Tag Archives: facebook

Achieving Ubiquity with Social Networks

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If Facebook wants to be the king of hill, they’re going about it the wrong way. The number of useless apps that cram my Facebook feeds with useless “top friend invites” and “super hugs” is just too much. Those of us who would prefer a more serious social network tool would prefer the closed, no-frills approach of something like a LinkedIn, which doesn’t allow “apps” to be added, and tries valiantly to keep nuisances to a minimum.

Still, LinkedIn is for business-oriented users, and will never have the flexibility or wide-audience draw required to make a ubiquitous, dominant social network. People go to LinkedIn because because of its tight focus, and, in many cases, that’s why people avoid LinkedIn as well.  And in the end, tools like LinkedIn won’t suffice to help salespeople, because it’s mostly sales people than inhabit its garden (let’s face it).

Buying and selling aside, I’ve been doing a ton of thinking about social networking lately, because I was charged with creating a social network for a company in the media business. This social network is geared around a specific pastime of American culture–a vertical subject area too narrow for a Facebook to be excellent at.  What’s more, this social network wouldn’t be a good extension of a large publisher or broadcaster already involved in this pastime, because traditional media is bent on subcription fees and a lack of openness that discourages adoption.

So there’s a specific role for culture-driven social networks, things geared around video (like YouTube), sports, and music, though none of these verticals has been dominated by a single player, except for video probably. What’s needed is a social network infrastructure that allows many enrollment-based sites to be used with a common access credential–that’s right, a single sign-on for many social networks.

Google’ OpenSocial offers some of this thinking, but adoption has been laggard. Another example is Gravitars, which allow a common avatar picture across many blogs. Gravatars is supported by WordPress and Typepad, among others.

The challenge to seeing a single sign-on implemented across the medium is that the players who are big enough to make it happen (Facebook and MySpace, make no mistake) won’t do it, because they’ve gone into revenue-sucking mode.  So time will tell.

Cell-phones, not PCs, ARE the user conduits for social networks

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Well over a year ago, I wrote in this post:

Cell phones are going to become the dominant means of social networking. They’re already the best tool for it and the only reason PCs are dominant in the social net arena is because PCs have always been OPEN ENOUGH to participate social nets in a meaningful way. Cell phones haven’t been. Today I’m thinking about the nexus of mobility, identity management, and social networking.

So my point then was the, eventually, when a cell phone with enough functionality and usability finally shows up, users at large will fall into preferring cell phones over PCs for social networking over the web.  This is a point that didn’t get enough attention until iPhone 2.0 showed up last Friday. Now, it seems the web is abuzz about the potential of cell phones and social networks. Here’s a snippet from ZDNet’s Jennifer Leggio:

Think about it. Two of the big iPhone application announcements centered on location-based social networking sites Loopt and Whrrl. Both allow users to determine the locations of their friends and both provide microblogging and hyperlocal reviews, all using a GPS-powered application.

Jennifer goes on to say that social giants MySpace and Facebook have an advantage over upstarts like Loopt and Whrrl because, well they’re already giants. Touche. But MySpace is an incredibly stupid company with an incredibly poor base of core technology.  So, if social nets on cell phones are going to thrive in a lasting, meaningful way, my money’s on Facebook.