Social Networking: A Business or a Feature?
Interesting post today from Marc Canter, who runs social networking vendor Broadband Mechanics on an important question for service providers to really come to terms with: is social networking a business or a feature?
Or taking it to the next level: will social networking startups like Facebook, MySpace and others be able to keep their users and build a business around them; or will social network components like friending, poking, friend content feeds and more proliferate as features that users expect, and take advantage of, in ALL the software they use in the future.
Canter’s vision, and the vision of his company, is the latter:
If you look at the top of our corporate web site - you’ll see the phrase ‘bringing social to software’. Its our positioning saying “sure we can buid you a stand alone social network - but we can also add social features to the web site you have already”.
This idea has important implications for carriers and service providers aiming to play Facebook catch-up. For starters, if social networking sites don’t survive as destination sites, there may be nothing to “catch-up to.” It would be like trying to catch-up with AOL or Prodigy.
It also means the service providers should be aiming to add social networking features to all the new services they create — and adding them to their existing service sets. In short, every service should include “for you–and your friends” as a standard feature.
This kind of approach is becoming standard in the world of Web applications. Bookmarking services like Delicious become social bookmarking services by letting users share and read their friends bookmarks. Photo services like Flickr become social photo services by letting users comment on, distribute and share their photos with friends. And on and on.
Canter points to a ZDNet blog post that sums it up well:
If you’re Facebook and MySpace social networking is clearly a business that generates a ton of ad inventory. But there are only so many of those success stories. For giants like Yahoo and Google it may make a lot more sense to build social features into existing products. You can still generate the excess ad inventory and target better.
As a service provider, are you ready to deliver — or maybe just re-brand — “social voice mail” or “social caller ID” for your customers AND THEIR FRIENDS?
Let me know what you think in the comments section.
Related Topics: Social Networks, All stories
