Earlier today I commented on a post by Confused of Calcutta's J P Rangaswami (see
here for my earlier post) on the difficulties regarding the diffusion of new technologies (and by extension, ideas) and things to look for to predict likely outcomes.
I also wanted to address one of the issues brought up, but didn't have time this afternoon, so here it is now. He noted:
I can remember a time when people thought social media, software and networks were a complete waste of time. When Facebookers were fools, Twitterers were twits, when even blogs and wikis and IM were viewed with deep suspicion, when everyone thought that the people who were using them…..were wasting time. You know something? It wasn’t that long ago. Maybe it’s still happening now.
(In his post, he had noted resistance to the internet, email, etc and other newfangled things as well)
Now, what I was going to do was reflect on the differences between different types of social media (Twitter vs Facebook for example) and note that they add very different amounts of value, and thus their outcomes will probably be very different. It is my hypothesis that Twitter like services are actually far more valuable - in the medium term - than Facebook type services, for example.
This post from Nick Carr fortuitously popped into my reader in the interim, and it speaks to the subject quite well - re the value in Facebook etc, Nick notes Google's thoughts:
Cofounder Sergey Brin was particularly blunt about the problem: “We have a huge amount of social networking inventory, including the MySpace relationship. I don’t think we have the killer best way to monetize social networks yet. We are running a lot of experiments and we have had some significant improvements. But some of the things we were counting on in Q4 didn’t pan out. There were some disappointments there.”
If Google, News Corp., and MySpace are struggling to monetize social network traffic, one can only imagine the challenges facing Facebook, a much smaller company with less traffic, fewer resources, and, in general, a clientele more resistant to commercialization than MySpace's. In this light, Beacon seems less like a folly than like a deliberate act of risk-taking, if not of desperation.
Now, to my hypothesis.
We here tend to look at Social Nets on 3 main axes, based on a combination of (initially mainly) empirical and (increasingly) data driven research. These axes are:
- synchronous/ asynchronous,
- creation vs aggregation of content, and
- open vs closed.
The hypothesis is that the most defensible value is created by synchronous, high content creation, open networks. Synchronous because real time communication is what humans cleave to, creative because ultimately in a multichannel world aggregation is easier to replicate, and open because you can touch more people more of the time.
It also worth looking at the raison d'etre of the SocNet (the "Social Object" of the "Social Graph" to use the most current jargon) and understand if its extrinsic (ie the net forms around a reason to talk, like telephony), or if its intrinsic (ie the net forms around a niche like porn, fishing, local affairs etc). Our hypothesis is that the least valuable is "weak intrinsic" ie the networks can't easily be bent to your social objective, but doesn't have strong ones of its own.
For these reasons we'd hypothesize that for example Flickr is less valuable than Last.fm, as Last.fm is creating real content (music metadata) in synchronous mode, and if we look at "social objects", music is a much more valuable one (market size).
Under these same assumptions, Twitter and similar UM services should create more long term value than closed Social Nets as they are more synchronous, more creative content-wise (in the broadest sense*), more open (ie multi-media) and are fairly exogenous compared to say Facebook.
Facebook faces the classic "what do you do after you've said hello" (and thrown a few sheep, poked a few people, been a zombie etc) issue. There's no really compelling long term "social object" - its not flexible enough to coalesce around a subject (like watching TV with friends), nor is it focussed like say a Yahoo group on a niche subject, and it is poor at synchronous comms. MySpace has started to coalesce around music, but Facebook has not as yet found a deep "social objective", and runs the risk of being dis-aggregated by synchronous chat on the one hand, and niche "social object" plays on the other.
Although both are social networks, in Telco terms Twitter is Unified Messaging in embryo, Facebook is the White (and now Yellow?) pages with pictures. There is an order of magnitude difference in value to the user. Facebook will be on the NewTelco's directory extranet, Twitter will be the NewTelco.
* I'd be the first to say its ariver of drivel, but the point is that it does what people want, on the media they want, at the time they want.
