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.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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?
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?
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
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.
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.
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