Finally, The Internet As Intended.

To start a social network today you need only flip the switch. Ning, KickApps, Pligg, GoingOn, are all players in the ever growing space of social network providers. The rapid commodification will have two major impacts on the nature of social software in the near future:

1. Social Networks are Features

Om Malik got it right when he said social networks are features, not properties. Friends lists, collaborative ranking, private messaging, public commenting, widgetable profile pages - this collection features strengthens any site.
2. Unified Identity Becomes Essential

The proliferation of social networks as a site feature means a proliferation of personal profiles, which makes identity management more and more of an issue for Joe User. He wants to participate in the social network features of the sites he visits, but managing multiple identities is a pain.

So, if you’re considering the addition of social networking features to your site (and you should be), you should be also be looking at the new identity standards and tools - and the one with the most momentum right now is OpenID.

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We’ve all read the Peanut Butter Memo, that Yahoo! SVP Jerry McGuire Brad Glarinhouse sent to Yahoo!’s executive team. The memo produced plenty of blog-o-sphere chatter, but Robert Young from GigaOM has the best the best reflection I have seen on the memo, and what its says about where Yahoo! is with their strategic vision in light of their recent under performance. His take: Yahoo!’s comparative advantage over Google is their community. So how does Yahoo! turn its comparative advantage into a competitive one? Marketing:

it’s critical to realize that the priorities of “marketing” have been inversed… whereas the primary function of marketing used to be to broadcast a product’s benefit to consumers, the priority of marketing now should be to be a proxy for consumer control, because it is the consumers who will lead your company to success.

This is a lesson that everyone can learn from - not just Yahoo!. Make your marketing about them and not you - unclench and watch the consumer market send it’s fickle attention your way. I said something similar in a post a few months ago -

…the story of the future isn’t consumer-producers competing with traditional producers, its traditional producers embracing and enabling the consumer-producer that will make tomorrow’s markets so interesting.

But don’t take my word for it - i’m just a long tail inhabitor, read Robert’s excellent post instead :-).

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Henry Abbott, the sportswriter behind TrueHoop.com (worth the daily read for any hoops fan), wanted information, and now he’s got the world working to get it - with a wiki. On September 7th, 2006, Abbot posted a TrueHoop blog entry titlled "Things that Should be Online, But Aren’t". Number 1 on the list: A complete list of NBA agents and their clients. One month later, TrueHoopWiki.com is making that a reality.

In four short weeks Abbott went from wishlist to growing online resource - a great testimony to the power of the network and simple online collaboration tools.

Here’s how it unfolded:

September 7th:

Abbott Laments the Lack of an Agent-Player List with a Blog Post

September 8th, 11:03 AM:

Doug, a TrueHoop blog reader comments:

Someone should start a collaborative site where fans can postagent-player links. Whenever a player’s agent gets mentioned in a localpaper story it could be posted on the site. Just from reading Pistonsarticles from the last few years I’ve compiled a list of the agents ofall their current players. Though it’s tough to know when a playerswitches agents.

September 8th: Later that day:

Abbot Reiterates the Need

let’s just set up a wiki and collaborate on making that list. Everytime any one of you sees in an article somewhere that it says somethinglike "Al Harrington’s new agent, Arn Tellem…" then you could updatethe wiki.

…and sounds the Wiki call:

I’m not exactly Mr. Technology, so I have been poking around: is there an easy way to put a wiki like that on TrueHoop?… Anyone out there feel like spearheading the technology of such an effort?

3 Weeks in September :

Abbott hooks up with TrueHoop readers Rolando de Aguiar, J.P. Given, Engineer Scotty, and Matt Bailey - the build TrueHoopWiki in 3 short weeks.

October 3:

TrueHoopWiki.com is released into the Wild

Here’s how we hope it will work. If you see an online article about a certain NBA player that mentions their agent, please update TrueHoopWiki (which already has "stub" entries for every current NBA player, or darned close) with the name of the agent and a link to the source article. With lots of people contributing, it shouldn’t take long to have a fairly complete and up-to-date agent resource.

technorati tags:wiki, collaboration

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Lars Ploughman pens the "10 to 1" rule that demonstrates why email vs online collaboration tools like ProjectSpaces (shameless plug for my company’s product) is a no contest:

Imagine for a moment that you are managing a project with ten other participants. Let’s say that an important change to the subsequent phase of the project has just been agreed with the sponsors and you need to communicate it to the project team. If you do it via email, this may be the result:

• 9 people read the email
• 8 people file the email (in their private folders, thereby duplicating effort)
• 7 people are interrupted in their work or thoughts when the email arrives
• 6 people will never be able to find the email again
• 5 people didn’t actually need to know about the change
• 4 people joining the project in the next phase wouldn’t have received the email
• 3 people will be able to find the email again, should they need to
• 2 people will check back to the email at a later date when they need the information
• 1 of them will understand the email in context, be able to find it at a later date and action it

 

 

Yahoo! Messenger 8 is now out of beta. It’s interoperability with MSN Messenger is huge, but the most exciting new feature is its support for web standards based plug-ins.  Now anyone can build tools for the 100 million + messenger users.  Plugins for file sharing and ecards are already popular. Those and about 120 others are available on the plug-in gallery.

This is yet another opportunity for Online Community purveyors to extend their community beyond the borders of their destination web site. As I said before your community members are out there communicating and collaborating away in places that are *not* your site. You can now give them the tools to take their community with them by developing useful widgets, plug-ins, and bookmarklets that operate all the places they do -which isn’t just your destination website.

Knowledge workers unite! My colleague Dave Witzel has an editorial in CXO saying the wave of online supported collaboration we’re experiencing is no less important to today’s global economy than the industrial revolution was to yesterday’s. It’s definitely worth the read, and I even get some ink:

More accessible and useful information. Not only are we rapidly creating and distributing knowledge, it is becoming more embedded in context and connected to other information. This context and connectedness is called “the semantic web” by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML and much of what we now know as the “world wide web”. As our knowledge becomes more connected with better context more people will be able to find it, understand it and use it. Google already uses the connections between websites to drive their powerful search engine. My colleague Kurt Voelker has invoked a “Moore’s Law” for knowledge where every six months we can expect connectedness, and the value, of knowledge to double.

Jeff updated his argument with a comment on my last post, Jeff Jarvis Hypes Consumer as the New Producer:

I don’t disagree. I think the fact that we can produce means that our production has a new relationship with the old producers. And production can be defined very, very broadly: empowered customers produce product ideas, customer service, marketing, and so on — because they can. And this, in turn, means that the old producers have a few choices, as you rightly point out: (1) fight, (b) ignore, (c) embrace, (d) update.

By the way, isn’t hate a strong word? ;-)

So. I’m busted. My mom would definetly not approve. There isn’t anything I hate about Jeff Jarvis - sorry Jeff :-)

Back to the consumer producer debate - Your response is the right one. We need to qualify “producer”. Your definition seems closer to ‘participant’ than producer, and not changing your terminology leaves you open to snipes like Nick’s.

So, maybe the right metephor for today’s consumer/producer is BASF: they dont make the products, they make the products better :-)

Wow. Netscape’s userbase is really letting them have it. There are six pages of negatives comments by Netscape users reacting to the new site. Will they simmer down over time? Here’s a taste of what most are saying:

I don’t want other people voting on what I should read first. I want to see major national news stories and then if I want to know about entertainment or sports or whatever I can click a link. I liked having a choice. This new format is awful. What if the New York Times decided to have readers vote on where things should be placed in the paper. What a disaster. If this is how it will be from now on, I’m changing my homepages.

So much for the wisdom of crowds :-).

Over at Read/WriteWeb Richard MacManus has some skinny on old-school Netscape user’s reactions to the just-out-of-beta redesign of Netscape.com. Apparently, based on comments left on Richard’s blog, some of the mainstream Netscape user crowd are not too thrilled with the changes.

you know damn well this kids running the show don’t give a crap about what the public wants.

Jason Calacanis, who came to AOL via their acquisition of Weblogs, is spearheading Netscape’s shift from a web 1.0 portal into a 2.0 collective-intelligence aggregator.

 

We should all be watching to see how eagerly Netscape’s mainstream userbase takes to the web2.0 principles at work in the new netscape.com. It’s a great litmus-test of the principles that are driving the big re-interest in the web.

About a month ago at the Online Community Camp in San Francisco I moderated the Emerging Technologies in Online Community session (grab the ppt here). In the talk I said you might as well kiss the borders of your online community goodbye. What I meant was this - tomorrow, the web is the community, and your members are running free out there, convening and collaborating away - and they are not doing it on your site. So let them, encourage them, but give them the tools to make your community portable. Don’t restrict them to your websites pidly 800x600 borders. Let your community members continue to participate in the community by pluging content and functions into their own websites, by commenting and conversing on other websites. Browser extensions, desktop widgets, site widgets, bookmarklets, syndication, and SMS let your community exist well beyond the boundaries of your ‘web pages’.

Dont believe this is the future of things, here’s a list of new companies that are turning the web into a community by enabling conversation, information sharing, and networking beyond the confines of a destination web site:

WidgetBox, which is still in stealth beta mode (but you can peek under the covers over at Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch) will offer users a host of "site widgets" that they can plug into blogs, auctions, social networks, and personal homepages.

CoComment lets users attach conversations to any site, collect their comments, organize them, and share them.

Itzle, a browser extension that "allows you to walk around websites as if they were physical locations". Users can have real-time chats, co-surf with friends, and share favorites.

Even Google is getting into the game with Google Notebook. Which doesn’t have a social aspect to it just yet, but is a good example of functionality that lets users interact across the web.

Of course there are the photo sites that let you plug your photos into blogs and personal sites, flickr, and photoBucket. And Yahoo is in the mix with Yahoo! Widgets, and OS X provides a platform you can extend your community to, and so will Vista.

The interesting thing is that all of these tools are just that - tools. They have a social focus, but are not ‘communities’ in and of themselves. This leaves alot of space for traditional online communities - ones that are rooted in a ‘destination site’ - to take these concepts and free their members from the confines of their site. Sites that already have significant membership and participation should really be able to leverage these types of tools to build an even stronger base.