Closely related to my previous post is the whole issue of data portability. Today social networks are making it as hard as possible for people to take their data with them when they want to leave (or even if they just want to double or triple up on social networks). This is sadly reminiscent of the fight the mobile operators put up when they had to implement number portability.
Both are bad approaches because they seek to rely on artificial barriers to entry/exit rather than genuine competitive differentiation in their products. If wireless carrier A was good enough, it wouldn’t have to worry about number portability because no subscriber would want to go to carrier B. Ditto with social networks. Facebook should be trying to make the experience it offers to its members as good as possible, rather than trying to raise the bar to data portability as high as possible.
The endgame for social networking has two elements – input and output:
Input: One place to enter all data which will show up on all profiles. I want to enter my email address, my favourite music, my photos, my friend lists etc. in one place and one place only. Currently I have to repeat these tasks and others every time I log in to a new site
Output: The ability for my one set of personal information and social network data to be presented on a multitude of different front ends, with the ability for me to customise which information appears where and to which groups of people.
Facebook is slowly getting to the second part with its forthcoming friend lists privacy options, but of course that will only apply to Facebook and not to any other social networks. Moli is geared up to doing the second part very well too. Mahalo appears to have a function which will kludge together different profiles into a single setting, which mimics some of the benefits of the first option but doesn’t really bring it all together, and doesn’t allow me to enter my data once.
The Google OpenSocial initiative will hopefully push us further down the road towards the achievement of both goals, but ultimately it should be relatively easy to do the first given all the APIs available for social networking sites today. The second shoudn’t be too hard either, for the same reason. Ultimately, I think that either the single service provider or perhaps two separate service providers who can provide this backend and front end to the social networking world will be kings, not players like Facebook, which will merely sit in the middle, watching data fly through from and to other places.
This clever chap has figured out how to analyse Facebook’s demographics by using its advertising platform. It yields some fascinating results, such as:
considerably more people are listed as female than male in both the US and the UK (and in most other countries too)
only a small percentage of total users are under 18 – a large majority are adults (compare with MySpace). And even of the under-18s most are 16 or 17 rather than younger
there are 8 million or so members in the UK, but only 1 million in France, 400,000 in Germany and 200,000 in Italy (there are 20+ million in the US)
there are 150,000 people in the US over 65 (or who admit to being over 65) on Facebook (and how many more who are claiming to be 35?)
"A Social Telco is an operator which seeks and achieves deep integration between its own core assets and functionality and that of social networks and the broader sphere of web 2.0 services and applications in order to develop new channels for its services and harness greater innovation in the creation of new services."
This post provides a brief introduction to the topic. This blog as a whole provides more detail! The term is my own invention but I hope it may prove useful in describing one of the ways telcos need to evolve to stay relevant to their customers.
