SocialStartups.com

(This post is a longer take on the things mentioned here and here.)

Pre-condition #1: Identity

Facebook, with the release of social plugins, has officially announced that they believe they are the Internet's digital identity system*. How so? Their new social plugins — Like buttons, Personalized widgets, site-wide toolbars — all assume that you are logged into Facebook all the time. No one has ever made an assumption like that before, and it dramatically changes the game. Also, it's scary because it's probably true.

[Update: My old boss Ted reminds me that Amazon Associates widgets also assume you are logged in, to show you personalized ads. IMO, it's more pernicious now because Facebook is approaching 500M users. If you exist on the Internet, you are probably on Facebook.]

Pre-condition #2: Traffic

Everyone wants traffic, and nobody has more of it than Facebook. So when Facebook announced "If you install our bug into your system, we'll send you traffic", publishers celebrated. Of course CNN wants their links in Facebook Newsfeeds. More traffic = more pageviews = higher CPMs to charge advertisers. Thanks to 20th century capitalism, everyone is chasing short-term metrics. Classic tragedy of the commons.

Scary Result #1: Ad network domination

Given pre-condition #2 (traffic), Facebook Like buttons are going to be everywhere. All of the top sites will have them, and most of the medium-sized sites will too. Who wouldn't want more traffic in exchange for adding one simple line of code, so simple anyone could do it? 

What does this mean? Facebook is going to have a window into every important website on the internet. You went to Victoria Secret? Facebook knows (see Pre-condition #1). You then went to Gawker? Facebook can show you ads for Victoria Secret products on Gawker because it knows you were just there. It's called ad re-targeting, and it's the most effective innovation online ads have seen in a while. And no one will be able to do it better than Facebook.

Scary Result #2: We know what you buy

There's been lots of talk about Facebook Credits – a Facebook created currency that allows you to buy real or virtual goods using your credit card, PayPal, etc. What if you could get a real Facebook credit card? Facebook would then be able to attain the Holy Grail of Brick & Mortar retailing – tying together what you are buying with your digital identity (again, pre-condition #1). Right now, millions (billions?) of dollars are spent by small businesses, trying to get you in the door – Happy Hour specials, Buy One Get One Free, Yellow Pages ads. But if you come in and buy something, they have no idea who you are, and therefore have no way to encourage you to come back**. 

A Facebook credit card is different. They know exactly who you are when you buy that special pair of Louboutins. And they can use that information to show you better ads or product recommendations. Remember, Amazon and Netflix give you great recommendations because they have more data, not better algorithms. And because Facebook sees financial benefits from these alternative streams, the Facebook credit card can have better rewards / lower rates than anything else, and they have the scale to do it. No wonder Blippy raised $11.2M at a $46.2M valuation.

Scary Result #3: We know where you are

f8 attendees had RFID chips implanted in their badges. To check-in, you simply swipe your badge against a kiosk. What if your Facebook credit card had an RFID chip in it? This should scare the shit out of Foursquare, Gowalla, and Bump. Imagine I walk into a cafe and the owner says, press your card against this pad to check-in; 10th check-in gets you a free coffee. No more fumbling for your iphone, waiting for the GPS / cell tower triangulation, and looking like an idiot. You don't even have to take the card out of your wallet – wave your whole wallet over the reader and you're in. Or, just buy something.

And don't think Facebook doesn't have the scale or cash or ambition to create a Point of Sale system; that'll just close the loop even tighter.

Why this scares the shit out of me

Facebook is filled with really, really, really smart people. And they've shown an incredible ability to innovate at large scale, with an ambition that is unmatched. So what happens when we give up our privacy in exchange for 5% off? What happens when Facebook knows more about the economy's transactions than Visa? What happens when Facebook is watching you closer than Google?

Data is everything in the 21st century. Who ever has more data wins the Internet, and I don't trust Facebook with that kind of scale and power.

————–

*You might remember the single sign-on wars of years past: Microsoft Passport, YahooID, OpenID, then later Facebook Connect / Twitter Connect / OAuth.

**The closest thing are loyalty punch cards you get at cafes or pencil & paper mailing list signups.

In the last 2 years, a few different sites have implemented some very successful social designs. I’ll lay out 5 social design patterns here and then follow up with case studies in subsequent posts. These apply to sites with user-generated content where the content is the primary object.

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.

Tumblr Breeds Its Own Species Of Griefer: The Anonyblogger is an article by Silicon Alley Insider about Tumblr and some serious trouble they’ve been having with trolls ( or griefer, if you prefer that term). The basic problem is spelled out nicely in the article:

I attended David Karp’s talk yesterday at Web 2.0 Expo called “Design Case Studies: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” (presenting alongside Avi Munchnik of Aviary). David presented the concept of “hell banning”, which means making a user invisible to everyone but themself. So the troll continues to post and sees their posts up on the site, but to everyone else it seems like the troll has suddenly disappeared.

I had the pleasure of having lunch with David afterwards, and I asked him more about that, specifically “Won’t the troll’s followers be suspicious when suddenly their anti-hero disappears?”. David said no, because all of the trolls followers still see the offensive posts, it’s just everyone else that benefits from the muting.

That’s interesting. You are now segregating your audience into troll supporters and everyone else. You give the troll a soapbox and their existing audience, and the troll can scream and yell into that vacuum to their heart’s content. Everyone else, however, is spared the abuse and harassment.

Of course, this only works if you have a social network where users can follow each other. For a traditional discussion board, this won’t work nearly as effectively.

Tags: socialnetworking, discussion boards, tumblr, trolls, griefers, web 2.0 expo

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 think the best innovation from twitter was messaging with @username. If I remember right, Twitter didn’t support that at first – it was a grassroots invention by Twitter users that was picked up and officially supported. Facebook did something similar even before Twitter: when you wrote a post on your Facebook blog (haven’t seen much uptake there), you can choose from your friends list which friends are mentioned in the post. Kinda kludgy solution though, since you have to scroll through hundreds of people and click a bunch of checkboxes.

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?