The future of social networks

My notes from Charlene Li’s presentation at SXSW…

Starting off by going back 20 years to Tim Berners Lee in 1989 wrote about the web being a social creation rather than a technical toy.

It’s only been in the last few years that we have had very simple tools to make that vision a reality.

Think of a social site: Facebook, Twitter, Bebo; Habbo Hotel; Last.fm

Social networks will be much bigger than these individual platforms. We’ll look back and think it strange that we had to visit a site to be social online.

Social networks will be like air – all around us.

Shoppping: Ratings and reviews are ok, but I don’t know the people reviewing. In the future I’ll be able to see reviews from my friends only. Building chat and discussion with friends into e-commerce to help make buying choices.

TV is becoming social. Current TV integrates Twitter posts into broadcast, but in the future we’ll have more control to see only updates from our friends, or from groups of people that we are interested in.

The trend is that social activity happens in other contexts, not necessarily within a social networking site itself.

Things you need to make social networks like air:

1. Identity – who you are
2. Contacts – who you know and what are the context of those relationships i.e. a real friend vs. a loose contact that you met once
3. Activities – things that I’m doing that I might want to share e.g. twitter; FB news feed.

We are still at the beginning of this.

Two standards: Facebook Connect and the Open Stack

Open ID; XRDS-Simple; OAuth; PortableContacts; OpenSocial

It’s not a standards war, but a journey towards agreeing a set of standards [hmmm, I’m not so sure otherwise FB would use and develop the open stack]

Identity: Work persona and personal persona. Use different platforms for different personas.

Friends: Filters and tools to manage different types of friend. Big problem of having separate friend lists for different platforms. Have to set up relationships many times.

Google/portals provide social data – collecting huge amount of data – email, calendar, and now voice.

We have to trust Google/FB/Yahoo with our data. Businesses potentially have to trust Google with their data too.

What will get businesses to be open with their data? Money.

Most digital activity resides outside social networks.

Example of The Insider adding social features using social networks. FB gets revenue share and new audience. The Insider gets profile information and better targeting of ads.

Using analysis of social networks to target ads, identify influencers.

Being a Fan of a brand on Facebook is not an endorsement.

If advertisers have access to social graph it can advertise a product that I’ve bought to my closest friends, without explicitly saying who it was that bought it. [like an anonymised FB Beacon]

How a business should approach it:

1. Evaluate where social makes sense. Where social network data can make the user experience richer. Leverage existing social data e.g. FB Connect or the open stack. Get privacy and permission stuff straight. Who will you trust? Google? FB?
2. Get your back-end data in order. Remove need for multiple sign-ins and profiles. Single identity for people in your database.
3. Prepare to integrate social networks into the organisation. Organisations are networked with human relationships, not hierarchies. Social networks will disrupt traditional information flows.

Put the customer in the organisation chart. Customer at the top, CEO at the bottom!

Open networks will be the new norm.