make meaning
That’s Hans Rosling going on about how we destroy our planet. He’s one of my new heroes :) The other two are definitely Kevin Rose and Evan Williams – two guys who have done incredible things online in terms of social web.
It’s 3.19 am, been awake for almost 24 hours, it’s time to get a few hours sleep and go conferencing again tomorrow. Like my friend said, or almost accused me of – I do actually do feel being here a bit like being in a candy store.
I’ve been talking about this to some of my friends for quite some time that we might see something like this in the near future and now I’m starting to see it in my own behaviour. I’m talking about Facebook being so powerful of a community that it’s disturbing the use of other social sites, despite it lacking the features of these other social sites. This is something that sites with strong social aspects should be worried about. Seriously worried.
The use of the social application I mainly see myself questioning is Jaiku. Now that it has closed registrations, it’s hard to invite people to use it and I only have about a bunch of people using the application. This of course results in the whole application not being very useful, even though I consider myself being in the innovator/early adopter groups with regard to the technology life cycle.
Facebook on the other hand is not that useful (especially from the mobile) and it’s not really micro blogging when you change your status line. However, it has severe social implications. My friends are able to see what I’m up to, and what’s really scary is that almost all my friends are using it to update their status. Those that use this feature know how clumsy and detached it is from your usage patterns – you have to open your browser, sign in to Facebook, change your status as compared to Jaiku’s take your phone and post a new Jaiku.
I find myself wondering if I should stop using Jaiku, because it doesn’t fulfil its social use anymore – Facebook is simply so much more powerful, there’s a lot more social pull. This of course will be a major problem for other sites with strong social aspects, such as LinkedIn, Last.fm and so forth. Only when the social groups that dominate the applications in your own circle of friends are far enough from each other is there a chance of adoption for you with regard to that application. With Jaiku, it shares pretty much the same social group with Facebook and therefore I find myself questioning the use of it when there’s a lot more value in using Facebook (despite lacking the features).
What does this all add up to?
Well, it certainly affects the way websites and companies should see their line of business and strategy of growing as well as their product development. It’s pretty self evident that you have to have the features to grow and keep the user base satisfied, but these features should very strongly support social interaction in your service – only then do they create enough stickiness and glue. The power of the website and the business is definitely in the community and how well the company can hang on to, and develop, that community.
There’s also a big question to ask in terms of Roger’s theory of diffusion. Is the theory itself valid anymore or are the diffusion cycles dramatically shorter in social applications. Do innovators matter anymore, when you can directly tap into the mass market and due to the architecture of the application, spread very rapidly in that group?
Update: TechCrunch and VentureBeat are reporting on a “gang-up” on Facebook. Seems like I wasn’t alone with the thinking.
There are rumours running around that Viacom is expected to buy Last.fm for 450 million USD. Mashable reports on a DealBreaker.com rumour that Viacom is chucking in an offer for the “YouTube” of music.
Looks interesting – especially as this will be one of the first large web2.0 music capitalisations. Furthermore, there might be something happening as Joi is in SF for a day and AFAIK he’s on the board of last.fm.
One thing I’d really like to see from Jaiku is a last.fm type badge that you could easily paste into your blog to show the last 5 Jaiku posts. This is something that I think would explode the usage of Jaiku among bloggers. The current badge isn’t really that useful anymore as it only shows where you are located when I’d really like to show people what I’ve been up to recently and Jaiku is an amazing application for that.
Therefore the location based function of Jaiku is interesting but I’d still like to use it more as a miniblog of what I’ve been doing and where I am.
Any comments?
New York Times has an article on how 22-year old Mark Zucherman has been offered close to 900 million dollars for his social networking site Facebook. He turned down an offer of $750m offer from Viacom in January as he was asking for 2 billion USD.
Social networking sites aren’t going to be just internet sites in the near future, they are going to platforms where millions of people spend time.
(via Guardian)