Archive for the 'social networks' Category

MySpace launched Development Platform

Published by Rytis Sileika on February 5, 2008 in news and social networks. 4 Comments

Keeping up with the “I post what you post, you post what I post” paradigm, I feel obliged to inform you that MySpace has launched their development platform which is based on OpenSocial API.

As opposed to Facebook, MySpace are going to have two or so month lead in period, so to allow fair play for all developers. Until that moment has passed no application is allowed to have more than ten or so installs.

A little bit worrying comment is this:

As for OpenSocial compatibility, company representatives say that 90% of MySpace’s platform aligns with the OpenSocial specification, meaning that OpenSocial developers will have to do a little bit of reengineering to get their applications to work.

What are the 10% delta we’ll soon to find out. I have to admit that I don’t yet have MySpace account, which is a shame. So first thing on today’s agenda is get myself an account and start playing with the platform.

Facebook platform vs Google PR

Published by Alexey Gabsatarov on December 12, 2007 in social networks. 0 Comments

In social networks we do not waste time - half a year in battle gets you a veteran’s badge.

Facebook has introduced it’s open platfrom about 6 months ago. Since than more that 70,000 developers lined up under its flags. About a month ago Google introduced its OpenSocial that is a direct competitor with Facebook’s platfrom. Small company with a lot of users an developers against a big company with not so many users and no developers. The stage is set.

The biggest threat to Facebook application platfrom and applications running on it is the Facebook itself. Or is it a benefit? Anyway, Facebook is a Microsoft of social networks. As long as people are on Facebook (willing to use Windows), applications are fine (application.exe are fine).
Google OpenSocial is a … no, it is not a Mac. It’s Linux. Open ( it’s even called open! ), container independent, not-so-evil as proprietary competitors. A lot of hype around it, a lot of flag waving and so on. But not so many real users and certainly not so many developers. But a lot of quality PR.

Classical example. Everyone will get a market share and probably Google will eventually get it all as Google usually do. But today Facebook and Bebo broke the rules of the game. Facebook licensed its platform to be used on other social network sites.

Maybe Facebook is not like Microsoft after all?

A brief history of search

Published by Alexey Gabsatarov on December 9, 2007 in search and social networks. 2 Comments

Network information search has a short but exciting history. Let’s look at some trendsetters and heroes of search and try to see where this whole thing is going.

1) 1990 - Archie . Created by a few students at McGuill University in Montreal and designed to search for scientific documents. Archie was originally a local tool that grew to become network services based on FTP protocol. It has a trawler, index database and a search interface. Important limitation - it could only search for document titles.
Actually, you can still check it out. There is one that takes your search query and returns the list of results via e-mail. Neat!

[Archie picture]

Continue reading ‘A brief history of search’

It’s going to be a good year for the Social Web!

Published by Alexey Gabsatarov on December 8, 2007 in social networks. 0 Comments

Promises Plaxo Chief Platfrom Architect Joseph Smarr. Plaxo is having an exciting romance with OpenSocial, boasting an impressive rise in connections number since OpenSocial introduction on 31st of October.

Plaxo Open Social

This is of course is pure announcement hype since non of OpenSocial partners has managed to produce any significant value to their users.Not yet that is.

How much is a social network user worth?

Published by Alexey Gabsatarov on December 5, 2007 in social networks. 4 Comments

Or put differently, what value will one user bring to a social network itself or to a third-party application running on a social network platfrom?

Take Facebook – Adonomics evaluation renders an active user value at $270. This is how much value user brings to Facebook itself.

It is a bit more difficult with third-party applications running on social network platform. I have seen different views generally ranging from $0.30 to $1.

What do you think?

Social networks = social politics?…

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 27, 2007 in social networks. 1 Comment

Yesterday Facebook and ABC announced a partnership to bring political coverage to Facebook:

ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.

This partnership is primarily focusing on political news, but that alone wouldn’t be enough for Facebook users, so ABC and Facebook jointly sponsoring and organising Democratic and Republican debates in New Hampshire.

Now, this may look as a partnership to bring massive news (political) source into one of the most popular online social network, but is that it? If you think about it, Facebook has 57million active users, with 50% of them logging in to Facebook each day and spending at least 20 minutes on the site. There’s groups, there’s polls, there’s people chatting, there’s custom applications… And you bring politics on top of that.

I see at least two immediate areas of influence:

  • Attempt for form the political view. This is obvious one, this has been happpening for ages with the help of mass media, and social networking sites are just another type of mass media.
  • Completely opposite reaction. Most of Facebook users are in US, but yet this is international community. Given that, any political even will be analysed and will get different opinions regardless the government will. Now, add social groups in to the equation and you ultimately might end up with more objective voters…

I guess it’s really hard to predict where this is all going, but definitely it is going to be the new way of doing politics.

Now you have to thank Alexey, who installed the polls things, and here’s a question for you:

What will the direction of political influence be?

View Results

Loading ... Loading …

Battle royal

Published by Alexey Gabsatarov on November 26, 2007 in enterprise and social networks. 0 Comments

Beware, early social adopters! The giants are finally awake and are closing on each other on the social arena.

Google with OpenSocial, Microsoft with Cloud OS and IBM with Lotus Connections are exploring the domain from different angles but unavoidably arrive at the same point.

It is interesting that new Microsoft visionary Ray Ozzie who outlined a major change in company’s direction, is the Lotus Notes original creator. Lotus was later purchased by IBM and is being transformed into IBM social enterprise product Lotus Connections. It is a small world.

And finally a little spot the differences game. Social enterprise from Microsoft and IBM.
Presentations are taken via excellent LotusConnectionBlog.

Facebook poketology

Published by Alexey Gabsatarov on November 26, 2007 in social networks. 2 Comments

I have to admit I am fascinated by facebook poke. And for the very simple reason – poke is a very social thing that did not and does not exist outside of social network context.

Since poking developed inside facebook, it is important to understand mechanisms behind poke to understand how social network works.

When an individual joins the group, it has two basic ways to get around unfamiliar environment – “trial and error” and “imitation”.

Trial and error treats the group as a part of the environment and explores it from the outside. Individual learns by acting and measuring subjective feedback from the action.
Imitation is much more powerful and robust as a social interaction. User acknowledges being part of the group and trusts the group. Instead of spending a lot of effort to establish what is socially acceptable using trial and error, users start imitating other users. After all, we are natural born imitators – why don’t we do what we do best?

In every dynamic group there will be still a fair amount of trial and errors and most successful attempts will set new trends. But there is no truly social interaction and there is no truly social network without imitation.

Let’s take poke. After a new user joins facebook and acquires a few facebook friends, she will be poked. Outside of facebook being poked (whatever the equivalent might be) by a complete stranger is at least confusing. Inside facebook one quickly learns that poking is normal and acceptable thing. If poking is normal, is there one way to use poke?

Facebook informs that poke is a cool feature without specific purpose. The same page suggests to invent own meaning of pocking. So in a best social sense, poke has provided facilities and left the usage and interpretation to the users. Some users set trends and the others follow.

Reflecting the diverse audience, there are currently 500+ user groups around meaning and usage of poke on facebook, ranging from pancakes to sex invitations. To be fair the pancakes group only managed to get 252 users against 332 thousands of “sex poke” supporters.

However, there are hundreds of poke usages that are a little bit more useful than pancakes invitations. The beauty is interpretation is entirely dependant on your friends demographic. And it could be a good idea to check what poke group they are on before poking back.

But remember that sometimes a poke is just a poke.

So what is your poke?

Why do you poke?

View Results

Loading ... Loading …

Online social portfolio

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 25, 2007 in social networks. 2 Comments

I want to identify what is an optimal set of social networks one should join and participate in.

First, let’s identifyuser groups we’ll be selecting portfolios for. We can’t use “one size fits all” approach here, especially when talking about social groups.

So, most obvious selection is by age, let’s start with three groups (G):

  1. Under 30
  2. 30 to 50
  3. Over 50

Second selection group is based on occupation (O):

  1. Student
  2. Non-professional
  3. Professional

And thethird, and last at this moment, is by income (this should be based on national average and abviously vary between countries, but the grouping remains the same) (I):

  1. None to high low
  2. Average to high average
  3. High and above

Now here comes an interesting bit, how do we select most common combination? After I’ve done some research I came up with only two selections that make up two large distinct groups:

  1. G1 + O1/2 + I1
  2. G2 + O3 + I2

This is just my feeling which is not based on anything at the moment, so I’d really appreciate if anyone could point me to some statistical data.

I’ve mapped this to some statistical data I could come accross, and the second group is much smaller in all popular networks. Both groups follow similar distribution pattern in most of the large networks. The only real differentiators I’vespotted were LinkedIn and MySpace. Therefore I think the portfolios should look like this:

First group:

  • MySpace or Facebook
  • Twitter or Jaiku
  • LiveJournal

Second group:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter or Jaiku
  • LinkedIn

Surely these lists must be customised for each case, depending on one’s preferences and interests, but I believe these could serve as initial kick off point.

Facebook API vs OpenSocial

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 24, 2007 in social networks. 0 Comments

Found an interesting post at BlogMaverick. Mark discusses whether OpenSocial can compete with FaceBook API. At the moment OpenSocial is unified API for participating online social networks that allows developer to write applications that would work across the board, ie on all participating platforms. Facebook however has its own API, and is not part of the OpenSocial group.

Whether this is good or bad time will show.

Mark argues that Facebook stands above other social networks because it enforces real identities:

When you go to my Facebook profile, you get the real me. Thats not to say I answer every profile question. I don’t. I’m not going to disclose everything about myself. However, the data that is available about me is the most comprehensive, self maintained database record about me on the internet or probably anywhere. Access to that information times the however many tens of millions of Facebook active users is worth a lot of money.

As a consequence the information about users is so much more valuable, especially if combined with search engines:

So back to Yahoo and the Facebook API. I thought that if you put the 2 together, enabling Yahoo to access the Facebook database of users within the current API constraints, Yahoo search and ad serving would improve considerably. Expand the Facebook database with an opt in option to add further personal data that could be used FROM WITHIN THE YAHOO WEBSITE, the results for Yahoo could be extraordinary. A Yahoo searchbox within Facebook , or a search from a Yahoo site that recognizes you are the owner of a Facebook profile and customizes the results according to information culled from your profile would be incredibly powerful.

In order for this to happen Facebook needs to open their API, so the application could exist outside the Facebook domain.

Tim O’Reily has made some valid observations on his blog, yet I’d like to disagree with some of them:

A framework and a set of Google Gadgets for building “social applications” misses the point. We don’t want to build more applications that look like Facebook applications. It isn’t about a social UI. It’s about deeper re-use of social data to enliven any application.

I personally think that these two (reusing social data and developing more applications to improve that data) are equally important. Moreover, extracting social data for use in searches and other activities might bring some security issues and put off those concerned about privacy.

To summarise I see tree problem areas here:

  • Centralised location to control user profile data
  • Access to social data /read/
  • Access to social platform /write/

All these three should be addressed separately. I guess Google is doing well with OpenSocial on the third, whereas social profile aggregator sites are targeting the first. Second one is rather tricky, because it touches very sensitive area of privacy.