Reflexion about social Networks

Mar 19th 2008 | SAN FRANCISCO

From The Economist print edition

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Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small programs can exploit this “social graph” to enable friends to interact via games, greetings, video clips and so on.

Coming up for air

But should users really have to visit a specific website to do this sort of thing? “We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.

The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks' lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users' information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

Historically, online media tend to start this way. The early services, such as CompuServe, Prodigy or AOL, began as “walled gardens” before they opened up to become websites. The early e-mail services could send messages only within their own walls (rather as Facebook's messaging does today). Instant-messaging, too, started closed, but is gradually opening up. In social networking, this evolution is just beginning. Parts of the industry are collaborating in a “data portability workgroup” to let people move their friend lists and other information around the web. Others are pushing OpenID, a plan to create a single, federated sign-on system that people can use across many sites.

The opening of social networks may now accelerate thanks to that older next big thing, web-mail. As a technology, mail has come to seem rather old-fashioned. But Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms are now discovering that they may already have the ideal infrastructure for social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and calendars of their users. “E-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network,” says David Ascher, who manages Thunderbird, a cutting-edge open-source e-mail application, for the Mozilla Foundation, which also oversees the popular Firefox web browser.

That is because the extended in-box contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections. On Facebook, a social graph notoriously deteriorates after the initial thrill of finding old friends from school wears off. By contrast, an e-mail account has access to the entire address book and can infer information from the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs. Joe gets e-mails from Jack and Jane, but opens only Jane's; Joe has Jane in his calendar tomorrow, and is instant-messaging with her right now; Joe tagged Jack “work only” in his address book. Perhaps Joe's party photos should be visible to Jane, but not Jack.

This kind of social intelligence can be applied across many services on the open web. Better yet, if there is no pressure to make a business out of it, it can remain intimate and discreet. Facebook has an economic incentive to publish ever more data about its users, says Mr Ascher, whereas Thunderbird, which is an open-source project, can let users minimise what they share. Social networking may end up being everywhere, and yet nowhere.

Is it widget (or micro site) a first sign of these social networks "coming up for air"?

VC's Say : Please, no more social networks

Posted by Stefanie Olsen

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--The consensus here at the Dow Jones Web Ventures conference this week seems to be that the world doesn't need another social network.

That's considering that the advertising model for even the largest social networks like Facebook has yet to fall into place--despite that company's projected $15 billion valuation. Or that sites supported only by advertising will get squeezed in a down economy and that venture capital is cooling for Web 2.0 startups. Or, more likely, that some audiences--like CEOs or cat lovers--simply don't need their own social networks.

"If I see another business plan for a social network, I might blow my brains out," Barry Schuler, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, said during a panel discussion this week.

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One of the biggest problems facing social networks is to recreate the kind of powerful advertising network that Google has with its targeted search ads. Facebook tried its hand at a system that matches people's consumer behaviors on the Web with ads in the online community. But it scaled back on that program, called Beacon, because of consumer privacy concerns.

Tim Kendall, a product manager for Facebook who spoke Thursday at the conference, said that despite that misstep, advertising will eventually be social. Facebook ads, for example, can pop up when a friend signs up for a new application or becomes a fan of a band, say Dave Matthews. As a Facebook user, you might see a Tickets.com ad for a Dave Matthews concert.

"Advertising will be about leveraging the true actions that your friends take and using that as the advertisement," Kendall said. He added later the Facebook will also work on better options for brand advertising. "We'll derive a meaningful set of revenue from brand ads. We need to address that market, too."

Still, for any other small potato in the business, VCs are buying it.

"There's an assumption that the phenomenon that occurred with Facebook and the young generation is applicable against anything," said DFJ's Schuler. "Not to pick on anyone, but I'm not sure ExpertCEO will engage in the same way that others do like Facebook."

all the article here

MindShare Diversifying Into Creative Services

by Joe Mandese, Thursday, Mar 13, 2008 8:00 AM ET
ANOTHER BIG MEDIA AGENCY MAY be poised to diversify into creative services. WPP's MindShare Interaction unit is interviewing creative candidates to head a new creative unit within its burgeoning digital media operations, reports U.K.-based Campaign magazine, which says the unit will rollout in London and will be headed by Norm Johnston, CEO of MindShare Interaction in EMEA, and Simon Andrews, the global digital chief strategy officer of MindShare.

The move follows similar creative services diversifications by other major media shops. In December, Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group began integrating Pixel, a creative services boutique specializing in digital media, adding creative to its media services portfolio, and began raiding top creative executives from other agencies as part of the move.

U.K.-based Aegis media, the parent of Carat, has long provided digital creative services via its Isobar unit, but recently began integrated creative as part of a full-service portfolio in some key markets, according to Mainardo de Nardis, CEO of Aegis Media Global (MediaDailyNews, Feb. 28). While Aegis creative services have focused mainly on digital media such as online display, search, and Web development, it has recently begun producing offline creative, including conventional 30-second TV commercials, and as the world of online video and traditional TV blur, de Nardis said he expects that trend to continue.

The most aggressive example of Aegis creative and media integration to date has taken place in the U.S., where the company has physically merged Carat with Carat Fusion, into a new integrated operation known internally as "Carat 2.0."

Details of MindShare's plan were not reported by Campaign, but the publication said it would likely offer "creative and content services, but may contract out production as required."

The move by MindShare, which like MediaVest still has ties to legacy creative agencies, is noteworthy, because big agency holding companeis such as WPP and Publicis historically have been loath to have their media shops compete with their "full-service" brand agencies on the basis of creative services.

Joe Mandese is Editor of MediaPost.

Future Bright for Widgets, Say Media Execs

(Media Summit in New York on March 12)
Advertisers and media companies are beginning to embrace the power of widgets, particularly those thousands of mini-applications that have sprouted up on social networks like MySpace and Facebook

Those close to the phenomenon predict a robust moneymaking future for widgets, i.e. small Web-based programs or content packages that users can easily download and take with them to other sites though several basic business practices need to be established, said a group of panelists at the McGraw Hill Companies' Media Summit in New York on March 12.

In the future, content and ad portability will be so commonplace to the Web that "every consumer facing Web site will be a collection of widgets," said Eric Alterman, chairman, KickApps, a firm that produces widgets for various companies. Alterman predicted that online ad networks will essentially become distribution networks widgets, and later boldly stated that as widgets take hold "all the money on the Internet will be in that space...and traditional media will be a leader."

Right now, traditional media is still figuring out its role, said Dan Riess, vp, marketing and ad solutions, Turner. Riess said that CNN.com has had tremendous success in letting users grab mini-versions of the news site for their RSS readers or social networking profiles, but not every traditional media company has figured out how to uses widgets or how to cash them in."Right now, widgets have two values for us," he said, namely marketing and media. While marketing is easier to swallow for media companies, said Reiss, using widgets are a form of media, which need to be monetized, "gets a little trickier. It's not as clear.

"Riess acknowledged that as content becomes more and more portable, "It's increasingly hard for sites to expect users to come through your door." Yet that often means a loss of control, and often, some sort of "revenue share situation. That isn't as exciting for a media company."

The MobiTMS social application "TMS Search" (the search engine of barcodes which offer users to preview a 2D barcode and send it to his phone) can be find actually in Facebook, Bebo, Friendster, MySpace, Ning...