Perhaps the "start pages" category is inherently likely to blur into whatever users are starting to do when they use them, but it is clear that Pageflakes and Netvibes are trying to compete with the rise of social networks, particularly Facebook.
Richard McManus provides a very 'close to the screen' analysis of Pageflakes Blizzard and Netvibes Universe, the companies' respective offerings in this area. But he doesn't really ask or answer the question of whether we should care. He more or less leaves that to another R/WW author, Josh Catone -- someone brand new to me -- who wrote a post called Who Can Compete with Facebook?
Both Netvibes and Pageflakes already act as platforms, with sophisticated developers APIs for creating widgets and programs to interact with their users. Both companies allow users to customize their pages, and inject personality into them. Both companies also already encourage users to share their creations (Universes and Pagecasts). Perhaps, the next step beyond sharing should be interaction.
As we grind forward, nearly every individual activity online will be nuanced by the opportunity to share the activity with others via social network.
The question really boils down to this: Who is providing the social networking in the user's potential flow of work or play on line? And, for entrepreneurs and investors, where is the part of the value chain most natural for that social glue to be inserted?
We are seeing the rise of contending social platforms, and different concepts of where the center of gravity for online sociality will lie. Is it in horizontal, content agnostic plays like Facebook? Will it be a thousand tiny horizontal application silos -- like shopping, dating, reviews, music, or whatever -- linked together with cross-interest interoperability? Will it be stages in the user's work -- like start pages, search pages, bookmarks, coordination, communication, or publishing tools?
I must say that horizontal platforms -- particularly Facebook, and the lurking giants -- seem to be in a strong starting position. With large and growing constituencies and strong support for general networking, added to a new interest in becoming platforms for a growing and diverse ecosystem of snap-on apps, Facebook and others, like Google Orkut/Socialstream and Yahoo360/Mosh, may be setting the stage for the next several decades of social experience online.
At the same time, the communication play seems obvious to me, although the communication giants seem confused. Consider AOL, who has hundreds of millions of AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users, but has failed to treat that world of personal networks (that what buddylists are, after all) as the springboard into a new future (despite my hectoring). Likewise, Yahoo, Google, and MSN have not done nearly enough to reconfabulate the IM bedrock into social networking platform. I have talked myself blue in the face about this opportunity with many of the large players (Yahoo and AOL particularly) in this space, and many smaller ones too (Jabber, this is your chance!).
I don't think we will see some federated model springing up organically in very focused sites, like dating, commerce, reviews, or whatever. Unless some existing standard existed that allowed cross app sharing of identity, networks, and privacy policy, the ten thousand dwarves in the web can't pull this together on their own. They need to rally around something, and that something doesn't really exist. So every Tom, Dick and Harry entrepreneur building yet-another-online-shopping experience goes off and builds yet-another-private-social-network.
I hope that we can bring this discussion into the real world at an upcoming event I am putting together with Christian Perry, in San Francisco this fall (along with a new business, Epicenter::SF, to run it and similar events). The Social Platform Summit is scheduled for 16 October 2007, in San Francisco. We have a venue in the heart of the city, and we have gone live with a blog this morning:
We hope to bring together the entrepreneurs, visionaries, and moguls that are creating a quantum shift in the online user experience. The Social Platform Summit will be the epicenter of the exploding discussion about the role of social networks as a platform for online applications.
The subtitle for the conference is The Future Of The Social Web, which is the centerpiece of this discussion.
We have a number of sponsorships, a growing body of all sorts of people wanting to participate, and many folks registering.
There is no doubt that the event is coming at exactly the right time to support this conversation.
Check this great Entrepreneurs Social Networking.
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Posted by: J Perez | July 25, 2007 at 04:46 PM