The holiday shopping season is upon us, and online advertisers may be considering better use of social networks for more effective advertising this year.  According to AdvertisingAge, a number of advertising tactics have been developing over the years that take advantage of one’s personal network of friends and associates, both offline and online.  Yahoo, for example, has targeted the friends of Yahoo Fantasy players with Fantasy ads, and found an increase of quality click-throughs and uptake as a result.  So this begs the question; can socially graphed advertisements predict what online consumers will buy?
(more…)

Driving in my car today I came to the realization that the current race of the social platforms is still to own my contact list. How I got to this conclusion is slightly abstract but let me explain. Over the weekend I began using an amazing application called Remember the Milk. The application is a web based to do list. Not remarkably innovative in terms of their technology but what makes them so valuable is their accessibility.

Within a day I had installed a Firefox extension enabling me to place my to do list within my Gmail inbox and access it via my iPhone in an easy to use format. Now there is no syncing for my to do list anymore. It is simply always there with me and always updated. Have you ever thought about all the other things you constantly need to sync?

Building My Contact List

If you lose your phone, often times you lose your complete contact list. If you are one of the lucky ones that has a smartphone and has synced their device to their computer, you will be able to recover from your loss. What if I never needed to worry about any of this information disappearing ever again? Technically I can, thanks to Facebook.

I simply load up my Facebook application and there are all of my contacts all with updated contact information that they’ve updated, not me! This idea is not a foreign one to many who remember Plaxo but the problem with Plaxo was that they spammed your internet to get to your contacts. Facebook has instead developed a platform where so much interaction is taking place between your friends and family, you cannot avoid joining.

Facebook is the first company that has realized the most important feature of their platform is to enable people to track and group their contacts. Today I track my contacts via multiple sources: my Blackberry, my laptop, my iPhone, Salesforce.com, Facebook and LinkedIn. The only things that are occasionally in sync are my laptop and one of my mobile devices.

Contrast that with my to do list in which I am always in sync and can access anywhere. While Facebook has a platform for applications, I would argue that their “killer application” is still their ability to track your contacts, group them and have granular privacy features for each. Soon enough, any system that you grant access to will be able to call the Facebook API and get your contacts to improve your experience with the software or device you are interacting with.

Rather than tracking all of my contacts in Salesforce.com, it would be easier to track sales information about specific contacts. This includes things like: when did I last contact this person, what was my communication history with that person, etc. In their current form, “social platforms” exist as websites in which companies can build applications like games and dating apps.

I think that the existence of “social platforms” as websites in which we spend a large portion of our time on is simply a facade. Right now these platforms have enabled us to “waste time” and peer into our friends lives but during all of this time being wasted we have slowly build a more efficient version of our individual “social graphs”.

The Future for Facebook

Now was Facebook simply designed as a really elaborate scheme just to get all of my contacts? Perhaps but at some point the company got diverted. Users don’t want complex tools. They want simple ones that make their lives easier or more enjoyable. Just as Remember the Milk simplified my task list, Facebook could easily simplify my contact list and suddenly become the center for managing our contacts.

Is such a tool worth $15 billion? I’d imagine so if you have the majority of the world’s population in your database. If a large portion of the world’s information (which Google has attempted to index) is worth around $165 billion today, Facebook should easily be worth a 10th of that. How about photo storage, video storage, application hosting and payment processing?

I see those as separate entities for Facebook. The most important feature is the contact list. And as for the other social platforms, where do they fit in? I would suggest that most of the other platforms have a chance at competing but not even MySpace has an accurate representation of my social graph. Ultimately, the most valuable thing to the social platforms is the contact list.

Without an effective contact list, these platforms are simply another distribution channel for content. While that’s not a bad place to be, it’s a completely different focus.

Social networking sites are increasingly becoming a center of activity on the web. MySpace and Facebook have become the modern day portals. Last week, Sarah Perez suggested that social networks will soon become the next iTunes in that they will become the center of media distribution. Back in November I suggested that social networks will become the new T.V.

Ultimately Sarah and I are both saying the same thing. The real question I have though is will these sites continue to exist 5 years from now? If these sites fail to exist 5 years from now, how can they be the new television? Ultimately there are only a few components that are used heavily on social networks: user profiles, friend lists and search. More recently there is the addition of newsfeeds as well.

When I began to write this article, my initial argument was that all of these features can be theoretically abstracted and don’t need to exist within a the traditional sense of a “social network site.” Charlene Li has been saying the same thing for the past few months and while listening to a podcast last night on the future of social networks, pre-recorded at last year’s AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, many of the panelists seemed to agree. Last week I stopped writing this post halfway through though because I began to wonder if this argument is accurate.

Could social networks really be totally abstracted? Would Facebook, which is this generation’s phonebook, really be abstracted to the point where other people create other directories based on their social graph? Twitter already provides complete open access and with the addition of friend grouping features you have a completely open social graph. Somebody is bound to do it, but then again the site that decides to open will need to already have a significant portion of the worldwide social graph.

While this could happen, it will require the average joe to understand the implications of entering all their personal data into this massive (and open) database. Otherwise, I don’t see a reason for the average Facebook user or MySpace user to go recreate their highly complex networks on another site. While I believe openness should and will win, I’m not quite sure how this will take place. Many will point to Friendster and say that users then were willing to easily leave the site.

My argument for those individuals is that the users had not completely entered their entire network. For highly connected individuals, it is extremely difficult to move all of that information to another site. Then again, I use Salesforce.com to manage all my contacts and they provide an export feature. With a little bit of effort my social graph could become portable.

Every time I think about it though, I come back to the same question: would the average Joe understand and do this? Do you think this is destined to happen? Will social networks become just like air and totally transparent? Perhaps there will be two classes of people, those with completely portable social graphs and those that stay locked-in to one site. What do you think?