Steve Rubel Is Wrong About "How The Portals Will Win the Social Networking Wars"

As we catapult headlong into a social revolution, it's reasonable to ask how various players will play. Steve Rubel has decided that the major information portal will win because they own the 'trusted' communication channels that we have come to rely on:

[from Micro Persuasion: How the Portals Will Win the Social Networking Wars]

[...]

The portals own the glue that keeps many of us connected to our structured social networks (e.g. Myfaceborkutspace) and the looser ones - e.g. a personal network of contacts. And that glue is a trusted communication system that works with every person and social net.

No matter which social network(s) you participate in, even if you float, you're going to turn to your trusted communication system to manage it all. This will include any or all of the following: a) web-based e-mail, b) instant messaging (which is nowadays integrated), c) RSS and d) telephony tools like Grand Central. And who dominates those? Yup. The portals - all of them. They have a pretty good lock in, especially as they give you all the storage you need.

This is not going to change. The big blurring of work and home technologies is allowing people to achieve greater flexibility in thieir lives. Webmail and IM are big drivers here. We're hooked but good because we use these four tools to also manage our interactions on social nets. I expect the portals will eventually build in new features that make this even all the more efficient.

Even if his premises were right -- that the portals 'own' these channels, that they are 'trusted', and that we require such channels are a primary need -- this argument would have suggested that the established media companies would have become the dominant players in Web 1.0, which didn't happen.

Back to countering his premises, which are based on old media notions, I think:

1. Channels of communication change very fast, when innovation appears. Cell phones, texting, fax machines, instant messaging, and now social media have all been immensely destabilizing, with people shifting the ratio of their communication appetites to incorporate newer, faster technologies. As the web starts to permeate everything it touches -- particularly media and mobile, right now -- the nature of the Web will naturally redistribute control and power away from centralized media and portal companies.
2. I don't think these organizations are 'trusted' in the way that people 'trusted' AT&T, in its heyday, or how trusted the major three networks during the Eisenhower administration. In fact, people distrust large organizations like never before, and the younger the group are the more distrust there is. As a result, they distrust commnications controlled by large, out-of-touch organizations perceived as running their own -- perhaps antithetical and inimical -- agendas.
3. Social networking may not turn out to be some spun into every site, like HTML or Web 2.0 design esthetics. The social scale and reach issues that dominate social network dynamics make it unlikely that people will participate in seventy three social networks, happily enrolling on one on every Web 1.0 style e-commerce site.

I think Steve is mistaking the actions being taken by the gazillions of Web 1.0 style websites -- who may be trying to build community via social networking technology into their information portals -- with what is likely to emerge in 2008 and beyond.

Google's recent moves in the open social vein suggest a different story. A federated concept of distributed networks interoperating. Ten thousand focussed apps, sharing common services, all enriching the value that others contribute. Winning solutions always add value as they scale, and we will be drawn to the solutions that most quickly create value for us.

The network -- the Web -- belongs to us, the indigenous people of the Web: the Edglings. We belong to us. Our words and creations, the indigenous content (or "user generated content" as they like to call it, casting us as users instead of creators) that the information companies are hoping to strip-mine, is for us, by us. We, and our creations, will never belong to them -- the large corporates -- ever again. There is no going back.

Our natural center-of-gravity will lead us to adopt the tools and technologies that suit our needs, not the agenda of the dinosaurs. This will reward the smaller, agile players who are attuned to what we are up to. And so, even if Steve is right about the wants and desires of the Oligarchs, he has discounted our needs and aspirations. Never underestimate the effects of a network coming into contact with itself.

Comments

[David Cushman]

Perhaps it's all down to how divisible you think the network is? Facebook: divisible (portals), google: whole (federation of networks).

I see it as all one network... which inspires some thinking about the value of reputation.

How I am represented on that network depends on what I do and how I am responded to by that same whole network.

And it's this that creates the value of the trust that can be attached to 'me'. On the scale of the whole net - that's a lot to lose. In a divided one, the trust at stake is less.

[adrian Chan]

Stowe,

Thanks for the points well made. I think the argument you make about trusted portals is right. And I think there's another reason the claim Steve makes may be off base. I didn't read the original, but the idea that we trust a destination for both its brand and the communication channel it provides conflates two separate modes of trust. I think we might trust a brand, and separately have confidence in its technology. Furthermore, though, and this would be an additional argument against Steve's claim, we invest in the audience the "trusted site" provides us.

It seems to me that we use channels in which we can be confident that our audience is also present and attentive. For some it may be twitter, or facebook, our own blogs, a small private network, group, or what have you.

Brands may seem to offer this trusted communication network because we feel they've assembled an active and attentive audience. In the case of a tool like twitter, however, it's less the brand's success in doing this, and more our own success in accumulating friends (followers).

So regardless of the brand's credibility and visibility, at the end of the day, I think we invest in those tools or networks in which we think our communication is most effective. And that's something that can change rapidly, especially as established sites accrue mainstream members and as new, small, and lightweight apps demonstrate their ability to rapidly aggregate audiences from our address books and other (eg linkedin) contacts.

[Dennis McDonald]

I have to agree with you. Portals are supposed to simplify access to multiple services, right? When users can go directly to the individual services, bypassing the portals, what need is there for portals, given evolving standardization of features such as relationship management and other "social" features?

You're right about "trust" -- trust emerges from relationships not from a master switchboard in the sky.

The one good reason I can see for maintaining the portal concept is as a benefit to the portal and the web itself -- to help to monetize access, infrastructure, and message transmission. If the portals go away, though, who will pay for things? That's a reasonable question to ask.

[Allison]

Random thoughts while reading this post:

1. I am so glad I found this blog. It's always interesting

2. I wonder what happens if Net Neutrality goes by the wayside? AT&T would love to make their "portal" the gatekeeper of what gets seen and what doesn't.

3. The beauty of social networking is that it's about people, not some huge corporate brand.

4. I think we've just seen the tip of the iceberg so far. Hold on, it's going to be an exciting ride.

[adrian Chan]

Stowe,

not to drag this one out, but one of my favorite sociologists, Anthony Giddens, makes a very useful distinction between trust and confidence. He argues that trust is intersubjective, and necessarily two-sided (our trust in a person is built in part on our sense of their trust in us). For technologies and the means we use to reduce the uncertainties raised by modernity (that all is subject to revision and thus contains risk), he claims we invest confidence in systems. Confidence is handed over to the system when we don't know how it works but have confidence in its reliability and consistency.

I think people often confuse trust, which works as means of describing the nature of relationships in a social network, and confidence, which better describes our relationship to the system that handles them.

fwiw!