1. Badges and game mechanics – Driven by the success of foursquare and Farmville, everyone is going to want badges and game mechanics embedded in their apps. Hell, we might do it, too. Not only do well-tuned game mechanics increase engagement, it also increases user exploration and education. Of course, it's easy to do it badly, and the results are not pleasant (see: Digg's leaderboard). Josh Porter has a good post on leaderboards.
2. Social media spreads deep within organizations – This is one of the bets we're making at Postling. The idea is that representing your organization on social media sites like Twitter will spread beyond the marketing department or the corporate communications / PR department. What if your salesperson at Bergdorf Goodman or Topshop had a twitter account and could provide fashion advice or tell you about sales? What if the chef at your local gourmet restaurant shared photos on his flickr account in addition to the blog and twitter account the restaurant manager may use? What if your local car mechanic posted short videos explaining what he was fixing and how it all works while the car dealership posts news about events, sales, and recalls?
3. A brief tech bubble – I think the financial markets are going to tick up a bit (although temporarily, as consumers still have more debt than they can manage) and VCs are going to be pushing for returns since their funds have done horribly over the last decade. You'll see some M&A and a couple IPOs (Facebook, Yelp, or Zynga, anyone?) in the rush to get liquidity before the window snaps shut. Also, some smart deals made by early stage firms like First Round and USV are going to see some sizable follow-on rounds.
4. Social media content as advertising – This one might not happen until 2011, but it's starting with HuffPo and VentureHacks. Basically, social media content – created to educate and inform – is the next form of brand / display advertising. Banner ads don't work, but how about blog posts or tweets? Bloggers have known that their content builds their brand reputation for years now, but I predict in 2010 we will finally see serious ad spend shifted into content creation. Next up: social media content ad networks. Postling will be there.
5. Rise of incubators and early stage funds by giant firms - In an effort to save themselves from almost certain death thanks to the sheer size of their funds ($1 Billion) coupled with the tiny amounts of capital needed to fund internet startups (< $1 million), the big funds will shrink in half and try to invest in early stage startups. Related to #3, this means it will be easier for new startups to get funding, but many won't get the support they need because the big funds simply do not have enough time / manpower to give their full attention to each of their investments. Why? Because to satisfy their investors, they need to return a huge amount of money, and they need to invest in hundreds of early stage startups (at $500k a pop) to have a chance. Eventually the big funds will give up and either shrink down to <$200 million or turn their focus to pharma, cleantech, and other life sciences investments. 

So that's my tech and startups predictions for 2010. What are yours? 

Public Timeline

I’m starting with the public timeline because, while it’s not the sexiest thing on this list, it’s critical for new users as a solution to the cold start problem. The public timeline is the first place new users will look for new content. It’s also how they will determine if they wish to join your community – the size, the tone, the cultural-norms, and the freshness of your community is easily communicated via the public timeline. And, of course, it’s also where new users can find other interesting users, which leads me to my next pattern.

Asymmetrical Follow

This has been written about before, so I won’t say much. Asymmetrical follow means I can follow the updates of a user without their permission. They, in turn, could follow me back but it’s not required. This allows for the kind of preferential attachment characteristic of scale-free networks, and it’s scale-free networks that are primed for viral propagation. When the goal is content distribution powered by network effects, it just doesn’t matter if you actually know the person or not. All that matters is if the person if a reliable source for interesting content. This is why social networks have failed to become anything more than social networks. Remember this graph from Brad Horowitz?

Only 1% of a community are content creators

Most people’s social networks aren’t large enough to contain more than a handful of super-star content creators. I believe the average Facebook account has 300 users. 1% of that is 3 – not enough to be a valuable source of content. If you think Dunbar’s number is a more accurate group size – which I do not with regard to online communities – then you’re only left with 1 or 2 people (1% of 150 = 1.5). Yes, you can argue that Facebook has done very well for itself living off of soap-opera like content – who is dating whom, who got drunk at what party, what was she wearing?!?) but there are natural limits to that growth. Their commenting feature will help drive page views, but there isn’t a whole lot of new value being created there.

Newsfeed

Nothing shocking about this. Now that your users have gone out and followed their friends and other interesting users, their homepage should now be the newsfeed that aggregates all of that content into one place. But it’s not sufficient just to include the stream of content. You need to also show who contributed that content (and, in the case of re-blogging, the other hands it passed through). Why? Because that’s how you can evaluate the people you are following (and, with re-blogging, discover new people to follow).

Re-blogging

I’m a huge re-blogging fan. It’s the engine that drives the content diffusion through the network. The concept is simple: if someone I’m following shares something interesting, I can easily push that same interesting piece of content out to everyone who is following me while providing proper attribution. Someone who follows me can do the same, and again, and again. This is really powerful, as the people who follow me are most likely not the same as the people I follow. Re-blogging provides a transport device for great interesting content to travel through connected components of the network (which are generally much larger than your immediate social network).

Social Proof

While judging the content someone shares is a decent proxy for evaluating whether or not to follow that person, social proof can help. Show how many followers the person has. Better yet, calculate their influence (like PageRank does for websites). Or, show how many favorites their posts have accrued or re-blogs their posts have had. It’s a quick and easy way for users to ascertain the reputation of a user in the context of your site.

Bonus: APIs and RSS

I promised five, but here’s an extra. Use APIs and RSS to amplify your power. Provide APIs so that others can build tools that extend your reach. Publish RSS feeds so that users can incorporate your interesting content into their existing routines. Make use of other companies’ APIs to publish your content out to them (like publishing to Twitter). It’s very difficult to create new habits, but it’s much easier to go where your users already are (Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader in my case).

Like I said at the start, I’ll be back soon with some commentary on how well (or not) various sites are implementing these ideas. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking about Blip.fm, bit.ly, and Soup.io. I’d love to talk about Etsy, but I feel like it wouldn’t be appropriate.

I was chatting with my friend Dan Nelson today after bumping into him at the Cornell Music Department library. He’s currently a Ph.D student at UPenn studying musical composition. He threw an idea at me and, after some collaboration, we came up with something akin to a Flickr for composed music.

It would work like this:

Everyone who registers gets a tumblog. (Side note: I love Tumblr. I thought about apologizing to everyone who keeps hearing me implement ideas with Tumblr, but I’m not going to. They deserve it for a job well done.)

Composers will use their tumblogs to publish 2 things. One, an mp3 of their composition. Two, a PDF of the score. Composers are encouraged to tag their content for improved discovery.

Everyone can use their tumblr dashboard to follow composers they like and heart music they like. Everyone can also use their tumblogs to re-blog music they particularly like and post about their experience with the music they’ve discovered.

Like Flickr, people can search for music or composers. Like Flickr, you can explore the most interesting compositions. And most importantly, like Flickr, you can pay to have a hard copy printed, bound, and mailed directly to you.

Your market is anyone who buys sheet music – basically every school and private music teacher in the country (and internationally). Sure, some people would just print out the PDFs for free, but I bet enough schools and teachers would pay for the nicely published and bound parts and score to make a profit. Like Chris Anderson has been saying since he wrote the Long Tail, you can be successful even if only a minority of your users pay.

If successful, what we will have done is broken the pre-Internet strangehold of the major publishing houses and academic elitism on composed music, similar to what Vimeo is doing for video and Etsy is doing for handmade goods. Something I thought about when I was at Etsy that applies here is, “An audience for every artist.” We can create a forum for quality composed music with a long tail. We can use social aggregation instead of editorial fiat to discovery great music. We can empower people to try their hand at composition even if they are a one-hit-wonder.

If anyone is interested in helping Dan build this company, please contact me – david.lifson at gmail – and I’ll pass your name along. It’s super simple, engineering-wise; Tumblr’s API is free and easy to use, storing the data and metadata is easy, slap a search index on the data, and you’re done. All that would be left is to set up a business partnership with a printing company like Subito Music, and the task of getting the word out and building up a community. And really, how many startups these days come with a business model, not to mention a highly targeted audience and a trove of user preference data.

Doc Searls Weblog · The Live Web

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. The web is a medium for activities – for collaboration and participation. When I read (or hear or watch) something, I want to know who created that content. I want to respond to it (as I am now with this post). I can publish this post out to my friends via a variety of methods thanks to RSS, so that my content can go to where my friends’ are, and not forcing them to come to me.

It’s perfect that at the end of Doc Searls’ blog post he links to Umair Haque’s post called How to Build a Next-Gen Business Now. Read it. Understand it. Expand the pie for everyone.

Thanks to a Facebook Application called Friend Wheel, I can generate the visualization pictured above of my 549 Facebook friends (and still growing). It’s kinda fun to look at; my friends are listing around the edges of the circle, and a line connects to people who are also friends of each other on facebook.  The reds, oranges, and yellows are high school friends. The deep blues are Amazon.com friends. The greens and aquas and most of the rest are college friends.

I had dinner with my friend Steve McNally last night, who is roommates with my other friend Jake Tuck. Lisa asked me which one was I closer to. My response was that I had more history with Jake (we were housemates all through college, whereas Steve only lived in my house for half of college) but was probably closer to Steve since we shared a passion for baseball. Tough call, since Jake is a musician (as I am). Then Lisa asked me if they were friends with Will Paul. I said no, because Will is a hometown friend while Jake and Steve were college friends. So that got me into thinking about how to visual social networks and how inadequate two dimensions is.

Let’s try three dimensions. For the x- and y-axis, imagine an ideaspace – this is a plane that maps out the various interests people have, the hobbies they participate in, the fields they work in. So you have one circle for the friends you go to jazz concerts with, one circle for your photowalking friends, one for your baseball friends. The size of the circle is the number of mutual friends you have who share that interest. At the center, (0,0), is you. The circles in the plane are arranged such that the interests that are most passionate to you are closest to the center. Does this make sense? Two dimensional graph containing overlapping circles of various sizes, with the ones closest to center being of the most interest to you. Got it? Good.

Now for the third dimension, which is time. Over time, you will naturally transition environments. High school, college, work, living abroad, joining the local book club, marrying your spouse and meeting her friends and family, moving to the suburbs to raise a family, etc. Each of these events expands your social network and can form dense clumps. The third dimension in our visualization allows for the stacking of these clumps. It is more uncommon for connections to span the clumps, but it can happen and can be enlightening. I think seeing such a visualization would tell a lot about a person – what their interests are, who their friends are, and how have they changed over time. What’s your social network look like in three dimensions?

I considered Tim O’Reilly’s suggestion of investing in pieces of an “Internet Operating System”, which could be the answer although they’d have to fight Amazon, Google, Cisco and others for the bragging rights. Requirement (1) no, (2) yes.

I considered gaming, hardware, healthcare, social networking, and others…. but Microsoft is always involved there with mixed success. Is there anything left?

I’ve got a crazy suggestion. And yes, your own personal blog is the perfect place for crazy suggestions. So here it is – Microsoft should work to be the #1 destination site for vertical searching of the “organic web” (I just made that phrase up). The organic web would be defined as information that is continually changing. One example is airline ticket prices. Another is real estate, and another is classifieds. Microsoft should go out and develop / acquire any company who currently has the following properties: (1) The relevant data changes continuously, (2) The site is a leading player in their vertical, and (3) search is the main user activity on the site. Examples I can think of are Farecast (they bought this one), Craigslist (good luck there), and Redfin. With insider access to the data, Microsoft could provide superior search experiences to Google. Microsoft could then create a search portal that would be the first place everyone would go to search for data in these areas. Google’s crawlers can only go so fast – if Microsoft could provide a “real-time” search engine customized to a particular vertical, they could differentiate themselves in a very powerful way.

That’s it, keeping it short tonight since I’ve got a meeting in 10 hours with the CEO, COO, a few others.

It’s obvious from the evolution of @replies on Twitter that this is something very organic and natural to humans. The internet is not a solitary vacuum; all software is social.

So here’s a thought: let’s bring @replies to the rest of the web. Whether I’m writing a post on my blog or commenting on a Flickr photo or sharing an item on Google Reader, I should be able to use @username. This serves two purposes.

1. Who is being referred to?

One is to give everyone reading your comment to understand who you are talking to. This is a basic tenet of face-to-face group communication – you turn to a specific person in the group, address them by name, and speak. Sometimes, like at a big dinner party, you might not know all the guests, leaving you guessing as to who is whom and what their background is. On the internet, we can do better. By linking to some kind of profile, the comment reader can read up on who is being pulled into the conversation and better understand context.

2. Who is referring to you?

Here’s something the internet can do that can’t happen in real life – being able to read the record of all conversations that made reference to you. Twitter does this with their “Replies” page. Why not off Twitter as well?

How #1 could be implemented

This is a really difficult engineering problem, and I won’t pretend like I’ve got all the answers. So I’ll do my best. There are a number of existing web sites that vend OpenID accounts, including Yahoo, Blogger, and LiveJournal. Here’s the list. All of these services support some kind of “Profile” page, where the user can publish information about themselves. So we have a decentralized way of naming people (OpenID) and we have a way to lookup information about that person (hosted profile). So what’s missing is browser support for interpreting the @reply markup.

What’s that you say? No one is going to use awkward OpenID URLs to name people? You’re right. So, browsers will also need hooks into your Address Book, so that they know which “John” you are referring to. This could have the same auto-complete UI that email clients already support – as soon as you start typing @John, a small drop down appears next to your cursor showing the various people you know who match “John”. You pick the right one, and the markup is entered for you, linking to John’s profile.

How #2 could be implemented

The last bit of this is discovering all the places people are referring to you. This is tricky, and the two ideas I have have weaknesses. One idea uses another open technology called XMPP, the Jabber protocol. Here’s how it could work. When your browser publishes “@John”, it will use XMPP to send a message to John’s OpenID server notifying John of the reference to his name. When John logs into his OpenID-supporting service of choice, he can be shown all of the messages that have been pushed to him.

The other idea is for the OpenID server to support an HTTP POST whose payload would be the URL where the reference was made. The OpenID server would log all traffic to that special URL and pass it on to John once he logs in.

Thoughts?

Anyone have thoughts on this? Obviously to big (some might call it “unlikely”) changes need to happen. First, browsers need to add support for OpenID based @name markup. Second, browsers need to know how to send XMPP messages (or, invoke a hidden URL hosted by the OpenID server, which might be easier.) Lastly, OpenID servers need to process these incoming messages and present them to the user in some helpful way.

Naturally, I imagine there are a host of security concerns to work through, especially with browsers pushing URLs around. Still, I think this would create a very interesting social ecosystem. What do you think?

Amazing, I was just writing up something like this yesterday. I said:

For good measure, you could also add in GPhone data – who is in my address book, what I’m saying over SMS and phone conversation (transcribed into text via a service like Jott), and my location. The only part (and I admit it’s a crucial part) that I don’t understand is how Google will benefit by “out-opening” Facebook. My guess is that more data = googly goodness. Google will know more about you if you take Google with you, or bring the places you visit to Google.

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Tags: Google, social networks, platform

This article reminded me that the Facebook vs. MySpace vs. Google platform wars may be a little premature. The biggest platform, outside the OS, is the browser. Everyone uses it, and through the browser, everyone accesses all other sites. Your browser stores your account information, commonly submitted form fields like email address, street address, credit card numbers. There are already a multitude of extensions.

This article reminds me that Google is working on a Google-branded Firefox browser. My guess is that this ties right in with Google’s claim to release a platform that is more open than Facebook’s. What if they centered it around the browser?

Here’s how this would work. Google knows my social network from Gmail, GTalk, and Orkut (if I use Orkut). Google knows all of my login credentials for all sites on the internet because every time I log into a new site, Google asks me if I’d like to save that information with them so that I don’t have to be bothered with logging in to Amazon, Netflix, eBay, etc. Google has access to my areas of expertise by applying semantic analysis (like what Twine does) to my emails (Gmail), documents/spreadsheets/presentations (Google office suite), and local files (Google Desktop). Google knows my financial portfolio (Google Finance). Google knows what areas I’m interested in (Google Reader, iGoogle, and my browsing history).

Mozilla could do this too – Combining Thunderbird (email) and Sunbird (Calendar) with Firefox  would get you a social network, areas of interest, and login credentials. Various extensions have been created for RSS aggregation, messaging, bookmarking, etc. I think it would be a hell of a bold bet, but an interesting one.

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Tags: facebook, google, firefox, platform

Sorry, but I think there is a serious disconnect between what Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins wants and what most Facebook users would want.

A podcast client? How many people know what a podcast is?

A Top 40 list? We know now that most adds are from the Profile box. So again, most users won’t care what’s in the app directory.

A PR Connection Tool? Right, because everyone needs to initiate a little PR.

IRC and FTP clients? How many people still use those? Way back when, Facebook launched a P2P media sharing client named Wirehog, which was a total disaster. I’m not convinced an FTP client would do better.

I admit I actually have no understand of his 5th wish list idea, so I won’t comment. I think he’s trying to describe Ning.

My top 5 wish list

1. A personalized version of Google News, taken from the shared items posted from your Friends.

2. Tagging of friends. This is something suspected is in the works. I want to be able to send messages or invites only to certain friends.

3. OpenID for all facebook users. Every facebook user should be able to easily link their Facebook account with their Amazon or eBay or Paypal or Skype accounts. E-Commerce has a large role to play in Facebook, and lining up who you are in facebook to who are you in Skype is crucial.

4. Stronger integration with local Neighborhoods. So yes, there are a few Neighborhood apps, but Facebook would be well served by growing the connectedness of a geographic community. Want to throw a party for the neighborhood? Find playmates for your kids? Tell your neighbors to look for your lost cat? The internet can help counteract what Robert Putnam describes in Bowling Alone.

5. A real email client. Sure, there is Facebook messaging, but what Facebook really should do is build Gmail right into Facebook. They could easily tack on features found in Xobni and Twine, and you’d get a heck of an email application.

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Tags: facebook