The Future Impact of Social Networking - Tom Standage

Agent Of Change, the future of technology disruption in business, Economist Intelligence Unit


Tom Standage is the digital editor of The Economist and the author of several books on the history of technology. He is currently working on a new book on the history of the idea of social media, from Roman times to the Internet.

Q: What technology do you think will have the biggest impact on business in the coming decade?

Standage: The really big one is the impact of social networking on the enterprise. This has been entirely a consumer phenomenon, but we’re now seeing start-ups like Yammer and Chatter. They are taking the benefits and the approach of social media and applying them in companies. I think that’s going to be a very big change.

Q: Why will social networks be so important for companies?

Standage: People who are entering the workforce now think that this is how software works. Some managers talk about Facebook and other [social] networks as being time wasters, but in fact the opposite is true. This is the way that software is increasingly going to look, and that will impact on the way companies are run, because when you have a general discussion about things on a Facebook “wall”, you tend to get much less email and much less wasted time.

It also becomes much easier to find experts on particular subjects, to expose expertise within your company. Very often people turn out to be very good at something even though it’s not part of their job description. When you ask a general question, such as “Does anyone know if we’ve ever done a contract on this?”, the people who reply basically self- organise. You can see who the useful people are, and people within the company start to be perceived according to their willingness
to co-operate and their utility to others. That matters much more than what their job description is.

Q: What about outside the company?

Standage: The missing link is the use of social media
by companies to deal with their suppliers 
and customers. This will take a while, but 
the opportunity for people to engage with their suppliers and their customers in this way will be enormous. You can imagine how companies will be able to collaborate much more effectively. We’ve seen a few small examples of specific collaboration spaces—for a particular project, for instance—whose participants come from all sorts of different companies. We will start to see more of this type of thing.

I agree that the world of business will be radically reshaped by the impact of work media: social network-based communication tools for the enterprise. But I wish Standage was backing that up with something more substantial than new entrants to the workforce wanting to use something like Facebook, or finding experts.

That’s why I think it is important to look at cognitive science, and make the case for using software that works the way our minds work. Or the tangible benefits of working out loud.

Social Revolution: Mosh and Socialstream

 

I am going to start referring to the release of the Facebook platform model as the Facebook Discontinuity, since it seems like the history of social networking apps will be dated before and after.

Among other things, the FB Discontinuity has forced the vendors of various doggy offerings to accelerate their implicit or explicit plans to kill or drastically revamp sluggard apps.

For example, I recently learned about the Google/Carnegie Mellon SocialStream project [pointer: Search Engine Watch], which sounds like the fusion of meta-network notions with the flow and traffic model (as found in Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, and others).

[from Socialstream]

An Introduction to the Project

Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. This project was guided by three goals that built upon each other:

Initial Task: Rethink and reinvent online social networking

Refined Focus: Discover the user needs related to social networking and explore how a unified social network service can enhance their experience.

Prototype Goal: Create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.

Directed to help improve the online community orkut, the project’s scope was not to simply redesign the interface. Our team considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty. After initial brainstorming and research, we chose to focus on the effects of a new model for online social networking: a unified social network that, as a service, provides social data to many other applications. Our user research examined needs related to online as well as offline social networking and considered how they related to a unified social network service model. Through this user research we identified a set of archetypes that represent common behavior patterns that existed across multiple study participants and also formulated a summarized list of their high level needs.

One of the aspects of Socialstream that I applaud is that they are incorporating a buddylist view (a la

Also, the rumor about Yahoo’s Mosh seems to be spreading (mostly courtesy of TechCrunch), which I am trying to clarify with my contacts in Yahoo. This is likely to be the Discontinuity-inspired end of Yahoo 360, which has had a disappointing pageview downturn, as interesting in MySpace and Facebook has risen.

Anyway, more to follow on both fronts as I weasel my way into getting more insight into the technology and business plans behind both Socialstream and Mosh.

Left-Handed Social Commerce

We are all used to the norms of real-world commerce: I want to buy something, say a fold-up bike, so I have to find out what bike stores have such goods in stock, and I drive all over town checking them out, and trying to get a deal.

The web (1.0) changed that dynamic. I can search for fold-up bikes online, compare prices, search for reviews, and then order the bike of my dreams online. Cool.

But I am doing all the work, and even if others help me along the way with advice or recommendations, they don’t get anything for it. And the information that I accumulate along the way usually just dissipates as soon as the transaction takes place: the myriad activities are never bundled together and published for others.

Web 2.0 tools exist to better this situation, but in general, they all fall short of my dreamscape, which I refer to as left-handed social commerce.

The solution I envision will be based on a social media/social networking platform, such as Facebook. I would be able to collate various observations and recommendations made by my contacts or me, as a sort of portfolio associated with the object of my desire: in this case, a fold-up bike. Once I have boiled down what it is I am after — either a specific make-and-model or a bunch of features, like number of gears, size, price range, and so on — I want to be able to post my buy. By posting my buy I mean offering the deal to the world of vendors out there.

In some way, I would like to have the platform anonymize my request for offers so that I can avoid being pestered, and I can filter out offers that don’t satisfy my concerns. For example, I only want offers from bike stores in the San Francisco area, because I want them to be able to fix the bike if it has problems. And I only want offers from highly rated sellers, and sellers that have been in business 3 years or more. Or sellers that at least some of my contacts have recommended. And so on.

But the real flip here is having the offers flow to me, as opposed to me wandering around in the web 1.0 world of pages, following links, like a rat in a maze. Sure, the rat is smart, and can solve the maze. But I don’t want to be a rat in a maze anymore. I want everything to flow to me.

And it’s not like I am consigning the vendors to running a maze: after all, the same platform could flow opportunities to them. A San Francisco bike shop carrying a variety of fold-up bikes could tag themselves appropriately within the hypothetical left-handed social commerce system, and my deal would flow to them. They could add a few parameters — prices, models, etc. — and flow it back to me.

We’d all get out of the maze.

Ebay is a big maze, where buyers have to do the work. Amazon. Whatever. Its all designed to make things easy for the retailer or the auction house. And we run the maze everytime we buy something online.

It’s interesting that I have had this discussion — more or less — with dozens of entrepreneurs in recent years, but I have yet to see a real solution emerge based on left-handed commerce and flow principles.

I also envision that I should get credit — reputation and commissions — based on the folio I develop on fold-up bikes. In a long-tail economy, a really good folio researching the alternatives could get hits for years. I could pass along some small discount to buyers who want the same thing I bought, as well as pocketing a small commission. Why not? When this sort of thing moves to the edge — for example in a social network platform like Facebook — and out of managed sites like Yelp, why shouldn’t we get the tips?

CBS Buys Last.fm

I am slightly out of touch here in Copenhagen — my hotel does not have Internet in the rooms — so I learned that CBS has acquired Last.fm via Twitter today (thanks, Paulo).

[from from Reuters]

Media group CBS Corp said on Wednesday it had paid $280 million in cash for the popular music social network service Last.fm.

CBS said in a statement the online service had more than 15 million active users in more than 200 countries. The Last.fm team will continue to run the online network under the terms of the deal.

I met with Felix Miller and Stefan Glänzer of Last.fm in London a month ago, and I suggested that Apple should but Last.fm as the basis of a social iTunes. They looked at each other. I asked if something was in the works, and they politely wiggled away from that line of inquiry. It’s clear now, of course, that they were in talks with CBS… and maybe others.

[Also reported by the BBC and Los Angeles Times]

Emily Yoffe on Facebook

It’s a bit swarmy, in that Sunday supplement style that ‘slice of life’ journalists employ like a long stick so they can poke at things that attract and repel them at the same time. However, Joffe’s experiences in fiddling with Facebook are actually pretty dead-on:

[from I’m fiftysomething, and I’m joining Facebook. You got a problem with that? - By Emily Yoffe - Slate Magazine]

You know how in The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell describes the person he calls a “connector”—the charming, gregarious individual who knows everyone and makes things happen? I’m the opposite of that person. Even within my small circle, I’m always falling out of touch, and I never know what’s going on. But finally, there seemed to be a solution to my isolation that didn’t require me to actually go out and see people. Facebook, the three-year-old, 17-million-member social-networking site once the exclusive province of students, recently opened to anyone. The site has so addictively insinuated itself into the daily lives of those under the age of about 24 that academics are studying how it is changing the very nature of their social interactions. I decided to see if someone old enough to remember when answering machines were a radical communication breakthrough could find someone, anyone, among those 17 million willing to connect with me …

In between the lines she suggests that social networks can actually make our lives richer, by helping us remain connected with those far away, and that we can discover connections with new people. No revolutionary rhetoric, but an almost bland send-up of what is proving to be one of the largest mass movements in the history of civilization.

[Pointer: Sebastian Hirsch]

/Message: Pairup

Pairup is a social networking service for business travelers that I really would like to have take off (pun intended). I have always wanted to use a “ships passing in the night” service, where I could simply state my travel plans, and I would discover that an old friend was going to be in New York City the same dates as me.

There is more to Pairup than finding old friends: the service is geared to helping business travelers meet new people as well, such as people attending the same event you are traveling to, or locals with similar interests. I wonder if by trying to do so much, however, the designers have moved too far away from a simple premise, and move into conflict with larger professional social networks? On the other hand, I could make the argument that my “ships in the night” service is really just a feature than a solution like Upcoming.org or Google Calendar could offer.

Snubster: United By What We Hate

There is an old world saying that you can judge a person by their enemies. Perhaps you can understand someone by what annoys them, as well. In that vein, Snubster

has launched, allowing people to post about what pisses them off:

[from Wired News: Antisocial Networking Gets Hip by Joanna Glasner]

Software engineer Bryant Choung intended to satirize social discovery services when he launched his beta site, Snubster, last month. The site lets members create public lists of people and things that rankle them.

“The whole concept of online social networking was really starting to irk me,” said Choung, who initially envisioned Snubster as a way to stem the often irritating flow of invitations to join networking sites like Friendster and LinkedIn. While such sites seemed like a good idea at first, their usage too often devolves into “an attempt to get as many fake friends as possible.”

Snubster members, by contrast, focus on what irritates them. Targets of discontent include individuals (President Bush is a popular pick), groups (guys who talk at urinals) and things (bologna). Besides storing lists, the site has a tool for sending an e-mail to someone newly added to a list to tell them why they’re being snubbed.

Looks to me like a lot of clique members ragging on each other for stealing food out of the refrigerator, but, hey, that’s still a potentially important social tool. And Snubster is not a joke site: it actually works. I like the time stamp/elapse feature.

We don’t always have to be answering an appeal to save the planet. Occasionally, we can get down to the everyday need to complain about the loud sex from the upstairs apartment. We’ve all been there, putting our head under the pillow. Although in my case, it’s usually in a hotel at 2am.

The Ten Commandments Of Social Networking

[originally published at Get Real, 22 August 2004]

Clay reprises my recent comments about Multiply and its email invitations, and does a very good job of making my argument more clear than I did, I think.

Clay Shirky

Stowe, reading my earlier Multiply rant, responds saying Multiply isn’t spam, and says that we need a statement of purpose for social networks to adhere to.

I’m more pessimistic than he; I believe that Multiply join messages are spam. Now spam has the “I know it when I see it” problem, so to talk carefully about it requires a specified definition. Here’s mine — spam is unsolicited mail, sent without regard to the particular identity of the recipient, and outside the context of an existing relationship.

Anyone sending me mail because I am on a list I haven’t asked to be on; without having a reason to think that I, in particular, would want this mail; and without us already knowing one another, is spamming me. In particular, ads sent to me as a member of a category, no matter how targeted, count, in this definition, as spam. You could be advertising a new brand of gin specially brewed for Brooklyn-dwelling Python hackers who like bagpipe music and that mail would still be spam.

If you adopt this definition, even just for the sake of argument, it’s pretty clear that Multiply fails the first and second tests. I did not ask for mail from them, and they are not sending me mail because they know me — they simply have my address on a list furnished by my friends. […] I think where Stowe and I may disagree is in point #3: do I have an existing relationship with the sender of the mail?

This is, I admit, a judgement call, and to re-phrase what I think Stowe is saying, Multiply is operating in good faith as a proxy for its users. My friends have furnished my address to Multiply, and authorized the service to contact me on their behalf. Thus the incessant messages from Multiply should be thought of as coming from my friends, and not from Multiply itself.

I hope I have characterized Stowe’s view correctly; in any case, I think Multiply fails this test as well, because I think they are engaged in a new form of targeted marketing. Jon Lebkowsky’s farewell to Multiply message includes this observation: “…next thing you know, Multiply was spamming all my Orkut contacts with a brainless marketing letter supposedly written by yours truly, only I didn’t see it until someone said no, no way, and noted the cheerful Muzak inanity of the message sent in my name.”

Clay has exactly defined the boundary cases in the ethical quagmire we are struggling with here:

1. I have assumed that the individual adding me to their contact list at Multiply (or elsewhere) is actually an individual known to me, and therefore I would not be surprised at getting an email invitation from them. Alternatively, if the invitation is coming from a party “outside the context of an existing relationship” it *should* be considered spam. But such an activity would be spamming on the part of that party (individual or group), and not necessarily on the part of the service. For example, someone could join LinkedIn for the purpose of spamming, which would not be the fault of LinkedIn, per se.
2. If a SNA coopts the contact list of its users and sends unknown, uneditable, and unannounced email invitations or (even worse) unsolicited advertisements for its or other services, that should be considered spam. This is what seems to have happened in Jon Lebowsky’s case, when he used the Multiply feature to invite his Orkut contacts… or so he thought. (I found that at least one of the Orkut or Friendster invitation features was not working yesterday when I was fiddling at Multiply — maybe they are revamping while this debate rages?)

I am totally opposed to parties spamming through SNAs as in case #1, and just as opposed to SNAs that meet case #2. I stated that SNAs try to make legitimate invitation of known contacts by email easy, to increase the acceptability of use. Clay argues that social connectedness should come at a slower rate, at a higher cost:

I think the growth of Friendster, one user at a time, undermines this notion, but however hard it makes it, that is a good amount of hard. Getting rapid growth one user at a time is difficult because it is supposed to be difficult. Social systems are, by definition, inefficient, and attempts to make them high throughput end up destroying them.

This last comment can be interpreted almost as a condemnation of the teflon slick feel of social networking applications, across the board, and I think gets into the guts of the problem: when social networking applications are targeted toward supporting human scale (not mass database) social networking for appropriate (non spam) purposes within the context of existing social (not commercial) relationships, things are fine. When you stray outside of any of those modifiers, it’s immoral, wrong, and possibly illegal under the CAN Spam Act.

Finally, Clay doesn’t hold with my push for a code of ethics that all should accord with (along the lines of what Duncan Work at LinkedIn recently pushed in his “Bill of Rights”), arguing for a more Darwinian solution, where the malefactors will just die off. I don’t know; I think the idea has legs, so I am going to try to boil down a short list of “do’s and don’ts” for SNAs, and promulgate it as the Ten Commandments of SNAs.

For example, Clay suggests that every email invitation from an SNA should include an explicit and easily discovered opt-out button. I strongly agree. The SNAs may want to qualify it in various ways (opt-out only for invitations from the specific sender; for a specific period of time; or for all invitations, ever), but there should be a way to opt-out, both at the SNA’s website and in every email invitation or other communication.

The Ten Commandments of Social Networking Applications (Part 1):

1. Social networking applications shall provide explicit and easily used opt-out features; specifically, every message sent by a social networking application on behalf of users, as marketing, or for whatever purpose shall provide a mechanism for complete opt-out, as well as a means to opt-out by email and at the SNA website.
2. SNAs shall not send messages to any user’s contacts without the explicit consent of the user, and without first displaying both the list of contacts to which the message is to be directed, as well as the complete content of the message.
3. SNAs shall not expose any user’s contact information or the information associated with the user’s contacts to anyone other than the user without the explicit permission of the user.
4. SNAs shall prohibit unsolicited commercial messages through their systems, and should bar or block users that try to send such messages.
5. SNAs shall provide means so that users can block messages from specific users.
6. SNAs shall provide users an “unlisted” capability, so that their use of the system can be undiscoverable if they wish.

Well, that’s a start. Other recommendations are cheerfully accepted.