Virginia Postrel, author of The Future and Its Enemies, and the Dynamist blog, recently wrote a piece in the Boston Globe about economic sociology. A fascinating run through a rich area of research, that I review in my most recent Centrality post.

My conclusions:

Postrel has managed to quickly highlight the trajectory of economic sociology's research direction, and provide some tantalizing examples of how this thinking is important for business.

But perhaps most important is the unstated argument: that the classical economic metaphors about markets and human interaction are being overturned. Business leaders today cannot approach their business plans based on the classical market concepts. People are not homogeneous, they are strongly influenced by who they know, and their economic decisions are framed by the social context they are embedded in. This is the core of today's bottom up marketing approaches -- like word of mouth or buzz marketing -- that rejects mass market, broadcast approaches to influencing buying behavior, and focuses on the intensely personal elements of deciding which car to buy, what clothes to wear, or what music to listen to.

Click here to read the full post at Centrality

I got a PR email the other day from AIM, asking

EVER WONDER HOW POPULAR YOU REALLY ARE? THE AOL INSTANT MESSENGER (AIM®) SERVICE HAS THE ANSWER

New AIMFIGHT.com Site Lets AOL® Members and AIM® Users
Gauge Their Online Popularity, Compare Buddy List Ranking With Friends, Colleagues and AIM Users Everywhere

Dulles, VA July 18, 2005 Are you the social center of the online universe? Do you covet the pinging sound of popularity and importance? Today, American Online, Inc. and the AOL® Instant Messenger(TM) (AIM®) service unveiled a new Buddy List ranking feature and Web site that let users once and for all answer the burning question: "How Popular Am I?"

Live today, AIMFIGHT.com (www.AIMFIGHT.com) lets AOL® members and AIM® users see how connected they are to the online community at any given moment. By entering their AOL or AIM Screen Name, as well as that of a friend, users can square off against their buddies to see just how popular they really are, and compare Buddy List rank.

We have seen a lot of this sort of gaming in the early days of the social networking explosion, when people would attempt to become the 'most connected' at orkut or LinkedIn.

In an accompanying description of what social networks are, the AIMFIGHT site is pretty good, and pretty funny.

I checked who was more connected, Greg Narain or me, using the 'boydstowe' and 'madmonknyc' handles. I dominated!

Of course, it would be a lot more easy to just put the numbers on the buddy list, like other attributes. In my ongoing Nerdvana rant, I'd like all these sorts of social attributes to be on the buddy list entries, but in a case like this it's even more obvious that it should be displayed there, instead of this silly AIMFIGHT screen.

What I would like to do with this underlying circles of friends and friends of friends information is to be able to make my own attributes public: where I am geographically, recent blog posts, my availability, or whatever. The implicit social network latent in the instant messaging network is just crying out to be tapped, and not for silly games like this: it's the future center of the online universe if someone at AOL, Google, MSN, or Yahoo wises up to it.

I am smack in the middle of an experience I have thought about a lot over the past few years. I am getting the opportunity to work with an impassioned group of entrepreneurs who are trying to design a new social application -- details omitted to protect my liabilities under NDA -- and unlike my usual technology consulting, this is really, really early stage.

We have been talking about various well-known solutions that incorporate social elements -- like friends, groups, collaborative filtering, tagging, and so on -- and stargazing about what the hypothetical users will want and care about (we even flew in a few to get their insights and thoughts). And what I have realized, after the first day, is how hard this is. I mean, I have designed lots of software in the past, and used a lot of different approaches to doing it, but this is somehow more complex: exactly because it is all about the social aspect.

I feel that we don't know enough about social tools to have the necessary design patterns defined to construct the social architecture that will surround all future successful social applications. Based on the events of the past day, I am offering a few -- perhaps obvious and overgeneralized -- observations:

• People Are The Living, Breathing, Beating Heart Of The Universe -- Those folks that I know and form my social reality are the center of my universe. Therefore, activities involving interacting with them, learning about them, and perceiving the world through their eyes should be the centerpoint of social applications. I am strongly biased toward the instant messaging buddy list metaphor as a central motif around which social interaction can swirl, but it's not essential, I guess. The motif of an address book can serve, I suppose, or the network models that underlie social networking apps, but seems to me less helpful than buddy list aggregation into groups. (See Nerdvana posts, for more on this.)
• Artifacts Bind Us Together and Define Us -- People create and leave a trail of their social activities, like creating blog posts, comments, tags, links, ratings, posting pictures, even the path that they have taken through a series of pages on a service. These artifacts are actually a more interesting way to characterize people than simply written stuff in a profile. More importantly, some of these artifacts -- links to people and posts, ratings, testimonials, and so on -- represent the social glue that links us, and is a reflection of emergent value in social networks. When dozens of people link to a book review I post in a hypothetical service, and rate it highly, they are -- in essence -- suggesting that my post matters, that it should be read, that others would find it helpful, and, by extension, that I, as the author, have made a contribution that is valued. This accretion of meaning through the tens of thousands of individual activities within a social application is larger than the 'content' generated: the whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts.
• Social Interaction Is Bottom Up, And So Is Everything Else -- Features like tags, user defined groups, arbitrary user-defined relationships, and user defined categories make sense and work because social context is very personal and local, not universal and general. All fans of what I think of as downtempo music will not use that term, and even if they did, they may still not agree with my characterization of a specific album as downtempo. But when you surrender to the bottom-up nature of social applications, that ceases to matter. Over the long haul, those that care about downtempo-ish music will converge toward a more-or-less consistent use of the term, at least consistent enough for the term to be useful in an approximate sense. Which is really all we can hope for in a subjective universe, anyway.
• Social Stuff Absorbs and Trumps Domain Stuff -- Imagine a social application dedicated to the love of wine (I'd join!). There is a natural information schema in the world of wine, based on things like country of origin, regions, vintners, vintage, kinds of grapes, and so on. That information structures an intuitive schema that we all adopt regarding wine. The same holds in other areas, like music, books, blogs, and nearly anything that people can obsess about. But you shouldn't imagine that this domain schema should the primary axis for people's interaction. That just leads to a giant catalog experience, which basically sucks. The primary axis of user interaction in social applications is human interaction -- people communicating, or individual looking at what others say about their obsessions, or finding new potential friends based on shared obsessions, or finding new wines, books, or music based on the recommendations of friends. The natural schemas of the world should be leveraged in the social sphere, but should be subsumed by it. People will want to live in a coffeeshop, talking to people about books, not in the stacks at the library or the warehouse at Amazon.

Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace Anna Karenina [update and correction thanks to Steve and Alex: see comments], "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I bet that all successful social applications will be based around the same, shared social architectural patterns, while ten thousand failed solutions will fall by the wayside by adopting some "innovative" take on social architecture that will, in the final analysis, miss the point. Like a social bookstore that forces us to stare, endlessly, at the stacks, and makes it hard to find out what your friends are reading, or to connect with other people that quote Tolstoy in their blogs. Even established realms like Amazon will have to rework their architecture to match the social architecture latent in our wiring, or they will get pushed aside by an upstart that cracks the social code.

I have never really adopted the use of Deli.cio.us, the best known social bookmarking and search tool. There was something about the spare, blank, austere user interface that annoyed me, so I never warmed to it. However, I am a great believer in the future of social search, so I turned to the new Yahoo My Web 2.0 with great interest, and now believe, like Waxy.org, that it is possibly a Deli.cio.us killer.

I continue to believe that the center of the social universe is the instant messaging buddy list metaphor: not just because I am biased toward real-time communication, but because human beings are the center of the socialized world. That's the rationale for the Nerdvana ideal that animates a series of posts I made over the past few months. However, the Yahoo My Web 2.0 builds on the Yahoo 360° social network metaphor, to decide who makes up my universe, which is a pretty good second-order approximation. I want to know what the Dunbar core group -- the 150ish most critical folks in my universe -- are reading, finding, thinking. My Yahoo 360° group includes Stuart Butterfield, Marc Canter, Jonas Luster, Greg Narain, Liz Lawley, Ross Mayfield, and a few dozen others, so the results are pretty indiciative of what My Web 2.0 might look like in a steady state of use. Here's a tagcloud based on the tags being used by my contacts in Yahoo 360°:

Ok, so I am going to start using the system for the next few weeks, and I plan a series of posts chronicling my experiences, and the commentary of other explorers.

Here's what the folks at Yahoo Search blog have to say about what they are up to:

[from Yahoo! Search blog: Search, with a little help from your friends]

Introducing Social Search

To address these kinds of limits of today's search experience, we are releasing an early beta version of My Web 2.0 for a limited number of users. It is a new kind of search engine -- a social search engine -- that complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web. Here's some of what we think is interesting about My Web 2.0:

• The trusted web -- Anyone can save, tag, and share knowledge with their community. Any page on the web with your comments and insights. Your community can do the same. The result -- a new search experience that combines web search with what your trusted community has tagged and shared. Users can build their community by inviting their contacts via email or by importing existing social relationships from Yahoo! Address Book, Messenger, or their 360° community. My Web 2.0 then leverages the Yahoo! 360° personal network platform to enable people to manage their search community.

• Personalized search -- My Web 2.0 is powered by Yahoo!'s new MyRank Search Technology, which provides personalized search results based on the shared knowledge of the people they trust. Personalized search is also supported by our My Search History capability, (launched in My Web 1.0 ). Over time, you will see us integrate MyRank technology across other Yahoo! applications and services.

• Control over what is shared and with whom -- Each page saved and tagged can be shared with the world, just with friends and their friends, or kept private.

• Structured tagging -- The internet is about much more than web pages -- key dimensions like time and location can be as important as the content itself. With user-provided structured tags like "geo:[location]" applied to pages, search results can now can include maps to locations in addition to the web page.

• Open APIs - Through the use of My Web 2.0's XML and RDF APIs , a whole host of new applications can be built -- like what the folks in the Stanford University TAP project are working on.

How Is Social Search Different?

Social search complements web search, which is driven by publishers and web sites, by providing a better search experience that is powered by people and communities. Flickr is a great example of this power applied to photos and image search.

Much like links and anchor text enabled major improvements in web search by becoming a new source of authority for search engines, people and trust networks are now an additional source of authority for social search engines. In the same way that blogs and RSS are empowering individuals to participate in publishing, individuals and communities can now participate in search, using tools like My Web 2.0 that let them define what is valuable to them and their community.

Over time, we envision communities using My Web to build their own search engines to capture and make accessible the knowledge of their community -- search engines populated with the collective experience of a group of medical researchers, a community of PHP experts, a bird watching club, or members of a structural engineering consulting firm.

Ok, I am looking forward to the integration with Flickr and Messenger, but please make sure everything works with Mac, ok? The Yahoo Address book doesn't sync with Mac, and the newly released beta of Messenger (I wrote about it a few weeks ago: Not Nerdvana, But Maybe The Suburbs) doesn't run on OS X yet.

Wednesday, June 22 at 8:45am, Antony Brydon and I will be speaking at the Collaborative Technologies Conference 2005 in New York. I am chairing the session, Social Networking Apps: Real Value for the Organization?. I interviewed Antony on that very topic last year, and here are some of his observations:

[See the rest of the posting at the CTC2005 blog.]

OpenBC announces they have reached the 500,000 users milestone. Definitely a serious player in today's approach to gated social networking, although I am still withdrawing from these sorts of solutions. [tags: Unlinking From Social Networks"]

On the Web, nothing ever dies, and no good dead goes unpunished. A case in point are the old Social Commentary pieces I wrote for Darwin for a few years a few years ago. Every once in a while I get pinged (in this case via PubSub) that someone has mined something worthwhile out of one of them. Today, I stumbled over a piece (see There is something about social software) by Jack Vinson that builds on this old thing:

It is the customizable flow of information that really highlights the fluid nature of social software and the fluid networks that underlie those interactions. Each person participates in many different networks, and they each have a different set of information flowing through their workspace. And people flow in and out of these networks as well.

I agree. We live in many circles, and that is one of the flaws of most social networking solutions, which flatten everying into one big telephone book. That's why I continuously argue for the buddy list metaphor. We partition the world into various groups, cliques, and worlds. People's relationships with us grow or decrease, friends become colleagues, and colleagues move out of town and out of touch. There is a natural ebb and flow, and most tools do a bad job of flexing with that.

[tags: Social Tools, Darwin, Social+Commentary]

Meet mates: a location-based social networking system put together by the University of Michigan.

Mates aims to connect people based on location as well as other commonalities - think connecting your IM with location data. People in your class. Your building. Your conference. A way to say introduce people who have a common link, or to give you a little ping when an old friend is nearby.

The Relationship Engine attempts to automatically determine user locations at any given point in time based on combinations of user input and statistical analysis. The RE can be sent explicit location information from a GPS device, a positioning system such as ekahau, or as the result of user input (clicking a point on a visual map, for example).

The Relationship Engine maintains information on user attributes as received from the user and other information stores such as LDAP directories. The RE generates relationships when these attributes change, and notifies users of relationship additions, deletions, and modifications that may affect them via a message queueing system. The RE and RSN currently compute and support relationships of the following types: friend, friend of friend, interest, course, and physical location.

The RS Navigator is a visual software client for the Relationship Engine. It features a live, animated visualization of related users in nearby locations, a buddy list, a messaging subsystem, and an interface for supplying attribute information to the Relationship Engine. The RSN also features a "location wall", allowing users to broadcast and receive location-related information and events to nearby users.

The project is based on open infrastructure so other applications can benefit from the work. Can we expect this built into mainsteam IM applications, or other social networking products? I hope so. Soon? Not likely. However, I think the backbone poses some interesting queries. It's been a while since I've tried to generate any new friends based on search criteria in the IMs - this, however, has more practical applications (or so I think).

I would love to, for example, know the people at a conference I'm attending. Have the ability to live chat while I event blog. I would also be really interested to know when friends, family or colleagues are in my area so we can meet up for coffee. These types of lists would be great if they were autogenerated based on integration with my calendar.

Via SmartMobs.

After talking yesterday about the ICQ release, I decided to play around with it a bit. It's not actually a "new" release as of yesterday, but it is still rather new (about a month out).

At first impression, I was rather annoyed by the startup. Like most IMs, the "standard" start is the "Welcome" Window. Although nicely designed, it's not something I like. Besides, as I soon found out, all those resources can be found in the Xtras tab. I thought the feature set was quite impressive - the multi-chat, bulk sending, Google search, AIM integration, and greeting card features were personally inviting. The customization area was accessible - granted, the "ease" of changing the features is a trade off with the time it takes to load the feature window.

So, what does the new icq have?

- Enhanced Xtras features - slider panel
- Custom status manager
- Voice Chat (VoIP)
- Games
- Push to Talk (Instant communication walkie-talkie style)
- highlight to search via Google
- SMS Follow Me Xtra (IM forwarding)
- Buzz It! Xtra - Send a message to multiple recipients

This ICQ has been downloaded 78,265,454 times in a little over a month. Pretty impressive guide to the active user base.

Being unfamiliar with ICQ Xtras myself, I read the review on CNET. It is a "personalized greeting cards, apply custom icons to your buddies, play online games, and customize your shortcuts panel for one-click access to all your favorite features." It is also the way that new ICQ features can be delivered without having to upgrade the entire ICQ client. I think this could be a great feature - seamless integreation would allow us to enhance our communication without hassle.

My overall impression - very good IM - the focus seems to be enhancing the social networking available through icq with more ways to communicate - from standard IM to voice options to SMS. There are even more options to talk one-to-many or many-to-many, creating more of that "community" feel that really appeals to me.

I would argue that the advertisements are a large downside to the client. Additionally, some missing features include group voice chat or encrypted chat. Although I don't intend to switch to icq (I still feel ike an outsider to the target market due to some of the features and the icon design), I think it is a very clean and intuitive system.

Just like everyone else out there, I am still waiting for the IM that will offer great feature sets like these and seamlessly integrate with all major IMs (icq, MSN, Yahoo). But that's another post.

Yahoo! has just entered the blogosphere with Yahoo! 360, a blogging tool combined with photo sharing and social networking. This follows suit of both MSN and Google adding blog services to their rosters. I think these easy platforms will invite a lot of people to enter into blogging who perhaps may not have before.

When I visit the Yahoo! 360 site, I am invited to be on the "waiting list" for the beta release - invitation only at this point. Not the warmest of invites, but it definitely will hype it up a bit. CNET reports Yahoo! 360 will open up on March 29.

Yahoo 360 combines a new blogging tool along with several longtime Yahoo products, including instant messaging, photo storage and sharing, and Internet radio. It also offers tools for sharing recommendations about places to eat, favorite movies, music and so on. [CNET]

As noted over at RSS News, Yahoo! 360 is a "mashup of Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Photos, My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Messenger" with blogging and moblogging components thrown in for good measure. It does seem a little overdone, but on the other sense the integration could prove really useful. From the info sheet provided on the new release, people will be able to define access controls, upload contacts from Yahoo messenger, yahoo address book, and even Microsoft Outlook - all with easy "point and click" designs. Yahoo even makes it easy to drag over content from reviews (yours or those in your network), discussion groups, or photo albums.

What makes this Yahoo! 360 release so powerful is that it can use all this integration to leverage its preexisting 165 million users and social groups into a sophisticated social network.

Yahoo also is making it easier for the service's users to connect with others who share common interests and friends — a practice known as social networking. Participants can choose to either open their blogs to the entire world or restrict access to people invited through e-mail.

"We heard from people that they have a strong desire to stay close to the people who are important to them, but at the same time they didn't want to feel like they were exposing themselves online," said Julie Herendeen, Yahoo's vice president of network products.

Since I am not on the invite list right now, I cannot tell you what part of the hype on this new release will live up to its potential. If you want a really good look into the features and their capabilities, take a look at this post by Marc Canter.

Heiko Hebig does a nice little post about some of the things I have been noticing around the topic of mobile blogging, or moblogging. Telco after telco has been coming out with services to tap into what they see going on in the blogosphere (and perhaps with an aim to also push other services such as MMS). But the moblogging services from telcos lack the insight into blogging to actually make them useful tools.

Most mobile blogging tools on the market let you send images, videos, or text to a web location... and, that's it. This captures the whole "posting" thing, pretty much, but does little to reflect the conversations that characterize blogs. Fortunately, there are other companies that have stepped up to the plate. Take, for example, the release by Intercastingcorp of Rabble, a tool encompassing moblogging, social networking, and location-based services.

Create your channel and post location-based media - your favorite places, photos or an up-to-the-minute newsworthy event. It's like putting virtual sticky notes on the world around you. Then connect with your world. Tell Rabble where you are and it will show you who is around you and the media they have created.

Services such as Rabble and Flickr (which offers moblogging of photos with tags) lead the way in creating what Visser, on Smart Mobs, calls “flash communities” and come much closer to how blogs are vehicles for conversations - for interaction and social interaction.

The mobile phone is evolving into a media production and consumption device. Hardly a “phone” anymore, it is a Personal Media Device (PMD). In a few years there will be over a billion people walking around with the equivalent of a radio station, film studio and broadcast network in their pockets, and our definition of “media” is going to change dramatically.

What can we expect from moblogging? As phones evolve, even just slightly, we should see more services popping up that allow us not just to post to our blogs, but to edit posts, view and make comments, host your location to others, share posts with grouped communities, send out trackbacks, and much more.

My newest Social Commentary column is live at Darwin Magazine.

[from The Barriers of Content and Context]

We can all just get along -- once we figure out how to find one another and what our groups are up to.

Social networking is suffering the curse of all attractive innovations in the modern era: As even the most winning innovations rise into popular consciousness, the backlash against them begins instantaneously. The traditional lag between initial adoption by a small percentage of hip, connected "innovators" and the later contact with the "majoritarians" that comprise the overwhelming bulk of the market has been squashed to an almost immediate effect. Just as truckers' caps begin to diffuse out to the average metrosexual a few weeks after becoming cool, the glitterati already declare them passé.

Like a hothouse flower, Orkut -- Google's social software experiment -- bloomed and faded, all in a few days. As other have noted. like Ross Mayfield and Marc Canter, there seemed to be an enormous upwelling of interest in Orkut, with millions of page hits, but the socializing aspect of the site was limited to making friends. There was no there, there.

After all, there should be some generation of emergent social capital in our interactions if these services are to add anything to other sorts of communication and community. People have to be doing more than adding friend to their rosters.

My dream is that some uber-FOAF-ish service will come along as a collection of javascript plug-ins we can all add to our blogs, and social networking will emerge where I live in blogspace. I am actively investigating the various services, but there nothing yet compelling enough to get me to move my center-of-gravity out of blogspace into an explicitly social space.

Gary George has provided an interesting and in depth article at VMS3.info that analyzes a wide variety of social networking solutions using Mitchell Levy's Industry Analysis Value Framework Template. I hadn't -- prior to looking at the article -- known anything about Levy's Value Framework, but it seems to lead to a relatively sensible segmentation of many of the social networking offerings, including Classmates, Ryze, LinkedIn, Ecademy, Friendster, Friendzy, Huminity, Spoke, and LinkSV.

Scott Allen provides a detailed review of the article, where I got the pointer originally.

Stefanie Olsen reports on Google quietly launching its own social networking solution:

"The search company, which is expected to go public this year, is flexing its power with its Internet fans by constantly offering new services, including comparison shopping and news search. Orkut could be the clearest signal that Google's aspirations don't end with search.

"Orkut is an online trusted community Web site designed for friends. The main goal of our service is to make the social life of yourself and your friends more active and stimulating," according to the Web site, which states that the service is "in affiliation with Google."

A Google representative said that the site is the independent project of one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works on user interface design for Google. Buyukkokten, a computer science doctoral candidate at Stanford University before joining Google, created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week--an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects. Buyukkokten, with the help of a few other engineers, developed Orkut out of his passion for social networking services.

Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriquez said that despite Orkut's affiliation, the service is not part of Google's product portfolio at this time. "We're always looking at opportunities to expand our search products, but we currently have no plans in the social networking market."

Still, Google owns the technology developed by its employees, Rodriquez said."

Interesting hedge -- not a product of the company, but owned by Google...

Chris Gaither of the Boston Globe covers the launch of Eurekster, the social networking search technology I covered a few weeks ago.

"Eurekster gets results like a normal search engine but ranks them according to the interests you and your friends have shown through past searches. For example, if many people in a social network use Eurekster to seek information about the Boston Red Sox, the websites they visit most will rise to the top in future Red Sox searches. Eurekster also lists queries that members of your social network have made -- although it doesn't say who made them -- and recent websites they have visited.

Eurekster is betting that "your network is interested in this, therefore you should be, too -- so go look at it," said Stowe Boyd [that would be me!], managing director of A Working Model, a technology consulting firm in Virginia.

Eurekster hopes to make money by selling ads related to specific search queries, known as sponsored search results, and by licensing its technology to Internet search providers and social networking websites. Overture Services Inc., a subsidiary of Yahoo Inc., powers Eurekster's sponsored and nonpaid search engines."

The Business Development Institute is holding a seminar on Social Networking, Feb 10 2004. Speakers include

• Antony Brydon, Founder and President, Visible Path
  
• Reid Hoffman, CEO, LinkedIn
  
• Valerie Symes , Co-Founder and EVP Business Development & Marketing, Tribe Networks
  
• Andrew Weinreich, Founder and CEO of I Stand For, Co-Founder and Former CEO of Six Degrees
  
• Adrian Scott, Founder and CEO, Ryze

The seminar will be held in New York, and simultaneously webcast to Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

I have been asked to co-host the San Francisco get-together, so I am weakly linked to the event (forgive the small world pun).

Shannon Henry of the Washington Post, in an article today, reviewed the social networking phenomenon in general, and more specifically, the use of LinkedIn by Dc area residents. The girl must have it in for me because she left me out of the list of locals using LinkedIn, even though a/ I know her (slightly), and b/ I am the second most LinkedIn human in the DC area, and c/ I am tracking the social networking space VERY closely.

Washingtonians using the system include a slew of techies, including CEOs MichaelTessler of BroadSoft in Gaithersburg, Donna Hemmert of Dulles-based OptiView and Eric J. Kuhn of Varsity Group in Washington. Also linking in are many local venture capitalists and investors, such as John May of New Vantage Group, Tim Meyers of Updata Capital, John Backus of Draper Atlantic and quite a few people from In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm. Many America Online executives are checking it out, too, as are some politicos like former Clinton White House staffers Michael Nelson and Mike McCurry (although McCurry's profile notes he's not receiving requests for contacts).

Judith Meskill caught a news story that seems like so 2003:

"InterMedia Inc. ... announced today that they have listed their
website RateOrDate for sale on eBay. The owner and CEO of
InterMedia Inc., Jay Gould, recently expanded the company by creating a sister
company SocialTree Inc., which will focus their efforts on the recent and
highly financed online social networking industry.

Christopher Allen offers his distilled experience after fiddling around with various social networkings solutions, and then lays out the form of The Perfect Social Networking Service:

"My ideal service would have the the multiple professional affiliation features of LinkedIn, but also allow me to show non-professional affilations. It would allow me to form intentional communities like Tribes.Net, but would also let me do a Wiki in addition to a message board. It would have meeting/party invite services like eVite, and blogging features like LiveJournal. It would have an endorsement system like LinkedIn integrated not only with professional endorsements, but personal endorsements as well, and you could even endorse intentional communities. It would let me better map and control my network, giving different friends different privileges. It would handle the release of my personal information like Ryse, but less clunky."

I have an upcoming coumn in Darwin (sometime this week, I think) where I opine in a similar fashion about the fusion of blogging's implicit social networking with the explicit relationship management of Ryze, LinkedIn, Spoke, VisiblePath, etc..

Interesting thread going on, with Tim Oren riffing on recent remarks by David Weinberger at M2M regarding the limits of social software which are followed up on by Jeff Jarvis. One of Tim's remarks:

"I think Weinberger's argument could be reasonably restated as 'relationships are contextual.' There is value in representing and supporting relationships in their original context. Trying to abstract them from that context, and use them to market / connect for business / whatever, is a fraught proposition. Ordinary folks are now finding out why field sales people keep their best contacts 'on their hip' and lie like thieves to the SFA tools.

In context, to me, boils down to "it's a feature." There's value, but it can't be abstracted away into a stand alone business, which is the filter that I run as a VC. Which puts me in agreement with your skepticism re $100m going into this sector."

Hmmm...

My feeling is that social software is inherently different from, for example, sales force automation. If a company emerges that has developed a super-powerful social networking engine and/or developed the killer appraoch to managing the context and content aspects of social relationships, that technology will likely be licensed as an integral component of next-generation, social software-enabled applications. Just as SFA companies don't roll their own database technology, or application server technology, or instant messaging technology -- prefering to license it from others -- I imagine the same will happen in this market. Some may decide to roll-up a very SFA-oriented social networking app into their offering, but I anticipate the shakeout of app vs infrastructure players in the space relatively quickly. So there is room in the space for both direct social networking applications -- like dating, job search, deal acceleration, collaboration discovery, etc. -- as well as core infrastructure development -- like social network analysis, digital reputation management, and so on.

The inevitable fleas-on-the-dog effect: as social tools come to the fore, and millions are using them, we can anticipate the deluge of Social Spam.

"Waiting for the Other Shoe

Companies that rely on e-mail to keep in touch with customers may be compelled to take a good long look in the mirror, as this major onslaught against spam takes shape.

"Now that the 'CRM revolution' has given us all these new direct-marketing technologies, we have gone to the opposite extreme and think nothing of sending out a couple million e-mails at a time," Aberdeen Group vice president Denis Pombriant told NewsFactor.

It is more important than ever for companies to develop protective e-mail methodologies and policies, Pombriant says -- especially as marketing and contact technologies reach greater levels of sophistication.

"I've often said social networking has potential to be a power tool for spam. If you think spam is bad now, imagine the plight of a person who has a lot of contacts and a big network whose contact information gets in the hands of a spammer.""

Obviously, the efforts that the social tools providers are taking with regard to security and privacy need to be maintained, and probably extended. There is some concern about the potential for identity spoofing (see recent post) which is a likely backdoor apporach for such scenarios.

I can almost imagine a Philip K Dick-esque sci fi thriller that hinges on a malefactor's identity theft of some highly connected and influential person, and the possible global disruption that ensue from this uber-networker's persona leaking out a rumor of, for example, impending monetary disaster in some southeast Asian nation.

Social networking terrorism? Once our social networks become encoded and channeled through software communication channels, they can be subverted.

The vendors will have to do more to ensure that the appropriate precautions -- in security, privacy, and ethical controls -- are in place before there is a horror story. And even one penetration -- one network stolen and used for social spim -- would echo in the media for years.

Just when I was sure that one more top ten predictions would drive me nuts, Dave Pollard offers a list that lines up so directly with my own rantings that I almost wish I wrote my own list.

"4. Blog functionality is a critical component of Social Networking, and Social Networking will transform blogging (and also transform the Internet, the media, the way we communicate, and even the evolution of business) - Social Networking Applications (recently voted Technology of the Year by Business 2.0 magazine) will go beyond just allowing you to publish what's on your mind and browse what's on other people's. They will allow you to map and manage your networks, the communities to which you belong, your strong and weak ties. They will evolve blogging from clumsy, mostly one-way communication to a rich, two-way seamless multi-media communications medium that will allow you to identify and connect simply and powerfully with people you want to know better (for personal, practical or business reasons). Build deep relationships. Collaborate on awesome projects. Find the next president."

Blog On!

Sonia Arrison writes in a piece called Is Friendster the New TIA? an interesting take on social networking: are we voluntarily offering up information on our interests, activities, and predilections that could allow the unscrupulous and/or security agencies to discern our every move?

"The idea of centralizing data to find patterns and links among people is no longer limited to governments or corporations. Individuals are now getting into the game with "social networking" web sites, the hottest thing in Silicon Valley.

Friendster, Ryze, Linked-in, Tribe.Net, Yafro, Plaxo, and Spoke are a networker's dream but a privacy-hawk's nightmare. These sites are aggregating information, provided by people themselves, that could prove almost as useful as a Total Information Awareness (TIA) program to government snoops."

She poses some interesting scenarios: FBI agents create false identities on Friendster ("Fraudsters") who gather data on the unsuspecting, either manually or through the use of Carnivore-like software programs.

I think it is just as likely -- along the same line of argument -- that the networks will become the scene where viral marketing groups of the big ad agencies try to push new trends and memes to the hip, connected, early adopters that are flocking there. Just as insidious, in a way.

Interesting piece at P2PNet.net by Annalee Newitz that points out that social networking sites are fairly lax in their security provisions, which makes it possible for your identity to be compromised. An interesting argument is made, suggesting that the reason behind identity spoofing is perhaps the value of a digital reputation, rather than something directly fungible, like your credit card number.

"What makes these attacks novel in the context of a social discovery site isn't how they are deployed, but why. What does an attacker have to gain by spoofing the identity of a member of Tribe or LinkedIn? What kinds of damage can be done by hacking into a LiveJournal account? The answer has to do with the public's growing dependence on social reputation systems. As we come closer to quantifying reputation, the identities we use in online communities begin to have real-world value. A top-ranked member of a network like eBay might be able to sell more items than her peers. A high-karma user on a site devoted to legal issues could have a tremendous influence over public policy. According to social networks analyst Clay Shirky, identity spoofing is possibly the greatest threat to social discovery networks. "When your reputation is valuable, it becomes worth exploiting. It makes a stolen identity a more valuable commodity.""