Technology As Innovator

Social Networking is definitely fun, but some players are feeling lost

Haven’t even experienced Social Networking fatigue…

It is predicted that Social Networking will reach its peak in around 2009 before experiencing gradual decline.

2 years is too far away, at least to an average user. Why not have all the fun today?

The truth is, I am really enjoying Facebook and all it’s got: relationship-centric network, mature core functionalities, rich applications, nice gifts, intuitive design…

Mini-feed is also a great idea! Whale done, Mark! With it I can explore what my friends have just been doing and so can they. A great way to know more about other people.

…but I just realized one important piece is missing

You can explore what your friends do daily on Facebook. Very good already…

Consider it more deeply, have you identified what are missing here?

You don’t know what your friends do in real life. Furthermore, you don’t know what they THINK!

Knowing one’s activities on one platform is great, but would it sometimes drive you to the assumption that you know what others are doing and thus spend less time interacting with them via more traditional but human way or reading what they have to write?

How do people express their ideas? Via what they have to write down (Blog!), or take photos on (Photoblog!), or produce video clip for (Vidlog!). Less likely via sets of pre-designed virtual gifts

No, I don’t mean that gifts don’t represent the hearts. I still treasure each and every gift my friends have been giving me, but I’d appreciate it more if they simply write in their own words or post their own design.

Because we’ve been bringing content to Social Networks…

I have emphasized many times that Social Networking is totally different from Blogging. However, due to the two facts that they are born so close to each other and that several sites offer both simultaneously such as Live Spaces or Yahoo! 360, the two are often mistaken to have to be together.

Let’s, for now, consider them cousins anyway. Who should follow whom?

It happens all the time that Blogging has to follow Social Networking, mainly because:

• The number of people ready to send pre-defined gifts outcrowds the number of those willing to write about what they think
• The inertia to connect with quick messages outdoes the urge to share well-thought ideas
• Social Networking activities are less time-consuming and less effort-consuming so they are done more frequently within the day. On the contrary, Writing takes time and efforts and Reading is usually done for once. In comparison, users visit Social Networking sites much more often than they do Blogs. “More times of visits” makes the impression of “being bigger”. Smaller ones always have to follow bigger ones don’t they?
• More times of visits per day means more ads generated and higher click-through rates. Subsequently, more revenues for site owners and more investments are expected.

User-generated contents, if applicable, may be integrated into Social Networking profiles via RSS and/or addons. Correct me if I’m wrong, though it takes much more time and efforts to write posts, the section containing these posts is not the center of the majority of Social Networking profiles, and is often depressed by the higher density of other quicker and painless activities.

…but why not the other way around?

After following me down here, is there any reason you can think of to do the other way around, which means to bring Social Networking functionalities to Blogs?

Shaking head?

What’s the point?

Any profits doing so?

I’m answering this question: Yes! There are.

Those serious about publishing their own content will not be hindered by limitations. The will to write will push the authors to overcome the (possible) difficulties.

How the world floats

We’ll see how people do the hard job of bringing Social Networking to Blogs.

MyBlogLog: more than merely $222 per blog

MyBlogLog builds communities around blogs and provides bloggers the ability to be updated of activities of their connections. Activities here are content-centric: read and comment.

The recent $10 million acquisition by Yahoo! has raised interests in MyBlogLog. MyBlogLog reports 45,000 registered blogs. A simple math gives us the price of each: $222. An innocent question comes following: will Yahoo!’s ads cover this cost?

Come on! Don’t pretend to be that naive. An acquisition doesn’t necessarily offer tangible benefits today or even next year, but the truth is that the concept and foundation of the seller then becomes more powerful in the strong hand of the buyer.

Acquiring MyBlogLog belongs to a grand strategy of Yahoo!. “MyBlogLog - a Yahoo! service” will not generate handsome profits alone, but will do so greatly when the platform is integrated with other legacy Yahoo! services such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Mash, Yahoo! Blog platform.

I am bringing networks to my blog with MyBlogLog.

DiSo: what should always have been

Distributed Social Networking is the next ambition of Open Web community. It brings

Visualize this:

• All things are done on your site without having to push your content to a small box in your Social Networking profiles
• You can add other bloggers as friends instead of simply putting them in your blogroll
• You can offer people your RSS feeds
• You can see your connections’ updates such as: Tai reads ‘Kafka on the shore Review’ on Lisa’s blog in 19/12/2007
• You have your status on your blog
• You see and can choose to pose list of recent readers of your blog
• You can send friend requests to other bloggers
• All things are done on your site. No tight boxes in other places

What does this mean? It means your content is the center of your site. What takes the most of your time and efforts deserves meritorious position.

How does it sound?

How do you feel about its future?

I know you care, so please just share…

CyVee cares about security of information by providing security options and regularly reminding its users of setting security issues. This is what I applaud.

However, this concern of security conflicts with its Account levels.

Currently CyVee offers 3 levels of account: Personal, PersonalPlus and Premium. Details can be viewed here

To upgrade to PersonalPlus for free, user needs to complete 100% profile. I have filled in most information about my portfolio and career, and I am very cautious about these fields:

1. Birthday in Personal Information
2. Email in Contact Information
3. Cellphone in Contact Information

I eventually decided to fill in Email field with a little tweak so as only human can get it correctly, and left the other 2 blank. Since I leave 2 fields out, my profile is 60% complete, which means I am not able to upgrade my account to PersonalPlus.

So in order to upgrade the account, one has to violate basic security practice by revealing his/her crucial information.

My suggestions

1. Provide built-in email image-generator like that of Facebook
2. Make these 3 fields non-required

Thanks,

Tai Tran

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

I don’t have a lot of detail from Google, but I’ve heard from several executives that this is their plan. When I talked recently with Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.” And when I pressed him about the relationship between the social aspects of iGoogle and Gmail versus Orkut or some other social network, he said, “It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”

Brad Garlinghouse, who runs the communication and community products for Yahoo, was a lot more forthcoming. He didn’t-have dates or specific product details either. But he did say that Yahoo was working on what he called “Inbox 2.0.”

This has several features. First, the e-mail service is made more personal because it displays messages more prominently from people who are more important to you. Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her.

“The inbox you have today is based on what people send you, not what you want to see,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “We can say, here are the messages from the people you care about most.

Yahoo Mail will also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up.

“The exciting part is that a lot of this information already exists on our network, but it’s dormant,” Mr. Garlinghouse said.

What Yahoo is missing in this vision is a personal profile, where users express their interests and personality to others. Yahoo, of course, has had many different takes on this over the years: its member directory, Geocities, Yahoo 360. It recently started Yahoo Mash. But none of these is quite right, Mr. Garlinghouse said. Mash is simply an experiment, not a product being readied for mass promotion.

There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0, he said. For people who use a lot of Yahoo services, this profile could be quite rich even at the beginning, as it can draw on activity on Yahoo Music, Yahoo Shopping and so on.

“If I get an e-mail from Saul Hansell, I should be able to click on his name and see his profile,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “The profile page is where you can expose what you want people to know about you.

In this vision, people have two pages: a profile they show to others and a personal page on which they see information from their friends as well as anything else they want, like weather or headlines. That’s different from MySpace, which combines all this into one page.

Already My Yahoo and iGoogle are increasingly collections of widgets that hold content and applications from multiple sources, some of them already social, like e-mail and feeds from social sites like Flickr. But much more is coming.

This approach has a lot of potential and a few pitfalls. To start with, everyone who joins Facebook understands that what they do on the site is about sharing information with friends and sometimes strangers. People who use Yahoo Mail, or just exchange messages with someone using a Yahoo Mail account, have no such expectations. So the company will have to be very careful in how it explains what it is doing and ask for permission in the right places.

“This isn’t a separate product,” Mr. Garlinghouse said. “This is an integration that has to be seamless to the user.”

What’s more, running social networks is like starting nightclubs. You need music and beer, of course, and some hard-to describe magic that draws people to the club. Yahoo and Google are so big that the most they could aspire to would be to create the online equivalent of a crowded bar at a train station, rather than a club for a particular sort of person.

But since Yahoo and Google already have hundreds of millions of people visiting each month, it may well be that they can get a fair number to stop and chat.

Saul Hansell, BITS blog, New York Times

Comments

A good move. Every social networking site now offers private messaging service. Their features are very limited and more importantly, in separated sites.

Net users still depend a lot on their primary mailboxes for the mainstream messages.

Delivering social networking into the mailbox is just so fantastic natural: bring the outer layers into the core.

As for personalized homepages, it is not a big surprise, as with a few content wrapper tweaks, I can make a netvibes page a integrated social networking space now. This is an example:

click the image