Andy Beal of webpronews writes about a recent conversation with Ask Jeeves’ vice president of products, Jim Lanzone. One element of that chat had to do with the theme of social search:
"[AB] Companies such as Eurekster are betting that social networking is the future of quality search engine results, what are your thoughts?So, Teoma is based on social networking theory, and it is building -- in essence -- a huge social network that allows Ask Jeeves to "identify the Web graph's expert hubs and authorities in real time." But no one opts in -- it's based on public information in blogs, articles, white papers, etc. And I, as an Ask Jeeve's user, don't have to state who I think are authoritative influences on my perspective of the world; Ask Jeeve's knows already.[JL] In terms of the social networking devices being developed by other companies, there are two types we're seeing get attention. The first is the kind being used by the likes of Friendster and Tribe.net, where social networks are being used to help people find a job or a gardener or a date. The potential problem with this is the "reverse network effect", whereby the more the network grows, the less useful the recommendations are by those in the network. For example, how much more useful is it to me, versus the yellow pages or a search engine, to be recommended a contractor by my friend's cousin's neighbor? Now imagine if that's how I'm finding a date for next Friday night?
Meanwhile, with something like Eurekster, the "social networking search engine", you may face the same problem. At what point are these results more useful than those given by our "normal" engine, which is already getting smarter and smarter about who and when it serves up certain results. So, in the end, we believe that social networking as defined and utilized by Teoma is the best of breed way to go in this area, and the most effective growth will be built on its foundation.
[AB] What makes Teoma the “best of breed”?
[JL] Our Teoma technology is predicated on social networking theory, as originally pursued by the Clever team at IBM in the mid-90's. Teoma was the first (and is still the only) search technology that can identify the Web graph's expert hubs and authorities in real time.
[AB] What is Teoma doing that the IBM team couldn’t do?
[JL] The Clever team identified that it was a better mousetrap for producing relevant search results, but thought it would take a server farm the size of the state of Texas to produce in real time. Teoma does it in a split second. Others questioned whether the technology would scale past 50 million document index. We're now at 2 billion. Remember that Teoma is a much younger technology than our competitors, so in some ways we're only now starting to see the power of it. And as it grows, social networking will continue to be at the heart of what makes Teoma different and special. "
Clearly the jury is out on the impact of social networking-based search, but activities by companies as diverse as Ask Jeeves, Eurekster, and Entopia (who I recently met with) suggest that the next generation of search performance is going to come from harnessing social network analysis in one way or another.
My February "Social Commentary" column has been published at Darwin Magazine, called Wicked (Good) Wikis.
"I recently attended a workshop on "Working Communities" that was developed and led by Full Circle Associates. The workshop experience was itself worthy of commentary, but the thing that I really came away with was the impact of a collaborative, social technology that we used prior to, during and now following the workshop itself: a Wiki.Note: the Wiki technology we used was from Socialtext, led my by buddy Ross Mayfield, who is one of the Many2Many bloggers here at Corante.Although I had been exposed to Wikis as a casual reader of websites like the Wikipedia (which is the largest, and perhaps most ambitious, Wiki in the world — attempting to capture encyclopedia entries on everything), I had not had the opportunity to work with a large group collaborating with the medium. My eyes have been opened; and in the jargon of my Boston boyhood, I now think "Wikis are wicked" (which means they are good)."
To read the full piece, click here
Bambi Francisco's email today from CBSMarketwatch digs into social networking applications, asking the inevitable:
"So, it seems that these social-networks are a natural extension of any the larger portals (those mentioned above as well as Microsoft's (MSFT) MSN, Time Warner's (TWX) AOL, and search engines, like Ask Jeeves (ASKJ)) as they move toward a more personalized search experience. The question is: When does Yahoo and MSN launch their social network, or some variation of it?"She goes on to mention a new deal announced by LinkedIn, a SNA vendor *not* competing with search engines, but in the job site market:
"Separately, LinkedIn, which competes with online job sites, such as Yahoo's HotJobs and Monster WorldWide (MNST), is expected to announce Tuesday that it's partnering with DirectEmployers Association to help the 125 companies that make up the group, including IBM (IBM) and Sprint (FON), to hire employees. LinkedIn, which has 140,000 LinkedIn users (including myself), says it's facilitated more than 15,000 referrals."Many observers argue that there is no market for SNA, per se; its just a feature, they say. But if so, it is such a major shift in how these services -- search and job sites, for example -- that it is potentially destablizing for the established market. LinkedIn could potentially force job site leaders to compete based on SNA-features, and capture serious market share in the meantime.
I recently stumbled across WiredReach, a new Dallas-based SNA start-up. I have only spent a breif period of time with the technology, which is a peer-to-peer based approach to social networking. But what I have seen, I like.
Among other now-familiar social networking features -- such as inviting friends to join the network (now kind of limited, since Ash Maurya, the founder, is limiting access to the beta), asking for introductions, and so on, WiredReach incorporates a full text instant messaging capability, and the service is presence enabled. Note in the screenshot above that Ash's pawn is red (offline) while mine is green (online). Also note the floating IM window.
I'd like to get a few fanatics involved in using the system, so if you are interested, let me know.
I read a well-balanced article on social networking software by Jane Black in BusinessWeek. No handwringing, no declaiming the end of Western civilization due to loose-moraled hipsters and free agent nation types swapping spit and job leads on the Internet. Does touch on the security flap-doodle that Orkut's now-revamped privacy policies caused a few weeks back.
Also mentioned a peer-to-peer social networking start-up that I had not encountered before:
"WiredReach, a Dallas startup, is trying a different approach. Its system uses peer-to-peer technology to keep users' data safe -- right on their own hard drive. Founder and CEO Ash Maurya says the danger in social networking is uploading such personal information to a centralized server that's "just one hack away" from being exposed. Peer-to-peer technology has no central server. Two users who know each other can search each other's hard drives for, say, a recruiter at IBM or a senior writer at BusinessWeek. If they find a match, they request an introduction. Says Maurya: "We're trying to simulate real-world networking without losing any confidentiality.""About which more later.
In a sign of the growing convergence between traditional media, new media (i.e., web-based blog technologies), and social networking, Tony Perkins announced this week that Always On now supports social networking: the so-called Zaibatsu.
There is no doubt that even fanatics like me will now start to limit participation in these services. I guess if someone has made an investment of time and energy into the Always On network to date, this turn of events will be seen as positive and beneficial. However, if Always On has been a sideline for you (as it has been for me), just another source of info, then having the SNA snap-on is unlikely to tip you in.
Pretty soon, the Wall Street Journal and Comcast will be offering SNA services threaded into their offerings. And why not? Its just a matter of what you affiliate with. WSJ has a good claim to corporate America's networks, and at the other extreme, Comcast serves nearly all the high tech households in my neighborhood. People's networks are not homogeneous, they are really discontinuous and heterogeneous. My neighbors are 'close' in proximity, and I would like to share certain forms of information with them ("Come to my barbeque this weekend") while other subnetworks should be getting different sorts of announcements from me ("See you at Instant Messaging Planet in Boston next month!).
I guess I am willing to join various disjoint services to manage different sorts of networks, especially if the services catered to me by providing differentiated offerings. Like if Comcast supported neighborhood related networking somehow, or Monster supporting job-search related activities.
But Zaibatsu looks like another Orkut -- there's no there there. If all we have is a way to make relationships explicit -- the most minimalistic social linkage -- I despair. It's too thin a broth.
Visible Path announced a series A funding of $3.7 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers at the recent Business Development Institute sponsored "Social Networks: What's Next?" seminar, held last week in New York City (see my piece on the conference). Ray Lane, general partner of KPCB, joins the board.
My September column in Darwin, "Cracking the Social Code," treated Visible Path's value proposition and technology at some length.
"I think VisiblePath has cracked the code for enterprise adoption of social networking technology, which gets down to business basics and leaves the social altruism aside. It's not just building a better Rolodex: it's keeping your network happy, and at the same time making your partners' wallets fatter when they throw you a lead."
For more details, see the Press Release.
From AP's Justin Pope, I learned that Lycos is repurposing its varied properties into a destination site for social networking:
"Terra Lycos [the 8th biggest brand on the web, by the way], trying to carve a niche in a Web portal realm dominated by its rivals, hopes an overhaul will make it a major player in the trendy Internet field of "social networking""The company is not launching a new service -- like Google's Orkut -- but is simply respinning what it has as a "community of communities." The have matchmaker.com and blog technologies. already.
Kind of a "ride the buzz" strategy, rather than a serioius investment in the technology side.
Sitting in Palo Alto at the offices of MoFo (Morrison & Foerster) for the Business Development Institute's Social Software: What's Next?" Lee Greenhouse (Greenhouse Associates) will be herding the cats down the beach, who are
Highlights:
Q: What is the landscape? What sort of companies are in the SNA space?
Generally split into consumer and enterprise flavors, with a broad spectrum of offerings in the consumer side, ranging from dating to politics.
Andrew: "Social networking is using the people you know to find the people you don't know."
Antony: In the enterprise side, we are putting the old enterprise processes around networking on steroids.
Andrew: The promise of the Internet was that everyone can publish. We have the ability to codify the map of people's relationships -- relationships that already exist, and are captured in enterprise databases.
Mark: Social networking gives us a way to send 'spammish' emails to our networks more efficiently than we have previously been doing.
Q: Why now? Why has SN taken off?
Andrew: Friendster took off really as a dating service. Today, everyone has a digital picture of themselves, so people can upload pictures. What's changed is technology and timing.
Adrian: What excites people about SN is that it is about people. That's one of the things driving it.
Antony: I define SN in the enterprise as using relationships to solve business problems. Like improving sales. Without that defined problem, I don't see SN doing anything. Visible Path doesn't build one large public community, we help our clients build their own network. We then help them to analyze their network, building a detailed relationship map, and then applying it. When we first looked at enterprises, the systems weren't in place, but now they are. We can analyze 90% of an individual's network from the assets available in the enterprise -- email, documents, and contact databases.
Q: What's your value proposition?
Anthony: Companies don't know what their networks are, so they don't know how much information they are not accessing or applying.
Q: Reid, what's going on at LinkedIn?
Reid: People have their own networks. Its a key asset of a professional. When I am considering hiring a senior exec for a company I always ask "who can you bring along as lieutenants?" When you link to people at LinkedIn, you can only get to those who are connected to you.
Lee: So, do social networks have to be directed toward some specific issue or purposes?
Adrian: We need to help people do something, solve some problem.
Reid: I am going to disagree. Contrast Friendster and LinkedIn. If you are inviting them into a dating scene, a mid career professional might freak out. But if you are inviting that person into a network for business, it is a different world. The "shape" of the network is very different. So people may belong to multiple networks.
Andrew: People know people once. Even though there may be different classifications for relationships. And people may belong to multiple networks.
Mark: We don't think of social networks just as people you know. People belong to affinity groups. We expect a big "people web" emerging -- like what is happening in blogworld. We expect that you'll have multiple identities, meeting with different folks for different purposes.
Lee: So in Tribe-speak, I will belong to different tribes?
Mark: You may want to get into a very tight network like LinkedIn, which will be a very valuable high investment activity. On the other hand, you may sell you car through a different service, which is totally loose.
Antony: I disagree. There are dozens of relationships between individuals. People's relationships are very context specific -- bad at hiring, good at selling. Relationships are more than links between people.
Lee: Does this mean we are going to have a limited number of networks?
Mark: No. It depends. We have to see if the interest keeps up, but there is the potential that the value continues. I can see a world where we want to control our identity. We may want to manage what people find out about us. If the want to buy my car, cool. But I may want to only allow certain sorts of people to learn other information about me. Potentially, standards may emerge to allow you to control information in a big way.
Lee: It turns out that those using dating sites are signed up with multiple sites. Today all these networks offer different functionality, and you don't know which one will be the biggest. There is a huge advantage in being involved with the biggest. I maintain that it is different with enterprises, but on the consumer side, there is a real likelihood that one will become big.
Mark: AOL destroyed Compuserve because they provided a name instead of a number for email.
Lee: The network effect shows up in IM, where now everyone doesn't want to switch to other services because of their buddy list.
Lee: Are you worried about the power of distribution? Google's launch of Orkut?
Adrian: We are very different companies. Ryze has been profitable, and
Lee: What's the SN business model?
Mark: My last company was an enterprise software play, and it took us over two years before we had completely settled our business model. I don't feel defensive that we don't have revenue yet. We believe that the exciting revenue model is increasing the revenue in classifed advertising. Someone who's looking for a car in SF will be more attractive to someone selling BMWs in SF.
Adrian: We have various fees for advanced features, ads, and promoting events, and we sell the right to create a network. We are planning to launch a new feature this year, which is private branded communities.
Antony: We are working with companies that have invested heavility in SFA, and we are helpling them leverage that investment. This is a proven model.
Reid: We are focused on a high level sort of interaction, such as people finding work or doing deals. We are thinking of google-like services.
Lee: [Analogy around IM]
Antony: The nature of the divided IM space is a problem, and that makes it difficult to build a business around IM.
Mark: Our investors were media firms, and they bought in on the classified ads spin.
Antony: We closed our first round today, Kleiner Perkins, and welcome Ray Lane to our board. They believe in our enterprise approach.
Lee; What about Monster and Match.com? They could add features and be in the market right?
Mark: Match.com is not growing membership, even though they claim to be growing their revenue stream. Why would anyone pay Match.com when you can do the same thing on Friendster, with more information available? If you were the CEO of Monster would you cut your price to zero to complete with LinkedIn?
Andrew: The Six Degrees idea was to make a layer that other services could tap into. The real fear is when eBay gets into this space, or Amazon? Or when car dealerships get into the space? Why won't people already in verticals have a dominant position in the future?
Audience Questions:
Fred Wilson: How hard is it to build an SNA? There are a bunch. Is there any intellectual property or IP protection?
Andrew: We spent millions and had 45 people, and what we did in years could be rolled out by two people working with open source compenents could build a rudimentary site in a few months. Thinking through the service and getting it right is what is hard. Re: IP -- SD had a patent which was auctioned off to some folks at this table. I wouldn't be surprised if this space gets ugly. Why haven't AOL and Microsoft gotten into the business. They have all the data in the IM networks -- hundreds of millions of contacts -- and could clearly get everyone to opt in.
Sunil: What about Orkut and Google?
Reid: The nature of what Google is doing is very different from what we are doing at LinkedIn. People may be conducting business there, but its much more oriented toward finding out how sexy someone is.
Antony: I think you have to either go broad or deep, or you're dead. Orkut may constrain people from going broad.
Andrew: You have to worry about Google because they do whatever they do so well.
Q: What about interoperability? Who will make that happen?
Mark: There is already FOAF, which is a public expression of friendship relationships. There will always be public and private worlds.
Q: Privacy issues?
Andrew: Mostly a perception issue.
Lee: Fodder for journalists?
Adrian: I disagree. People are concerned with privacy and the issues are real. We started Ryze wide open, but now we have added a privacy layer to step that down to two steps away or perhaps through membership in groups.
Antony: In the enterprise setting, your rolodex may be worth millions, so keeping that control is critical.
Q: How can I start a network for my business?
Adrian: We support brand ed networks, so that one way.
Antony: We say that building the network is easy, the hard part is deciding what business problems to solve. If you just build it, no one will come.
Bob Kohn: I am on the board of Borland. I have joined a bunch of networks, and I am getting spammed every where.
Reid: Internally we call this invitation spam. Some people send 3000 of these. Few of us -- even the most networked -- have that many close friends. We now support ignoring invitations. LinkedIn limits spam since you can only get something from your network.
Mark Lesnick: Customer lifespan is what?
Mark: On Tribe, there are two ways we are working that. People are starting tribes, so people have reasons for long term relationships and some people feel very strong affinity. We found that the Craig's List effect was interesting -- I bought my couch, found my aprartment, and my girlfriend there, I will use that service for life. But with Friendster, people say I think I am spending too much time there. So we took note of that.
Q: How are you dealing with the uptake of the activities involved in SN use.
Anthony: We are very aware that we need to integrate with what people use and do already. We are advocating an individually controlled system, so we maintain that the contacts added to the system are not just made public within the company.
Q: Some guy in Finland stated that since he has 500+ contacts, and therefore he is able to help me through his network. How can I judge since I can't see his contacts.
Reid: We have endrosements to confirm what the person's reputation. We plan other features to extend the bio info.
Q: Reputation management -- I am cautious about my reputation. What about negative feedback. How does the network self correct?
Reid: Today. we have 2 things: a public, presumably positive system. The second, is the system itself. So over time people build a retribution system, where they remember that this guy has sent me a bunch of junk. We can't publish the negatives for legal reasons, but obviously it still is a feedback system.
Antony: Report cards are a bad way of trying gto do this. When we have good analytics, we can simply organically change the strength of relationships based on good or bad results.
Bambi Francisco writes about Spoke Software's newly announced social search technology, and what she saw kind of freaked her out.
"Spoke, one of the rising social-networking upstarts which has raised more than $20 million in venture financing, is attempting to make the search process, or at least the searching-for-people process, more personalized and relevant.Spoke is harnessing public data about people, just like I might if I was considering hiring Bambi for a job. But the ease with which it can be done is unsetlling, just like the experience of seeing a Google map showing your home by simply providing your phone number.By organizing information based on social networks drawn from members' address books and the people they communicate with through e-mails (and instant messaging in the future, I'm told), Spoke improves upon the average search engine's results. That's the cool part.
On the other hand, the data it pulls together includes information about millions of people who are not members and suggests a dark underside to search precision.
For instance, I haven't joined the Spoke service, yet I became one of the 13 million searchable people in Spoke's public network.
My profile on Spoke included a resume, notes about me, and a list of people who may know how to contact me. "
This is a mild form of future shock.
New communication media are always disruptive, and are no respecters of the established order. The diffusion of email across the corporation spelled the end of middle management, and led to wholesale "rightsizing" of the enterprise. The emergence of the Internet led to the death of previous models of computing and communications. Social networking-based collaboration and communication technologies will upset other applecarts, and inevitably rewire etiquette and ethics as well.
Social networks exist in the world, and people's relatedness can be inferred from public information. I know that you sit on the board of company X, and therefore infer that you know Mike who is the CEO there. Spoke's is simply applying this logic to rank order search data.
The fact that computing power can be harnessed to accomplish this sort of inferencing in the large is what raises the hair on Bambi's neck. Yes, there is nothing stopping the uncrupulous from trying to use the power of this social inferencing to spam someone. (I am getting social spam daily, anyway, with or without social networking solutions to help, but at least with the social networking tools I can anonymously reject requests.)
But my stance is that the tools are not the issue: prosecute the spammers, create mechanisms to preclude email without proven identities, etc.
Meanwhile, I look forward to a better mechanism to sift through the 16,877 hits I can get associated with "Bambi" so I can actually get the information I need. And I promise not to spam you, Bambi.
A recent piece by Verne Kopytoff of the San Francisco Chronicle digs into the emptiness of social networking without purpose. If your networking activities are not serving an aim aside from gaming the system -- seeing who can be more connected, who has more fans, or whatever -- at some point the fun wears off. This algal bloom is gumming up the plumbing in social networking, and will lead to a hype bounce, when the anti-pundits start writing "I told you so" articles.
Kopytoff writes:
"But the question remains whether the Web sites can keep users interested beyond the initial few months. After users link up with all their friends and browse their profiles -- then what?"It's a question that many social networking companies are only now addressing. Some are planning to add new features for dating, job hunting and business networking, activities that are already taking place more informally on the Web sites."
The secret (is it a secret?) to supporting anything online is to a/ find an existing constituency that is underserved and b/ serve it with tools that augment what is already going on.
The recent froth over Urkut -- the Google SNA that provides very little support for anything other than making friends and sending messages -- is a good example of empty networking. There is no there, there.
Meanwhile the real value proposition for SNAs -- getting "work" done faster and better -- is being pushed to the back so that everyone can roll up the rugs to have a party.
I read in Microsoft Watch that several former Visio/Microsoft execs
"have banded together to form a new company that is developing social-networking software and Web services that will build on top of .Net and Microsoft's forthcoming Longhorn Windows operating system.I did a short stint consulting to Visio back in 1998 or 1997, and spoke at two of their conferences. I will try to track them down and find out what is going on.The new venture, The Graw Group, officially launched in October 2003. The principals behind Graw include Jeremy Jaech and Ted Johnson, the co-founders of Visio."
I had the opportunity to meet Amy Jo Kim this weekend (while attending the Working Communities workshop. Amy Jo is the author of Community Building on the Web, and her blog is Social Architect.
She related some experiences in developing social architectures, and in particular discussed the transtion away from place-centric online communities to a people-centric model. This is well captured in a recent post at her blog:
"What I see all around me now are networked social tools that have 'emergent purpose.' This is an old theme in new clothing -- the 'build it and they will come' belief that connecting people is STEP 1, and the purpose and business model for a cool online social tool will emerge over time. I saw a lot of companies fail as they followed this ethic - particularly those that created and marketed FREE tools & services built around chat, message boards and virtual worlds. The companies who made real money connecting people online -- Amazon, eBay, SOE (makers of Everquest) -- built their community infrastructure around a shared, meaningful activity other than pure socializing.I confess I was elated when she turned to me, prior to her presentation, and said "Aren't you Stowe Boyd? I love your writing." Yow!
Chris Allen has a long post -- Followup on Orkut -- that digs into the furor over at Google's Orkut social networking service. Chris, like Marc Canter and other very active users, has been placed in Orkut 'jail' -- locked out of his account -- and has received some interesting emails from the Orkut staff regarding his suggestions about the service:
"You are a bit annoying, and you seem to go about making things a better in the same way a child goes about crying to his mom because he didn't get his 4th lemon pop in a row."Touchy, eh?
Got email from the Orkut team:
"We took orkut.com offline for a while to build some new features and do some general tweaking. We hope you'll keep sending your ideas to us, because we want to make orkut great for you. That said, we may need to take orkut offline again for short periods to update it, so please bear with us if it's temporarily unavailable. Hopefully the changes will be worth the wait. We'll see you on orkut soon...Now that they've asked so nicely for me to send suggestions, I will have to write down a few dozen.stay beautiful,
orkut.com team"
Stefanie Olsen reported Orkut's rise and fall, and how hot the service had become:
"As an illustration of the exclusivity of Orkut, an invitation to join the network was sold off for $11 on eBay's auction site this week."
I alerted Stefanie to the service being turned off, so she nicely lifted some of my tamer observations about the turn of events:
"Stowe Boyd, an Orkut member and a technology consultant, suggested that the service had attracted too many people at once, overloading its capacity. "They had like 3 million page hits, so it may be that they just need to revamp the physical infrastructure," Boyd said.Which messaging system had led to mindless email broadcasts to the entire community, so I am sure that will be fixed before relaunch.Many people have put forward suggestions for changes to the network, "so I'm sure they are rethinking design," he added. Orkut offers a messaging system, among other features."
I was trackbacked by since1968, who points out that the Orkut mushroom cloud indicates a lot about Internet society:
"There are so many things to ponder with the rise of orkut (the death of the weekend, viral marketing, the pace at which language changes, etc.) but don't bother: why do I feel like we've been here before? Is this anything more than a high school clique driven by some clever technology and piggybacking on a resurgence of late-90s internet froth?Yes, the whole space is bubblicious, but don't let that fool you. There is real meat to social capital, and we are determined to get there.Maybe it's just sour grapes: I still haven't been invited to join."
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.
Like Liz and Clay at Many-to-Many, I have gotten a slew of friend invites for Orkut.
First Take
The interface seems primitive, and the questionaire is too involved for business purposes. Once again, the confusion that arises from lumping together the many different sorts of networks -- dating, business, culture, etc. -- and making all of us walk through the same antechamber.
The system doesn't have some of the niceties that are found in other solutions for expression and content development, but it is possible to create 'groups' and post bloggish entries associated with your profile. Looks like it has a long way to go.
The discovery by many that mass emailing is possible has led to -- guess what -- mass emailings about mass emailings. Until that settles down, the email system there will be useless, and we will all be deleting broadcasts with zero content.
Like Liz, I received an invitation to 'friend' with George Something, and then could not find George. Liz suspects the admins are deleting people and posts that suggest things are awry.
Starting to smell like an experiment going sideways.
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.
Socialtext today announced support for RSS for the company's Eventspace and Workspace products:
"Socialtext's unique combination of user-controlled email alerts and choice-based XML syndication enables Socialtext customers to improve the productivity of users by giving them greater control over their information flow. At a low cost, it also allows loosely coupled integration with other systems.The company plans to support Atom in the near term, as well.Socialtext Workspace and Eventspace customers can now enable their users to subscribe to weblogs using news aggregators and RSS."
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.Interesting hedge -- not a product of the company, but owned by Google..."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."
Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing got twigged to Eurekster, and experienced social networking backlash:
"I haven't played around with eurekster yet, and I mean no disrespect to whoever built the project. But if one more website asks me to "invite all of my friends," I swear I'm gonna fucking throw up. Invite your own damn friends, you website"Xeni was turned on to the service by Marc Canter, who did sign up, despite Xeni's nausea.
The folks at Cutter have dubbed me Cutter Consortium Consultant of the Month, a bald-faced marketing trick to get people interested in the newly published report "Social Tools: Ready for the Enterprise?" My interview is posted:
"Q: Tell us about the importance of swarm intelligence and "swarmth."Swarm intelligence is simply the observation that a group of people -- each operating without global understanding -- can collectively come up with smart solutions, even when, individually, they couldn't. In this view, the intelligence of the group is an emergent property of the social network that arises through group communication and collaboration. We all know that people's abilities and contributions are uneven: but in self-organizing societies, the members judge each other's contributions, and as a result, those who are judged to be better contributors build a reputation. In many social tools, this reputation is made tangible: in the Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) tech forum, for example it is called "karma." I like to call it "swarmth" -- a measure of social network value based on the collective judgment of your peers."
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
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).
In an article by Todd Inoue, I came across some interesting stats on Friendster:
"The website counts more than 2 million sign-ups in its easy-to-navigate matrix. According to Internet measuring firm Nielsen/NetRatings, Friendster logged 532,000 visitors in June, 675,000 in July and 961,000 in August. According to the Alexa rating service, it's already one of the Top 100 most visited English language sites on the web. (Match.com is at No. 23.)"Millions of people making friends!
I get a kick from the company hiding its address, laying low from all the people that want to petition for jobs at Friendster:
"There's no signage from the street, nor is Friendster listed as a tenant on the building map. Walk up to the assigned door, and it's just that, a big block of wood. The only indication you've arrived is a Friendster sign behind the front desk and a helpful person wearing a fleece jacket (due to a faulty air conditioner that day) who offers a cup of coffee.The spot is a Segway and Aeron chair-free zone. Scattered around the mostly spartan 1,600-square-foot headquarters are Desk Depot knockoffs positioned against bare beige walls. When Abrams seats down, it's in a chair he got for free.
He asks that I don't reveal the address; they just don't have enough help to sort through the potential employees who could and would stroll through the door. The 10-person staff moved into these quarters in July, and the company is already looking for a larger space."
I have been invited to present at a KM Cluster event in NYC, 26 March 2004. Deloitte is hosting the event at their Manhattan offices. My talk is entitled "Social Tools: Ready for the Enterprise," the same title that I used for a recent Cutter Consortium report I wrote. The event will be a full day, and John Maloney, who heads KM Cluster, will soon be posting more information about it.
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).
Ross offers a modest proposal to deal with comment spammers: those creeps who insert URLs in your blog that lead to porn or Viagra ads.
"So here's a solution for you. First, turn off comments. Second, do what Cory did and move your discussion to a Tribe (http://boingboing.tribe.net) [Cory notes in comments that his readers did this when they shut comments off because of spam]. This creates a social network-based whitelist for conversations. It raises the cost of commenting to registering with the service and agreeing to policies. It shifts the burden of enforcement to a third party.We really need a protocol of being admitted to the implicit community of readers after application to the author. Moving the community to Tribe.net does that, but the comments are then out of context. This is a failing of blogs, based on the lack of explicit social relationships.
New research by Martin Reuf of the Stanford Business School examines the factors contributing to innovation, and suggest spending less time with those you know well, and more time with those you know less well. The power of weak ties, again!
"Looking at entrepreneurs' social networks and their career histories to see what the connection is to innovation, Ruef concluded that the most creative entrepreneurs spend less time than average networking with business colleagues who are friends and more time networking with a diverse group that includes acquaintances and strangers. "Contrary to common assumptions," says Ruef, "the evidence suggests that in many cases strong social ties do not provide significant new information, so it helps not to be as embedded in them."Ruef has found that disparate information and its transmission are keys to innovation. "Weak ties" of acquaintanceship, of colleagues who are not friends, provide non-redundant information and contribute to innovation because they tend to serve as bridges between disconnected social groups," he says. "Weak ties allow for more experimentation in combining ideas from disparate sources and impose fewer demands for social conformity than do strong ties."
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..
David Weinberger writes about the increasingly prevalent practice of leaving 'social spam' in blog comments. He notes, unhappily, that the comments are often bland and inexact encouragement to the blog author, suitable for nearly any context:
"Frankly, I'd rather be spammed by someone touting penile enhancements than drown in innocuous platitudes.
Chirgwin won't relent, despite the following assessment of Plaxo's lawyer, as related by Scott Epstein of Plaxo:
"I spoke with our attorney, who has a good base of knowledge on anti-spam legislation. He reviewed this issue and found nothing in Australian law or the laws of any other jurisdiction that would make use of the Plaxo service a violation of anti-spam, privacy or any other applicable law.Again, Plaxo is a "carriage service" (in the parlance of the Australian law) that enables individuals to contact all or some of the other individuals in their address book to get updated contact information. Plaxo does not send out unsolicited e-mails on its own accord. It is true that the content of update requests includes a request for the recipient to join Plaxo and other information about Plaxo, but this is similar to the ad for Yahoo! that appears on the bottom of e-mails sent by Yahoo! users (like many other e-mail services)."
Chirgwin can't resist a parting comment or two:
"Without being too contentious, there is at least one difference between advertisements in Yahoo's free e-mails and messages sent through Plaxo: I have never had a Yahoo! E-mail in which the advertisement was personalised to the recipient."Huh? Plaxo is not pushing ads, it is attempting to get updating contact information on behalf of one of its users.
"As to readers who have e-mailed me saying that they found Plaxo useful, I guess I would reiterate my original concern: I simply can't devote my time to data entry for other people. The “backchannel” effect on someone like me could quickly become overwhelming; so I choose not to take part."Again, if you would simply register as a user, you wouldn't have to do any data entry.
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.Hmmm...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."
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.
Bambi Franscisco reports on Speed Dating being launched by Match.com
"With Online SpeedMatching, InterActiveCorp's Match.com members go to an electronic prescheduled SpeedMatching session on the Internet where they can participate in four to eight dates per session. The participants have a four-minute phone conversation with each date. During each conversation, a profile -- complete with age, location, a brief biography and photo of their date -- is displayed on their computer screen."
Real time matchmaking is here!
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 ShoeObviously, 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.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.""
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.
An interesting follow-up to the recent flap caused by Richard Chirgwin's article that suggested Plaxo would run afoul of Australian anti-spam laws. Scott Epstein, Plaxo's new head of marketing, commented on Chirgwin's piece:
"Your article implies that Plaxo is spam. Plaxo is a software program that users consciously and actively download. They use it to automate a process that people do manually everyday: exchange contact information. Like to Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook, Plaxo is a software application and service that people use to send emails. While Plaxo computers handle the mechanism of sending the emails on their behalf, Plaxo, the company, does not send emails to anyone.I had an email interchange with Chirgwin, in which he maintains that he is merely looking at Plaxo in the light of the Australian anti-spam law, but I believe there is no grounds for such an attitude, except Luddite anti-technology bias.Unlike spammers, Plaxo offers clearly identifiable sender information; has a opt-out policy that is prominently displayed and works; is registered with both TRUSTe and VeriSign; and strives to live up to painstakingly detailed privacy policies. Plaxo has also partnered with Cloudmark, a leading anti-spam software company to provide Plaxo users with additional options to fight spam.
Opting-out
Plaxo launched an opt-out policy earlier this year, which provides users multiple ways to opt-out of receiving Plaxo update requests. If you do not wish to receive Plaxo update requests from our users, you can go to the following URL and block all future emails: http://www.plaxo.com/opt-out.
In less than seven months, Plaxo has registered more than one million users and more than 15 million people have responded to their requests for updated ccontact information. It is a simple and secure way to make sure that all your information is correct and complete."
Chirgwin counters Epstein's comments by closing:
"The question which provoked the article - what's the standing of Plaxo messages under Australia's anti-spam legislation? - is, I think, still valid, so I look forward to continuing my dialogue with Mr Epstein."I guess this furor will not quietly die, and Plaxo will need to continue to take the high ground in the discussion.
I signed up for the beta of Eurekster, which uses a collaborative filtering approach to web searching, based on the searches of your 'friends' in the Eurekster network.
"What's Hot in Your Networkeurekster uses the six-degrees of separation concept to learn from your extended network of contacts and deliver you prioritised results based on the success and proximity of the searches they have done."
I can imagine that it is helpful to know "what's hot" in your network (a la Blogdex), and if your network is homogeneous (and hard-working in training the system) you will get better search results than keyword- or editorial-based solutions.
My problem is that my network is heterogeneous: really a collection of independent networks. As more and more of my networks are brought into Eurekster, the group will more and more approximate a random sample of people, and this will cancel out the social network effect. The answer is that I really need to be able to partition the network into discrete subnetworks: what are my social software buddies looking at today? What about my personal friends? What about people in the 20194 area? Until social networks attack this angle, we will be dealing with a very coarse-grained approximation for what is actually going on in social interactions.
In a piece in TelevisionWeek, Time Warner is reported to have "lost about 600,000 subscribers between September 2002 and September 2003."
Analysts believe that AOL is possibly for sale, no matter what Time Warner execs are saying:
"The real question becomes whether or not AOL is for sale. For the record, the company denies AOL is on the block. However, many analysts remain skeptical. "Sure, they would sell at the right price. But I don't believe the cash flow at the online unit is headed downward," commented Jordan Rohan, an influential analyst at Soundview Technologies. "2004 could be a good year for them."MSN buying AOL is on way to get interoperability between AIM and MSN, at least.What seems obvious is that the AOL service and many of its divisional components fit perfectly into the category of "nonstrategic assets," which Time Warner says it wants to unload. But the complications may outweigh the benefits, and at least for the moment, the AOL unit is still throwing off significant cash flow.
There are persistent reports that interested parties have been circling AOL, especially Barry Diller and his InterActiveCorp. and Microsoft and its MSN Internet service provider. Mr. Diller's IAC is said to be interested in the e-commerce applications, and MSN is eyeing AOL's 25 million U.S. online subscribers."
Good piece at Wired by Gary Wolf making the parallel between the Dean emergent democracy network and Isenberg's "Stupid Networks" concept.
Make the network stupid.[pointer from David Weinberger.]The Dean campaign is a network rather than an army, and that is one of its strengths. But it's a stupid network, and that's also a strength. Stupid is meant in the technical sense, defined by David Isenberg in his classic telephony paper, "The Rise of the Stupid Network." Isenberg advanced the principle that under conditions of uncertainty, a network should not be optimized for any set of uses presumed to be definitive. Instead, the network should be as simple as possible, with advanced functionality and intelligence moved out to its edges. For the Dean campaign, this means that hundreds of independent groups are organizing with very little direction from headquarters.
Dean's network may not be globally optimized toward getting him into office: there are likely to be hundreds or thousands of locally optimized purposes that partitions of the network dream up.
I had the chance to chat with Matt Hicks of eWeek for his 29 Dec column: Are Enterprises Ready for Social Networking?
"The hype around social networking is here and the products are ready to launch, but will enterprises be eager to adopt this new technology?That depends largely on how quickly early-adopter enterprises can begin demonstrating return on investment using the new software and services entering the market, analysts say. The first enterprise target is clear: sales and business-development organizations.
"There's no place more evident than in sales that who you know is more important than what you know," said Stowe Boyd, managing director of consulting company A Working Model, in Reston, Va.
Sales and business-development groups are heavy users of sales force automation systems, which already track ROI and deal flow metrics. Companies who first use social networking in a coordinated way should have little trouble tracking the impact that the technology has on the number of deals or time it takes to make a deal, Boyd said."
Fortune's Tech Skeptic makes his "Fearless Forecast for 2004" and parodies the hype surrounding social networking:
I really like the way that "gullible hipster wannabes" rolls off the tongue."Friendster, the leader of the social networking phenomenon, becomes withdrawn, angry, defensive, moody, and erratic, leading sites one degree away from Friendster -- Tribe.Net, LinkedIn, Craigslist -- stage an intervention. Friendster couldn't deal with its surging fame and became addicted to prescription painkillers it got from Rush Limbaugh when he signed up. And he had said that he was "just here to help." That enabling behavior meant Friendster never had to confront that it was never really interested in making new friends as it says on its profile. Its true desire had been to find "activity partners," if by activity you mean finding gullible young hipster wannabes to sign up for a thinly disguised dating service in the hopes of making money off of them later. The pressure to maintain the friendly illusion led it to spiral into decidedly non-friendly activities, making the gossip-page exploits of Britney Spears, Tara Reid, and Paris Hilton look like the ladies were attending ice cream socials. Friendster checks itself into the same retreat where Limbaugh sought help and returns to the Net five weeks later, blaming the media for wanting it to succeed too badly because it's different from the other dating sites."
John Perry Barlow begins blogging, and wonders how social networking tools might help connecting his many friends.
John Battelle comments on the possible confluence of social networks and blogs:
"I think it'd be cool if you could join a network of folks who read the same blog(s). I've always maintained that any good publishing effort understands and reflects its community - that it is both a mirror to the community members, and a window into that community for folks who are interested in joining or understanding that community. Conferences have always been a neat way for readers of a publication to meet each other, for example. Foo Camp was one of the first I've been to where "blog ecologies" ended up meeting FTF, and it was quite something to see how folks who'd been connected mainly by blogs ended up working together in real space.So think if you could "see" all the other people who read this site each day (and who opt-in to be seen, of course) - and invite them into a LinkedIn like network if you wished to. I wonder if that's in the cards for LinkedIn - to do vertical OEM stuff like that? Are there others working on stuff like this?"
WSJ article on Match.com's push beyond dating into social software:
"Users of Match.com now can opt to set up a "friends profile" in addition to their dating profiles. The friends profiles are searched separately from dating profiles.
Users can also chose to invite up to 50 acquaintances to become part of their Match.com community of friends. Those people get linked, so that users can see who each other's friends are."
Note: I hadn't looked at Match.com earlier, because I am not -- per se -- interested in dating sites. However, I was intrigued to see that Match.com supports an instant messaging system, Match.com Messenger (not to be confused with Match Messenger, which is a Jabber-based service), but I was surprised that it doesn't interoperate with any of the public networks. They also use MSN alerts as a means to notify you of "winks" that others send you when you aren't logged into Match.com.
Plaxo announced that is has surpassed 1,000,000 registered users of Plaxo Contacts in only 7 months of operation. In a phone call earlier this week with Rikk Carey, Plaxo VP of Engineering, I learned the company is adding 60,000 new users/week.
The recent interchange I had with Richard Chirwin, the author of yet-another article bashing Plaxo is an interesting contrast to the company's stratospheric growth in users. There seems to be a luddite reluctance to actually accept the utility of robot-like applications that perform tasks on our behalf, like Plaxo's "contact unmanagement" as I called it in a recent article.
The fact that Plaxo generates email to ask others to update their contact information is no different than me generating an email and sending it to someone, asking them to do so. Some detractors object to the fact that Plaxo email suggests that if they install the Plaxo software, then they would have contact updates automatically, without emails being sent, and suggest that presenting this information amounts to spam.
The zooming uptake of Plaxo is reminiscent of the adoption of IM in the enterprise, which led to all manner of ultimately useless hand-wringing, as well.
USATODAY.com piece on social networking has some interesting stats on the "stickiness" that social tools offer:
"Such beefed-up search technologies boost traffic on the sites -- and hold visitors' attention longer than traditional dating sites, says Nielsen/NetRatings. Friendster users spent nearly two hours on the site in October vs. 35 minutes for Yahoo Personals and 55 minutes for Match, Nielsen says."Those detractors that suggest that VCs are crazy for pouring millions into the social tools space without a complete understanding of where the money is going to come from should take note.
I got an email from AOL touting the Love.com dating service. This is strange because
Ephraim Schwartz writes that social networking is gaining adherents in the enterprise. Mentions ZeroDegrees and Spoke, as well as two companies new to me: ContactNetwork and Interface Software.
I can't seem to find ContactNetwork on the web, except in Schwartz' article; and none of the social software solutions I tried (ZeroDegrees, LinkSV, Ryze) yeilded a ContactNetwork contact. A pointer would be great.
Yet another wrong-headed Luddite attacking Plaxo as spam:
"When I receive “please update your details” messages from Plaxo users, I'm already inclined to hit the “delete” key. I'm not a data-entry clerk; I already type way too many words in a day, and the job of maintaining a database I don't own and get neither paid for nor thanked for rankles.I couldn't disagree with the author more. Plaxo is providing a simple to use service that automates the updating of contact information. In the US, 40% of business people change some aspect of their contact information every year, and if you have a reasonably large rolodex you find yourself making lots of updates, as well as discovering that your contacts are no longer reachable at the email address or phone number you have for them.There are, however, rather a lot of people who have downloaded the Plaxo toolbar, who are keeping their e-mail contact lists in a Plaxo disk rather than their own (foolish for reasons I'll get to in a minute), and who are letting Plaxo send the “please update” messages on their behalf.
Well: next year, the Spam Act 2003 will come into effect, and if I look at the message on one side and the legislation on the other, I suspect that Plaxo will could find its activities curtailed somewhat.
On the face of it, Plaxo seems to slide through in a loophole. I'm offended by the “obfuscated” address – the Plaxo message pretends to have been sent by someone I know, but in fact a look at the header identifies the real sender:
(I've removed some of the numbers for my own privacy...).
Well, it's not illegal. The bill clearly says that a message must identify the individual or organisation “who authorised the sending of the message”. Since Jim Bumbles-Bloggs authorised Plaxo to send the message, and Jim Bumbles-Bloggs is identified as the sender, the law is intact.
So far, anyhow."
Calling it spam because its email-based is simply wrong-headed. Would react the same way if a friend sent an email informing you that he was taking a new job, and here's his new email address?
I wrote a piece on Plaxo called "Contact Unmanagement" and I recommend that anyone interested in Plaxo and the issues involved read it.
David Hornik advances some closely reasoned arguments about conserving social capital, and the risks posed by social networking applications.
"Social capital is just that, "capital." If you aren't careful you can spend it all up. Sure, there are some relationships that will be more resistant to fatigue than most -- for example, I am sure that I can make a lot of introductions to my dad before he stops taking my calls. But some relationships are far more tenuous. If you have a good conversation with a potentially helpful business contact at a conference, he will probably take your call or read your email the first time you reconnect with him. But that relationship is pretty fragile and if your initial post-conference contact with him isn't at least mutually beneficial, that relationship will be spent before the second email. Even relatively strong relationships can be taxed if they are over-exercised. If I were to bother the same person for multiple introductions serving only my interests, even a good friend is going to get sick of hearing from me pretty quickly."
At the same time, social capital not used decays. The fellow at the conference -- if you don't contact him for some reason or other -- you are a few months later. Social capital needs to be used or it degrades, like food on the shelf.
While I agree that a new ethos needs to arise in the face of social networking technologies, that is really small potatoes. The real reason that social tools are viral is their capacity to uncover possible connections, opportunities to collaborate, and people with like interests that you simoply wouldn't have bumped into at Starbucks.
A fusion of digital photo sharing and IM, Picasa Hello is a free IM service designed around sharing photos.
The central idea is a 'film strip' -- a series of photos that have been displayed through interaction with others in the Hello network. Individual phots can be saved, as well as a folder of photos representing the current film strip.
Along with photo sharing and chat, there is a flavor of social networking in the product, through the 'introduce friend' feature. I presume that this is oriented toward dating.
Hello looks like a great way to share holiday photos with relatives far away. Picasa is offering a 15 day trial of the same-named Picasa digital image manager as well, which can be used in an integrated fashion with Hello.
Looks like Esther Dyson has been fiddling with the social networking products, and she likes LinkedIn best, although she has some reservations about getting requests to be friends:
"I am getting a lot of invitations from people I don't know. It would be great to have a button that says "See inviter's profile" that links directly from the confirm-or decline-invitation page.Also, on the invitations page, the service should include some advice: "Do not invite people who do not know you. If you are not sure, at least give them a hint of who you are ... how you met, etc. If you are not sure or that effort is too much work for a particular person, perhaps you do not know that person well enough."
My sense is that people are starting to invite everyone in their address book. That may goose statistics, but the key is the signal, not the noise. ANd, of course, too much noise will drown out the signal..."
Patti Anklam agrees with one of the basic arguments I advanced in my most recent Social Commentary column at Darwin:
"Stowe gives substance to my complaint in my blog about Spoke: you can't go inviting all your colleagues into multiple standalone social networking "services.""
The Promise and Pitfalls of Social Networking at Darwin:
"In an editorially schizophrenic show of ambivalence, Business 2.0's November issue lauds social networking — with mentions of offerings from companies like Linkin, Ryze, Friendster, Spoke and VisiblePath — as the best technology of 2003, while the magazine's lead article warns that the tech bubble is about to blow again. This juxtaposition of tech rise and fall has sparked a strange turn in the media discussion regarding social networking, specifically: Is the bubble around social networking about to burst?'
Spread in the Wall Street Journal today on the bubblicious world of social networking services, like Ryze, Friendster, at el. (NOte that the link won't work if you don't have WSJ access).
There is beau coup money streaming into the space, with firms like Friendster getting millions even while the financial equation hasn't been finally worked out. The theme seems to be "get folks signed up, and then upsell premium services." I buy the pitch, and I am looking forward to the premium services, when the social networks are put to work.
The article does not dig into digital reputation (whuffie, or swarmth, as I call it) and only touches on privacy glancingly. The hard part of getting networks to work is not really covered, here, but since this is really the money lenders convincing themselves to jump into the market, that figures.
I was having a conversation with Antony Bryden of Visible Path today, and one of the features of that company's social networking solution led to a joke. Because most solutions (like Ryze, Spoke, etc.) lead to a spam-like barrage of emails from users of the solution to potential buyers or contacts (although that's not how VisiblePath works), Antony suggested that someone will soon develop a service to block such contacts. Courtesy of Joi Ito, I see that Greg Story has parodied these solutions with Introvertster. LOL.
WSJ article this morning re: contact networking solutions,WSJ.com - Six Degrees of Exploitation? (the hyperlink won't work unless you have an online account with WSJ). Clay Shirky is quoted, saying that earlier versions of these solutions were too aggressive in forcing people to share info, basically "cracking people's heads open to see what's inside."
Mentions Spoke, Visible Path, but omits Plaxo, that I just wrote about at Knowledge Management magazine, a piece that should be published today.
Does a fairly good job of explaining how Visible Path can automatically determine how familiar you are with a contact:
"Visible Path's "Relationship Mining Engine," for example, considers a contact closer if the employee has the contact's cell-phone number as opposed to just an office number. It also checks to see if a contact regularly responds to the employee's e-mails -- a sign of strong links -- or just receives it. Names on an instant-messenger buddy list are automatically considered strong links. So are repeated face-to-face or telephone meetings that show up in a calendar."
Thanks to Rafe Needleman for a pointer to Spoke Software. The server is down today (perhaps because of the flood of traffic precipitated by Rafe's piece) but I intend to dig into the technology ASAP.
The company seems much more focussed that other competitors (like LinkedIn), working specifically around the sales/BD function. A good demo is available here (click the demo button).
I was working on my column for Darwin last week, and I dug up a piece I had written in mid 1999 about Abuzz BeeHive, a real-time expertise management system. The company was acquired by the New York Times while I was writing it. At any rate, the title was "Social Tools: Business Culture in the Post-Everything Economy" which was the first time I used the term, and I don't believe (but who can remember) that I was using a term I had seen elsewhere. Click here to view this issue of Message.
Here's the definition I offered:
"... a new category of software is emerging, software intended to augment social systems. Not to change the company inadvertantly, like email did, when the electronic analog of interoffice mail became something else, grew into something else by changing the way people communicated, and led a change in the structure of the company. No, this generation of software is intentional, designed from the start to guide human behaviour into new paths and patterns, to counter prevailing ways of interaction. I call these social tools: software intended to shape business culture."
At any rate, I am interested to see if this is the first use of the term. I will snoop around.
In my upcoming Darwin column (under my new byline, "Social Commentary") I introduce the term 'swarmth' to more clearly represent the concept of digital merit or reputation. The word is derived from the idea of "swarm intelligence" and is meant to be a better option than slashdot 'karma' or Corey Doctorow's 'whuffie.'
"The emergence of social order from emergent properties of merit-based social interaction is a potent self-organizing principle, and is likely to form the foundation of all adaptive social tools in the future. This principle has been named many times: in Slashdot it is called ‘karma’, and Corey Doctorow called it ‘whuffie’ (in his science fiction work, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). I favor the term ‘swarmth’ because it gets at the heart of what is happening – swarm intelligence leading to filtering out the dumb, and intelligence rising to the top."Just remember, you heard it here first!
Reading an interview of Eric Bonabeau (Icosystems founder and CTO) by Derrick Story regarding Bonabeau research into social insects, and the applicability of swarm intelligence to human concerns. (Pointer from Dan Williams).
A great comment from Bonabeau regarding the reluctance of business management to accept the notion of bottom-up, emergent solutions to thorny problems:
"Managers would rather live with a problem they can't solve than with a solution they don't fully understand or control."
I received a press release from Erick Mott, CEO of Creator Connection, with the slug "Secure, Internet workspaces for individuals and groups who want to use e-mail and the Web to communicate, get organized, and complete projects."
I was intrigued enough to go take a look, and fiddle with the hosted service. Here's a few observations, and recommendations for Creator Connection and possible users.
Trying out the service requires signing up, and paying the first month's fees ($19.95 monthly through paypal) although there is a 30 day money back guarantee. This is the opposite of how some other competitors (like Groove, to name just one) are set up. eRoom doesn't offer free kick the tires anymore, either, so maybe Erick is just going with the post-dot-bomb flow.
I had a few minor snags, now rectified, which Erick believes were caused by his personally (and wrongly) configuring my space. His tech folks fixed that, and it seems to work as advertised.
Creatorbase is both a community of individual users, and a place to create project-oriented workspaces. You can in principle become involved in the community of people, although at the moment there aren't very many people in the community, and try as I might I never could figure out how to search for people with specific interests. All I was able to figure out was how to search for users by name -- not very helpful. Presumably, this social tool aspect of the service will be amplified in the future.
Regarding the service as a project workspace system, there seems to be a great deal of (useful) emphasis on access controls -- very sophisticated approach to manage policies in groups and subgroups -- that makes the system attractive to complex projects. Consider the case where you would like to have a project management team within a larger project team with more access rights than the group as a whole. Likewise, there is finegrained control of documents managed within the system, including provisions for locking docs, checking them out via email, versioning, and a routing for document approval -- very cool.
Another feature is offline folder synchronization -- which seems to work (I think) but also requires manually synching when connected. This will support offline access to project information. I haven't extensively fiddled with it -- synching, disconnecting, modifying content, reconnecting, attempting to synch -- but it is in principle supported.
Calendars and task objects are supported, although with only a limited synch capability for the calendar entries for Outlook and none for tasks.
Creatorbase seems to support three flavors of unrelated user information -- profiles (the information that subscribers enter into the system), contacts (which are like Outlook contacts), and users (people invited to join groups). These may interrelate in some way, but I don't understand how, which made any use of these types of information confusing to me (but then again, I'm easily confused).
The folder metaphor is extensively exploited -- perhaps too extensively -- in the Creatorbase UI. Nesting of folders inside of folders is fine as a technique for partitioning, but Creatorbase lacks a top level status "dashboard" associated with projects or subprojects. There is a so-called "dashboard" but it is really just a folder of links to other information, and can't be presented like a project "dashboard". My bet is that use of the system will require way too much moving up and down in the folder hierarchy. I got lost several times. The solution may be to provide a different sort of navigation and view management, like a Explorer-like folder widget, and something like Lotus Notes "views" so that subordinate information (such as the postings in a discussion folder, or the tasks in a task folder) can be presented as a scrollable list of records at a higher level in the folder hierarchy. This would allow real dashboards to be created, and would minimize up and down movement.
There is no way to use Creatorbase as currently configured to support large online communities with anonymous users. Erick states, in fairness, that his service is not targeting that need. But it seems a shame to me that this limitation has been imposed. I recommend that the company consider creating a special class of user, with very limited acces rights -- namely the ability to read various docs and information, and the ability to create (moderated) discussion entries -- and then allow open access to public groups. Not only does this open up a larger market for Creatorbase, it would create a viral form of marketing, since community creators could simply post the URL to public communities on other websites, or in emails, and avoid the pain of actually registering casual users. Think it over, Erick.
Creatorbase looks to be an affordable solution considering its rich content management capabilities. $19.95/month allows you to invite up to 50 users to participate in multiple projects. For the SOHO or small business market, this is a true bargain. Creator Connection has a way to go on the UI, but a few new features would certainly remove my concerns in that regard. And the notion of integrating both project workspaces and social tool-style community interaction is a great idea, full of promise.
