Marc Andreessen even defined 3 levels of platforms in defending Ning's position against Facebook social platform.

Web2.0 is a culture movement
The evolution of web platform constantly reshapes our cyberculture in terms of the way people interacting each other. The collective view of our social intercourse that morphed in cyberspace is a cultural phenomenon, as we have experienced with AIM culture, Myspace culture, Facebook culture, Twitter culture. It is prominent in digital divide among age groups. The usage of fast pacing digital media distinguishes cultural demographics. As a sociologist discovered earlier based on social class analysis, Facebook was favored by rich kids from private universities, while poor community college students felt more comfortable to hang out in Myspace. When web platform functions as media, the usage of such media shapes our culture. Moreover, the culture morphing is the natural selection process in technology evolution chain. Cool and fancy technologies can die in cradle if there is no cultural adaptation.

Global village as a result of mass media
From wikipedia:

Global village is a term coined by Wyndham Lewis in his book America and Cosmic Man (1948). However, Herbert Marshall McLuhan also wrote about this term in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). His book describes how electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media.

From newspaper, radio, television, to Web1.0 version of Internet (Yahoo portal and Google search), the mass media made the world small, flat, and within instant reach. Mass media as a part our postmodern life, the culture of the global village created the problem of "singular modernity" as summarized by Fredric Jameson. The singular ideology or totalitarianism built up with the assistance of mass media, in Jameson's opinion, "secures the notions of progress and the future under the auspices of global-capitalism while preemptively dismissing any alternative as un-modern, outmoded, or old-fashioned". Global village is the colonization of the singular cultural sphere.

Tribalization as a result of web2.0 culture
Youtube (or UGC in general) could highlight the cultural anti-colonization in web2.0 culture movement. Time magazine's Person of Year in 2006 was "You". Social apps connect these individualized identities throughout tribalized explicit social networks or implicit social connotations (e.g. sharing same tags in del.icio.us). World wide tribalization is coming!

Ontologies of the present demand archaeologies of the future, not forecasts of the past - Fredric Jameson

Why FriendFeed is hot?

FriendFeed is the current hype. Some bloggers compare it with Twitter frenzy happened last year. It is a simple (at least today) social message aggregator and definitely it's not the first one (Mashable listed 8 aggregators). I have FriendFeed installed on Facebook and quite enjoy "spying" what my friends are doing, specially I love to follow my sociologist friend's new posts and book reading updates for my research purpose before I become a big fan of Twitter.

So, why FriendFeed is hot?

FriendFeed is a continental beacon
Facebook beacon and news feed are most compelling social messaging mechanism. The passive messaging makes social utilities evolved into the third generation of social networks - behavior centric. However, Facebook is an Internet island (note that the island is not a walled garden as Facebook is an open social platform). FriendFeed breaks the island effect through message aggregation. Hence, it is a continental beacon.

As Facebook demonstrated the business model that social messaging will be the key for social ads, which envisioned by many insiders that will potentially surpass Google in the future, FriendFeed indeed raised the attention on how far the social messaging can be reached. Yet another land grabbing!

3 categories of social messages

There are three basic categories of social messages:

1) Conventional greeting: In Myspace, the hotspot of social messages are thanks for add for new friend, birthday, holiday, congratulations to graduation, raise, etc. The greeting is similar to Hallmark greeting cards bought in department stores. Users can get fancy and flashy virtual "cards" from lots of image sites.

2) Social grooming: Facebook widgets expand the scope of message beyond conventional greetings. One popular widget "X me" just for sending "Jane chest bumped me". Another "Food fighting" widget delivers non-conventional social message like "Jane threw an icecream to David". Those "non-sense" social signals are subtle but important in social relationships in the way like animal grooming each other.

3) Passive: Facebook invented passive communication or passive social message. When you login into your facebook account, the first page is a news feed about what's going on with your friend, like "Jane and Mark now are friends", "Jane threw an icecream to David with Food Fighting" (Food Fighting is the link to the widget install page).

Dunbar's number and language invented for social grooming

If we follow Prof. Dunbar's theory, social networks as a new communication tool is simply the advancement of natural language. The whole purpose is to make the social grooming more efficient. However, the efficiency has its limit - the magical Dunbar's number - about 150. The question is: by leveraging intelligent agents, can we handle relations beyond 150? Looks we are getting into a scifi scene - "I need your response in real person, not your program".

Dunbar's number from wikipedia:

Dunbar's number, which is 150, represents a theoretical maximum number of individuals with whom a set of people can maintain a social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who each person is and how each person relates socially to every other person. Group sizes larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced policies and regulations to maintain a stable cohesion. Dunbar's number is a significant value in sociology and anthropology.

Dunbar's major work from Google Books

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
What a big brain we have for all the small talk we make. It's an evolutionary riddle that at long last makes sense in this intriguing book about what gossip has done for our talkative species. Psychologist Robin Dunbar looks at gossip as an instrument of social order and cohesion--much like the endless grooming with which our primate cousins tend to their social relationships.Apes and monkeys, humanity's closest kin, differ from other animals in the intensity of these relationships. All their grooming is not so much about hygiene as it is about cementing bonds, making friends, and influencing fellow primates. But for early humans, grooming as a way to social success posed a problem: given their large social groups of 150 or so, our earliest ancestors would have had to spend almost half their time grooming one another--an impossible burden. What Dunbar suggests--and his research, whether in the realm of primatology or in that of gossip, confirms--is that humans developed language to serve the same purpose, but far more efficiently. It seems there is nothing idle about chatter, which holds together a diverse, dynamic group--whether of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, or workmates. Anthropologists have long assumed that language developed in relationships among males during activities such as hunting. Dunbar's original and extremely interesting studies suggest otherwise: that language in fact evolved in response to our need to keep up to date with friends and family. We needed conversation to stay in touch, and we still need it in ways that will not be satisfied by teleconferencing, email, or any other communication technology. As Dunbar shows, the impersonal world of cyberspace will not fulfill our primordial need for face-to-face contact.From the nit-picking of chimpanzees to our chats at coffee break, from neuroscience to paleoanthropology, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language offers a provocative view of what makes us human, what holds us together, and what sets us apart.

Category of roles and relations on social networks

Users in social network will typically assume one or many of social roles and relations under the communicative paradigm:

1) family member in family relationship
2) dating relationship and love relationship
3) close buddies with strong trust relationship
4) common friends bonded by physical connections (e.g. classmates)
5) playmates sharing common interests, can be virtual relations (e.g. "friends" at online forum or chatroom)
6) co-workers in job related relationship
7) consumers related to business entities (e.g. online stores, dentist, lawyer, consumer brands, publishers, music labels, movie producers, pop stars, etc.)

The first 3 are quite strong relations in daily social life and help to maintain a healthy personal psychological conditions. Ironically, since the bonding is so strong and natural in family and close buddies, we tend to invest least effort in social networks. The perceived social distance in online world can never compete with the close natural relations. In contrast, the top investment regarding networking efforts is the dating relation. Seeking such relation is the primary objective for most single people.

Depending on the user's role and personality, typically there's a "hub", or "anchor", or "lead" person in a small and closed personal network. The anchor person could be wife in family, mother for children in natural relations. As just stated, family relations are not most active in social networks. Among friends circles, people having hypersocial type of personality will assume the role of organizer for conversation flow, virtual events, and the glue to connect other friends, including introducing new friends. Interestingly, hypersocial personality may not necessarily consistent between physical world and virtual world. A shy person could be hypersocial and becomes a hub in social networks.

Second to dating relation, common friends relation (category 4) is quite rewarding for relation investment and there is less risk involved. A social skillful person could easily leverage regular friends base for both personal life and career. Good social apps or social utilities will enhance relations and help to overcome social skill shortage. Common friends relation is the twilight zone between 2, 3, 5 and 6 because "friend" here has very broad range of definition.

Working relation (category 6) is the key for career success and also could be high risk relation. People carefully invest and mitigate the risk by following social codes or social norms more strictly. Given the risk factor, enterprise or corporate social networks is less popular than social networks for other relations.

Relation 5 and 7 are important in leisure life. Since there's no risk involved in the relations, usually users are also least responsible in the virtual world, specially with disguised identities.

Relation 7 is the key to generate advertising revenue when the social network can be used as a powerful marketing tool. Social network operators' core business is to bridge all other relations with consumers. The difficulty remains in intent vs. interest. Consumers searching Google for product info is taking consumer role and the relation has shortest distance to business entities. Dating and friend roles distance from consumer role by orthogonal relations. Social ads attempt to fill the gap. However, the only possible success is the transmedia approach, i.e. ads become a part of social message and remix with normal social messages in order to enhance non-consumer type of relations.

Fans, entourage, and hypersociability

Fans are the core public social relations in Myspace since day one. At least, the original vanilla version of Myspace as public community was made up of music artists surrounded by their fans. In Myspace, fan relation is just a special kind of friend. It's relatively easy to get friended as most artists really pay attention and take care of precious fan relations. More interestingly, aggressive artists often send add friend request to "steal" fans.

in early days, fans didn't exist in Facebook. The vanilla Facebook never cared much about virtual relations in virtual community. Facebook differentiated from Myspace by focusing on physical world relations happened in campus. Last year, in the game of Myspace catching up, fans feature was finally added.

Fans in facebook is a dedicated feature and it is an explicit social relation, while in Myspace, fans are implicit "friends" to the artist. Mixing regular friends with fans, the cons is that two different relations belong to two distinct social circles. However, fans having entourage attitude may leverage such hypersociability. The pros is that fans could feel closer to the artist and could easily make entourage relations once the fans can be mixed with the artist's personal friend circle and perceptively involved. In Myspace, the entourage relations is perceived though top friends and message board. It can appear hypersocial but the relation indeed helps the artist to build fan base.

Hypersociability could further allow fans involve into artists creative activities. From different perspectives, today artists may explore transmedia approach. Some artists in Myspace provides music sample loops and ask fans to do the remix. The remix later got posted on the message board for share.

How mobile social networks differ from Internet social networks

Internet social networks have become mainstream online activities. However, mobile counterpart has not yet taken off. As we carefully evaluate the difference, we can foresee the huge potential.

Technology, usage, and user experience
Obviously, Internet browser has the advantage of browsing and capable to deliver rich user experience. Given the larger screen, faster connection and processing power, rich media is pervasive on Internet. In this sense, the usage of Internet is more media oriented. On the other hand, mobile device is historically more communication oriented. Today, mobile computing is becoming more powerful as we experienced with iPhone, once the cost barrier is overcome by volume, eventually rich media will penetrate into mobile world. However, mobile device is not ideal for browsing behavior, there must be innovative ways for users to acquire content more efficiently and effectively. So far, social networks along with widgets and social media are most promising solutions for mobile user experience.

Social graph
Internet users need to add friends one by one in order to build up their social graph. Friends discovery is only possible on large networks. In mobile case, the social graph is pre-existed in the form of contact list or phone book. There is virtually no extra effort to bootstrap the individual network.

Physical relations vs. virtual relations
Mobile phone book represents the real life relationships in physical world. It is not convenient to establish virtual relationships, and the users are not used to engage people they don't know. In contrast, Internet users tend to enjoy the relationship without physical contact at various virtual communities (e.g. fans of music bands at myspace).

Public and semi-public profile
One primary attraction of Internet social networks is the profile presentation. It could be completely public or only available to friends. Self expression could be a main objective. Users spend significant amount of time in profile page construction and decoration. The expressive profile is not easy to build and to show on mobile devices. The device constraint and usage habit prevent mobile social networks from profile centric social messaging.

Activity and behavioral social messaging
Since mobile devices allow users stay connected on the go, conceptually, mobile social networks are perfect candidates for activity centric or behavior centric social messaging and interactions. IM type of messaging, Twitter type of micro blogging, FireEagle type of location based mobile social apps, and facebook type of social widgets prefer mobility by nature. The usage pattern differs from Internet in that the access could be more frequently and time span would be shorter. The overall user engagement might be higher than Internet counterpart, specially when rich media is embraced.

Social equity
Aside from self entertainment (media oriented activities), the objective of mobile communication is social interaction and it is the process of accumulating social equity. Since mobile social networks favor real life relations, the social equity is easier to "cash out" in physical world. In other words, users should have more incentives in mobile social interactions. In contrast, building social equity in virtual communities requires more investment in time and effort, the reward and the equity value are more difficult to realize.

3 generations of social networks

So far, the evolution of social networks has been through three generations:

1G - Profile centric
The early social networks like friendster and myspace in 2005 emphasized user profile construction and sharing. The social graph is also part of the profile. Today, LinkedIn is still profile centric. A profile presents a user's static identity only. The persona presented is not yet a living creature, but quite useful when user wants to check out a new friend or contact.

2G - Activity centric
Users proactive interactions make persona live. In myspace, only the user comment area (message board) is the primary social interaction place, while the whole purpose of Facebook is to enable all sorts of social activities. After Facebook opened up its social platform, thousands of 3rd party social widgets flood in, making Facebook more activity centric. Activities keep users busy but may overload the users as well.

3G - Behavior centric
User's social behavior observed by others, mainly through passive or unintentional social message, is the trend of next generation of social networks. This is because behavior centric is more close to real life social interactions. One example is the body language in physical world. The behavior observation mechanism can be traced back to Facebook's innovative mini-feed and later beacon feature. The biological human can process the surrounding social messages efficiently. However, beacon as of today is extremely inefficient. Intelligent agents must be applied to partially automate the behavior observation. The recommendation or taste engines at Flixter, Amazon, Netflix, etc. are automated, though narrow banded to taste comparison only.

Who will pay the bill for social media?

Stage6, the video sharing site from DivX, today has announced that it will be shutting down. Last month, Revver, another video site was on sale for $1M. We would expect to see more death tolls among social media startups, mainly from video companies with the high operating cost.

Users love UGC, however, who will pay the bill? The list of possible payers is quite short:

1) Users. No way! Internet is free, that's Internet culture. Subscription model won't work in general.

2) VC's. No kidding! VC's only pay for bait - baiting for high return exit. If there's no sight of exit, bait can never be meal.

3) M&A bidders. No hot seat on deal table. There are so many potential acquisition targets, but first, large media and enterprises need time to figure out new social media strategies. There's no enough fear factor to miss the deal.

4) Advertisers. Not falling love yet. Everyone dream to be the next Google until the advertisers buy in the idea. Advertising on social media is still a test tube business.

It's not the fault that social media startups could not figure out a viable business model. Simply because the business model doesn't exist. Google's longtail story is about timing - once the ad industry is ready, new business model can be sold and somebody will pay the bill.

Before the stone can be turned into gold, the social media game is abort surviving. I see three surviving strategies:

1) Lure larger bait and make pocket deep. Youtube won't fall even there's no clear business model. However, there's no many Googles for other whatever tubes.
2) Get a night job. VMIX just dumped its community and focused on its technology offering to NBC type of marquee accounts.
3) Tighten the belt. Lower burn rate in rich media is tough but doable. Joost and Vuze utilizing P2P technology are able to cut the bandwidth bill. Hulu gets its R&D in Beijing to cut the relatively low paychecks.

Stop talking about business model, it's time to focus on surviving before the web2.0 bubble bursts.

3R ingredients in social recipes

Upon designing a social application, we need to focus on three main social ingredients that make up the recipes for social interactions:

1) Role: the person's acting role within the community.
2) Relation: the inter-person relationship.
3) Re/action: the action/reaction behavoir under certain relationship.

At flickr, it's easy to see two different roles: content producers and content consumers. However, there are social roles that sometimes may not be quite obvious, such as newbies, fans of certain photographers, subject specialists, gear lovers, critique, moderators, etc. Definitely the same person may assume multiple roles, and roles of the same person can be shifted from time to time.

Relationships are formed and shaped by connecting roles among people. A subject specialist on seascape photography, or a gear lover collecting Canon lens is likely surrounded by newbies. Fans would enjoy reading quality critiques. Reputable moderators would settle the flame generated by the hostile commenters. A community cannot be well forms if certain important relations are missing.

Re/action makes the social dialog and keeps the relation live. Re/action behavior is conducted under social norms. Social features in the sense of tools can help the formation of social norms. Spam filter can fend off intruders in bad relations. Thumb-up, dig, or kudo as reaction can accumulate social equity and promote healthy relations. Beyond the tools functionality, like any society, the action/reaction behavior at the end collectively forms the culture. Users make the culture through the app. App itself won't make the culture.

Successful social apps should allow users to find out easily:
1) This is the right place for me as my role can fit into the community.
2) Based on my preferred acting roles, I can bring in and extend my existing relations from physical world if needed, and establish new relations at the virtual world.
3) I can act/react in my comfortable zone when interacting with other people in my preferred social graph.

To make 1,2,3 happen, besides building the right social features from the tool angle, human factors are more significant as they shape the culture. Checkpoint: Do you have dedicated community managers? Are you able to promote and encourage loyal users who have been taking moderator roles?

When social ads missing semantics

"Leaving Yahoo?" ad placed at facebook by First Round Capital made a news: facebook social engine mistakenly mashed up a profile photo of a Yahoo employee to the ad. Read the fact.

The advertiser First Round Capital cannot see the actual ad at Yahoo network on facebook. What happened is that the Yahoo employee also belongs to FRC group:

Anyhow, I've now been informed (loudly) that my ad which said "Leaving Yahoo?" was accompanied by a picture of a current Yahoo employee. Most of those employees joined the FRC group before the ad campaign -- and (obviously and justifiably) were not too pleased by any implications that they were leaving their employer. And while I've apologized in person to those that contacted me, here's a very public apology to those who haven't.

This interesting social ad experiment generated totally unexpected results for the advertiser. The missing link is the semantics processed by facebook social engine. Even human can make mistakes during social engagement with misaligned social context, as of the machine, why not?

The simple machine model doesn't work for human. If the ad is going thru viral channel, human social ability would mostly place it in appropriate social context. However, this natural human model seems not working for facebook's eager revenue objective.

Anyway, it's funny to see actual people being placed by ad engine in the way of AdSense which is often non-sense. This story could be a perfect sample of first generation social ads.

mini-feed: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Facebook so far has two influential innovations in social apps: mini-feed and open social platform. The mini-feed is a passive messaging system that constructs a social sensory mechanism. This feature is so successful in creating viral effect that it becomes a widely copied feature as well.

The good: the sweet-spot of mini-feed is the social messaging to enhance users' social sensory capability. It makes a lot of sense to be notified that "Nikki and Alan are now friends" and "John was challenged to a movie quiz!". (Beacon and privacy are a separate issue)

The bad: turning the mini-feed into a personal activity log. It happens on some copycats when the copiers missed the point that social messaging is about what happened on other people who are relevant to you. It's not about "I installed this stupid facebook app on Tuesday 9:34pm and found it's actually really fun". What you care about is to share this app with friends, not yourself.

The ugly: making mini-feed overloaded to the users. The feed is bulky and no longer "mini". The worst scenario is it gets quickly spammed and becomes useless. Facebook started to suffer this problem when the user couldn't digest huge amount of social messages mixed with lots of non-sense ads. The obvious simple solution is to limit the categories of emitted social messages and prioritize them. The ultimate solution is to create intelligent agents that will help the user to process and filter the surrounding social messages.

What is the social app?

The social app is the media.

Social apps are often perceived as tools. However, it is the social usage of such tools that ultimately delivers the social experiences, and all social experiences must be interpreted in corresponding cultures. In McLuhan's media theory, the bridge between tools and cultures is the media. Therefore, the social app actively used in social context ultimately is the media. This media centric social computing model is depicted below:

As a fan of digital photography, I process RAW photos with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. The two tools are capable of delivering best possible personal experience for me. However, these Adobe tools are not social apps as there is no social experience involved in my usage. To share my personal experience with others, I post some processed photos onto Flickr. Flickr as a social app is the media for social interactions. If nobody visits my Flickr page, namely, no social usage, Flickr would be merely my personal photo storage media and won’t be anything better than my USB hard drive.

My Flickr social experience is interpreted with the culture coined by the digital photographer community at Flickr. One social norm any careful user can figure out is the photo “dressing code”. To get respect by pro eyes, usually photos need to “dress up” by post-processing. “Naked” unprocessed photos are considered non-professional and novice. Also in Flickr culture, the social value system is carried by the host sub-cultures of the peers. Photographers participated at the same group (e.g. 50mm lens, surrealism) would be more easily appreciate each other’s work and behavior.

The media is the bridge connecting cultures and tools. The active social app, in the form of media, is able to change our cultures gradually. Flickr changed the culture in photographer community. The social value system for judging a photographer is no longer impacted by the person’s profession and professional credential. Nobody cares if you are a professional photographer for living and how many awards you've received in photography contests. At Flickr, only your works speak.

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” – Marshall McLuhan

When usability is useless

A common mistake in social apps is to design usability with a common conventional objective - efficiency for task fulfillment. Indeed, efficiency is the central theme of the mainstream productivity tools (e.g. word processor, spreadsheet, google search, nextag price comparison, etc.). However, usability merely for efficient user experience is useless in the context of delivering rich social experience because now we live in the web.

Facebook in early days was an CRM (collegemate relationship management) tool. In the sense of usability, the user experience was comparable to enterprise CRM (customer relationship management). The site was designed for efficient task fulfillment in profile management, friend management including a workflow for add-friend request and approval, and an inter-friend messaging system. The social experience, unfortunately, was relatively poor comparing to rival myspace until facebook embraced many third-party mini-apps. A significant number of popular facebook apps are dedicated to delivering social experience (e.g. X me, food fighting, SuperPoke, etc.). These very sociable time wasters have nothing to do with efficiency but actually destroy the productivity in user experience, making the usability for efficiency and productivity totally useless.

SuperPoke at my facebook profile page.

Conventional usability might be inadequate in describing social experience for social apps. In addition, we need to emphasize sociability aspect and create a more human web environment to live in.