This past week or two I’ve been spending some of my spare time building up the professional side of my social networking profile. I’ve been a pretty active Facebook user now for a year or so and have Friendfeed and Twitter accounts that I’ve half-heartedly kept up with too. I’d like to use these tools for work purposes too but was always uneasy about mixing personal and business audiences with these various streams of my output. Either I would cut out all the personal stuff in order to enable me to feel comfortable with my business audience, in which case it would more or less cease to be social networking altogether, or I would continue to limit my business audience for fear of over-sharing the personal.

In the end I decided to start doubling up on profiles - one for my personal life, one for my business life - on these major sites, and so far it’s working well. I now have a business-centric Facebook profile, a business-centric Twitter account, a new account on Friendfeed and work-centric IM accounts with all the major providers (janovum on Yahoo!, Google Talk, AIM, Live/MSN and Skype). My choice of username might eventually be a problem if and when I leave Ovum, but for now it’s easy to remember but most of all has the salient virtue of being available on all these services (have you ever tried picking a username that will be available on all of these, including AIM and Yahoo!? Very difficult). 

If you’d like to connect, please feel free to look me up in one of those places - I’ll be happy to “friend” you, add you to a “buddy list” or be followed by or “follow” you. I’d like to make these networks as inclusive and broad as possible, and also hope to make them as interconnected as they can be - I already have Twitter and Friendfeed apps running in my Facebook profile, for example, and Friendfeed itself is pulling in my Tweets, blog posts and shared items from Google Reader. 

Some day, I’m hoping that all these services will allow me to be a single individual with multiple profiles for friends, family and work, for example. A while back I heard that Moli offers such split profiles, and I did try that service out, but until it’s used by a lot of other people it’s not all that helpful. But I do believe that splitting the social and business aspects of your life in a single profile will become an increasingly important feature of these sites going forward. It’d certainly be a lot easier than my current approach, which involves using different browsers for different profiles (when I’d much rather live in Firefox in Windows or Safari in Leopard) so that I can stay signed in to each service. 

How have you handled this problem? Do you just mix both in a single profile and not worry about mixing business and pleasure? Have you found another approach that works better?

I was asked recently during a call with a client about the prospects for enterprise mobile social networking. My first response was that I thought two other things had to happen before that could become a reality - successful mobile implementations of social networking, and successful uses of social networking in business settings.

Having had the opportunity to think about it some more, I think that initial reaction is still the right one. Only once those two things are well established can the combination of the two really occur in the form of mobile enterprise social networking. And those aren’t insignificant barriers.

Ironically, even though I think the opportunities are far greater in some ways for mobile social networking, enterprise social networking actually seems to be taking off more quickly, in part because there are companies with the right assets to take the job on. Oracle, IBM and others are taking the lead in creating enterprise-grade social networks with the appropriate structure and controls for the business setting. They have the software expertise and the credibility and knowhow in business to make it work, and they are already doing so, both for internal use and for use by customers.

On the mobile side, most of the players only have half the story to tell - the social networking companies have the SN knowhow and the customer base, but not the mobile knowledge or operator relationships to really make things happen. The mobile implementation of Facebook (both the mobile website and the BlackBerry application) is limited at best and doesn’t do a lot of the things you’d want it to in order to be really useful. Mobile operators, who have many of the other pieces needed to make things work, don’t have the credibility as social networking providers in their own right, and so need partnerships with SN specialists to make things work. In time, the two groups will come together in such a way that mobile social networking is enabled in a more mainstream way, but we still have a long way to go.

Only once both of these trends move a lot further down the road does it make much sense to expect mobile enterprise social networking to take off. But that doesn’t mean that the various stakeholders shouldn’t start thinking about how it might work now. Both the Oracles and IBMs and the mobile operators and social networking sites should be actively working out how they will take advantage of this future opportunity today. But that shouldn’t prevent them from staying focused on nearer-term opportunities in both mobile and business flavors of social networking individually.

This great graphic illustrates that, for all that we’ve become a global economy, the world is flat, and so on, there are still very marked differences across the world in the proliferation of social networking, and in the specific platforms which have caught on in different parts of the world.

Google’s Orkut has famously been very popular in Brazil, but it’s interesting to note that Facebook, which is second to MySpace in the US, is ahead of it just across the border in Canada. Factors such as early adoption, language options, tie-in to other products and so on all have an impact, but the result is this huge fragmentation. Given the massive network effects that accrue to a provider once they become big, it’s hard to imagine any single provider ever becoming dominant across large swathes of the world.

Chris Brogan has an interesting post up today about what he wants from social networking etc.:

We’ve got OpenID. We have OpenSocial. We have cross-platform IM clients like Adium and Pidgin. We have life stream aggregators like Friend Feed, Spokeo, and Lijit.

I want the following to be product features of something cross-platform, and I want it soon-ish:

• Friends list portability.
• Proximity-based social networks.
• Mesh networking widely built into laptops.
• A Network Communicator (that allows for IM, Voice, SMS, Status, Presence, and a platform for commands (like “follow” and “@”). I want this communicator to work the same way on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, my IM client, etc, the way a cell phone just cares about connecting the call, not which network you’re reaching.
• Granular, modular grouping of friend data.

At the end of the post, he asked, “What do you want?” I responded as follows in the comments, along the same lines as this post from a while back.

I have been doing some similar thinking and posted on this topic over on my own blog. I think that ultimately what I want is:

• one place to input my data, friends’ names, email addresses etc.
• one place to check on everyone else’s (ideally the same place as the first)
• one tool to communicate with all of those people

The fact that data sent from/to that one place passes through / ends up in other platforms like Facebook/MySpace/Twitter etc. is irrelevant in some ways. I can always go and check it there if I happen to like a particular format or way of presenting it, but I want to have a single place (I use the word “place” - I guess site or even service or application would work too) to manage it all from. Then it’s less about data portability (since my data never moves - at least its home doesn’t) and more about APIs that allow me to plug my data in / feed data out of other services as needed. I think whoever figures out how to do all that will make a lot of money, and destroy advertising revenue streams on the social networking sites in the process. (just think what offline messaging has done to that aspect of Facebook’s site traffic).

It’s an idea I want to expand on some more in future posts. I’m surprised Chris hasn’t had more feedback on the idea yet.

I attended a couple of hours of the Money:Tech conference organised by O’Reilly Media in New York today. Tim O’Reilly himself - originator of the phrase Web 2.0 - was the keynote speaker, and was followed by a chat with Jim Cramer, host of Mad Money, founder of TheStreet.com, etc. etc. The conference was about Web 2.0 and financial services, and O’Reilly started out by talking about Web 2.0 and what it means to him. Ovum certainly has a definition of it, which revolves around four parts - social, business, content and technology models which define Web 2.0 services and sites. However, O’Reilly has a simpler definition, which stays away from specific technologies and services, and is simply this:

Web 2.0 is really about harnessing collective intelligence. It’s about creating a network-effects driven data lock-in with accelerating results to the winners. [I'm paraphrasing based on my notes but that was the gist]

In this way, O’Reilly says, it’s similar to Sun CEO Scott McNealy’s “red-shift” concept - that is, as you start to successfully differentiate yourself in something, your lead over the competition begins to grow ever more quickly. It’s all about creating business models which thrive off network effects - examples, according to O’Reilly, include Google (where the network effects come from the number of links people make), eBay (where the critical mass of buyers and sellers is the biggest barrier to competitive entry), Amazon (where he suggests the reviews are the key network effect) and so on. The value lies in accumulating data which leverages network effects in such a way that it is very hard for competitors to emulate what you have done.

Another major theme at the conference was open source software, and a debate during a panel session focused on whether open source adds or destroys value from a market. There were arguments on both sides, but it’s pretty clear to me that it destroys value for existing players, since it replaces proprietary products priced at a premium with free open source products. At the same time, it creates new opportunities for players which didn’t have the in-house resources to develop their own software, and it reduces the cost of doing business for everyone, which increases liquidity and therefore provides broader benefits.

So, how does all this apply to the OpenSocial program, the Social Graph API and efforts to create data portability? Do these effectively do to value in the Web 2.0 world what open source is doing in the software world? Does Facebook’s value proposition go away? Part of the answer may lie in something else O’Reilly talked about, which is Clayton Christensen’s “law of conservation of attractive profits,” which states:

When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products usually emerges at an adjacent stage.

This would suggest that when open source enters a market, the value flees to the adjacent markets. And when data portability enters the Web 2.0 market, value will flee away from the Facebooks and MySpaces and to - where?

I would argue, as I’ve suggested in other entries, it flows to those best able to make use of the new technology - data portability - to create new services which thrive off it. I think this is the logical conclusion, and it’s another reason why Facebook, MySpace and others need to create value in something other than the information they hold about their users, because that will soon become commoditised and easily duplicated. They need to leverage that data in ways others can’t because of special sauce they themselves have concocted. It’s not clear to me that they have figured this out yet, hence (perhaps) their resistance to full data portability. But they’d better figure it out quick or that value really will go to someone else (and who would bet against Google here?).

I’ve just started reading Googler Brad Fitzpatrick’s essay on the Social Graph problem and his accompanying slides. While I agree with a lot of what he says, I find that one of his big assumptions (as stated in the slides) is

some edges/nodes secret (but most public!)

This remains one of my biggest beefs with social networking - that the assumption is we want everything public. I sound unfairly old when I say this, but I’m just not comfortable with the younger generation’s tendency to put everything in the public domain. I have very separate groups of acquaintances (they’re not all “friends” in either sense) in real life and would like to maintain the same distinction online. I will put some of it in the public domain (like this blog), allow Google’s bots to crawl it and so on, but just as I have a personal blog which isn’t linked to here (or crawled by Google), I want to control access to my information, even to the extent that “most” would be “private” in the sense of being shared with certain people but not everyone. And I think this is a key feature of the endgame of social networking I discussed in an earlier post. I also wonder how Google will participate when some of the data is password protected. I think we still need the current model of providing behind the scenes authorisations for one application to access another to download key data, and I don’t want all that going through Google.

Update: looks like I’m not the only one with this concern. Although this article takes a slightly different tack, the problem it points out is essentially the same - not everyone wants all data tracked and searchable by Google. Having said that, there are ways to put up stop signs respected by the Google search bots, but not everyone knows about them and certainly not everyone would have thought it necessary before the Social Graph API came along.

Google just released the API code for its Social Graph initiative and Plaxo already has an early application which makes use of it. While it’s a bit glitchy, it essentially allows you to create a lifestream from various sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Google Reader and others. I found that it wouldn’t import my Flickr feed and the Facebook feed is restricted to two elements - notes and posted items - rather than your news feed. But this is an excellent early example of what should become possible over time. And hopefully we can go beyond a lifestream and actually create dynamic profiles based on this information from other sources.

Closely related to my previous post is the whole issue of data portability. Today social networks are making it as hard as possible for people to take their data with them when they want to leave (or even if they just want to double or triple up on social networks). This is sadly reminiscent of the fight the mobile operators put up when they had to implement number portability.

Both are bad approaches because they seek to rely on artificial barriers to entry/exit rather than genuine competitive differentiation in their products. If wireless carrier A was good enough, it wouldn’t have to worry about number portability because no subscriber would want to go to carrier B. Ditto with social networks. Facebook should be trying to make the experience it offers to its members as good as possible, rather than trying to raise the bar to data portability as high as possible.

The endgame for social networking has two elements - input and output:

• Input: One place to enter all data which will show up on all profiles. I want to enter my email address, my favourite music, my photos, my friend lists etc. in one place and one place only. Currently I have to repeat these tasks and others every time I log in to a new site
• Output: The ability for my one set of personal information and social network data to be presented on a multitude of different front ends, with the ability for me to customise which information appears where and to which groups of people.

Facebook is slowly getting to the second part with its forthcoming friend lists privacy options, but of course that will only apply to Facebook and not to any other social networks. Moli is geared up to doing the second part very well too. Mahalo appears to have a function which will kludge together different profiles into a single setting, which mimics some of the benefits of the first option but doesn’t really bring it all together, and doesn’t allow me to enter my data once.

The Google OpenSocial initiative will hopefully push us further down the road towards the achievement of both goals, but ultimately it should be relatively easy to do the first given all the APIs available for social networking sites today. The second shoudn’t be too hard either, for the same reason. Ultimately, I think that either the single service provider or perhaps two separate service providers who can provide this backend and front end to the social networking world will be kings, not players like Facebook, which will merely sit in the middle, watching data fly through from and to other places.

This clever chap has figured out how to analyse Facebook’s demographics by using its advertising platform. It yields some fascinating results, such as:

• considerably more people are listed as female than male in both the US and the UK (and in most other countries too)
• only a small percentage of total users are under 18 - a large majority are adults (compare with MySpace). And even of the under-18s most are 16 or 17 rather than younger
• there are 8 million or so members in the UK, but only 1 million in France, 400,000 in Germany and 200,000 in Italy (there are 20+ million in the US)
• there are 150,000 people in the US over 65 (or who admit to being over 65) on Facebook (and how many more who are claiming to be 35?)