Web X.0

In case you want to get rich and/or work for Yahoo

Regardless of what happens on November 5th, and regardless of whether we end up calling social networks a "graph" or not... -
It's fairly clear that Yahoo will soon be scrambling to find a company that takes your Flickr friends, del.icio.us friends, Yahoo Mail contacts, IM contacts, etc, etc and merges them all into something that makes sense. A "social graph" perhaps.

This probably won't be a multi-billion-dollar acquisition, but it will almost certainly happen.

I don't recommend building-for-flipping, but if you're an entrepreneur and are eager to work for Yahoo with a nice signing package - here's a nice opportunity for you.

If you do use this tip, please send me a small comission in 6-8 months... :-)

{image captured here}

Implicit Social Networks

{Image CC by jared Thanks!}

Rogel rants about social networks here and here. We (=outbrain) are often categorized as being a social network focused on sharing of blog content. I had this question come up on several occasions, especially with VC's, and I get annoyed every time. After all, I've been known to quote this...:

"As a matter of fact, I think I know more social networks than people..."

I always argued the notion of outbrain being a social network. That's exactly what I was trying to avoid! I didn't want to enter my contacts in the 173rd site where my only real practical use would be invitation management... I have enough of that on LinkedIn and FaceBook, etc, etc!

But it kept bugging me... after all, it is true that outbrain is a platform for social recommendations of blog content... hmmmm - did we fall in the trap we were trying to avoid?

Then one day, my co-founder Ori made a brilliant observation:

outbrain is an implicit social network

That's it! The world of social networks breaks into 2 categories: explicit networks and implicit ones. I think they can roughly be categorized as follows:

• Explicit Social Network - a person is defined by the people s/he connects to
  (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace are good examples)
• Implicit Social Network - a person is defined by his/her interests
  (Last.FM, Amazon, Netflix and outbrain are good examples)

The power of implicit social networks is that they are not limited to the people you happen to know. Their weakness is in letting algorithms make social decisions for people. If the algorithms are good and the data set is comprehensive, magic happens. We're getting there...

Social network fatigue

Jason Calacanis has two great posts about social network fatigue. I couldn't agree more... - this is becoming ridiculous.

Reminds me of a great quote I posted here:

"As a matter of fact, I think I know more social networks than people."

MySpeace

My quote-of-the-month award goes to the DeGardner blog (slightly edited):

"As a matter of fact, I think I know more social networks than people."

This space is becoming fairly absurd. There are obviously a ton of social networks for teenagers, networks for college students, for professionals, for actors, for mommies and for their girls, networks for Hispanics, for Muslims, for hockey fans, for families, or any friends, for city dwellers, for Googlers, and even for dogs and cats!

With all these social networks it's sort of a mystery that no one has taken a stab at a social network focused on peace - A network with a sole purpose of creating cross-border connections in order to humanify both sides. It's much more difficult to throw bombs at each other when everyone is personally acquainted with 3-4 people on the other side of the border...

The personal value factor in viral apps

David Beisel talks about what makes an online service viral and proposes 3 variables that determine the viral adoption of an online service:

Viral adoption = (how inherently sharable x how easily sharable) x (integration of sharing into content/service)

Agreed on all 3, but I think David is missing the #1 factor that determines the success of the viral adoption: the personal value factor.  Both LinkedIn and IM would score similarly on David's formula above (both are inherently sharable, both are easy to share and in both examples the sharing is extremely integrated into the service). However, the personal value derived by having my friends on the same IM service as I use is 100x greater than the personal value I gain by having each and every one of my friends on LinkedIn (and btw - I'm a big LinkedIn fan). That's the primary reason for ICQ, AIM, etc having quite a few more active users than LinkedIn...

Or as Joshua Porter noted a while back:

From now on I’m going to call this idea the “Del.icio.us Lesson”. This is the lesson that personal value precedes network value: that selfish use comes before shared use. We’re seeing it more and more everyday in services like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and is an interesting aspect of networked applications. Even though we’re definitely benefitting from the value of networked software, we’re still not doing so unless the software is valuable to us on a personal level first.