Posts Tagged: adoption

Software / Thoughts — 10 Comments
30
Nov 06

Social Network Designers: Adopt OpenID

I get a lot of email from designers of social network sites. They write me to tell me about their new sites, their unique angles on SNS, and how they are going to beat MySpace :). I like getting these emails – although I’m not always able to respond, it always inspires me to see so many people working on creative ways to connect people.

In the past, I’ve done a good deal of writing explaining how to design better and more relevant SNS. Today I offer designers of social network sites my single most valuable piece of advice: Adopt OpenID.

If you are a designer of an upstart social networking site, you know the key problem: attracting critical mass. Even if you design the most relevant, most blogged about SNS in the world, it is difficult to attract users into your network. However, the cool stuff doesn’t start happening in a SNS until the people are there. People need to find their friends, they need to be able to send messages and pokes and whatever. Social networks are, well, social – and if you don’t have the people you don’t have much.

The critical challenge in bringing in the people is convincing them to sign up to your site. And that is a challenge. First, they’ve got to hear about you. Next, they have to have a reason to join your site. And finally, if you’re really lucky, enough people will join your site to give that segment of users a decent user experience. However, people can’t and don’t want to be active on too many social network sites. We simply don’t have the time to spend checking messages and keeping up with all the action in all those different walled gardens. So that’s why we all join Myspace and Facebook, and not your social network.

So the “build it and they will come” proposition is false. That worked for a few sites but it won’t work for yours. So how do you innovate? You think outside the box. Imagine if when you signed up for a gmail.com email address, you could only email other gmail.com users. That’s completely silly, right? Noone would use gmail because we want to be able to email people at yahoo, hotmail and AOL as well. When I sign up to a social networking site, I’m not able to message people on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo. I am only able to message people on the SNS I join. This is fundamentally flawed. The good news is that you have the power to change this.

Our SNS profiles are little URL-based identities. It just so happens that there is a huge movement gathering steam called OpenID that is entirely based around URL-based identities. Imagine this scenario: I have a Facebook, by my friend has a Myspace. If these two sites were enabled with OpenID, I could add my friend’s Myspace to my Facebook. They would show up as a friend on my list, I would be able to message them – they would be a part of my social network. Now, of course, when you clicked on their profile, you would be transported to their Myspace page, but you’d also see me on their Myspace. There would be true cross-pollination, and we’d be able to establish our identity on the SNS that best reflects our interest and personality. We wouldn’t have to join a SNS that makes us feel uncomfortable simply because there was a large network there. This is fundamentally the same thing as allowing us to all have our own email addresses – which is a system I think we all agree works to our liking (no we don’t wall want Gmail addresses – we want choice!)

So, the problem here is that the big players – Myspace, Facebook – they have no incentive to open up. They want to keep their sites walled gardens, and they don’t want to offer you choice. But as we well know, there are lots of other social networking sites out there – and they are looking for a foothold, something new and interesting that would let them get a foothold against the big players. So what if they did something revolutionary – they sort of worked together. If these SNS players adopted OpenID, people would be able to join a social network, and start adding their friends from other networks. They’d get a user experience that is a lot more satisfying than other sites. Designers of SNS – you just have to make peace with the fact that people want different things, different SNS – once you make peace with this OpenID just flows naturally.

The beauty of this system is that it is simple. We don’t need huge overarching schemas or new protocols. All you have to do is leverage OpenID, and be a little creative. The OpenID 2.0 schema has a robust namespace, so you can use it to do things like exchange messages, profile pictures, etc. But you don’t really have to do all that much. You’ve just got to let people connect.

OpenID is a ground-up, democratic system. This means that the small guys have to adopt it first. If Myspace or Facebook want to play, that’s awesome, but I don’t think they will. So there is a little leap of faith, but it is a great gamble. Since we added OpenID support to ClaimID, it has only been extremely positive for us. The best news is that the OpenID community is growing, and companies like JanRain and Verisign will even help you get up and running (they even offer OpenID hosting!). There’s a ton of open source code out there – and if ClaimID can retrofit their website with OpenID, I know you can.

The walled gardens will stay with us, but walled gardens in social network sites need to be a thing of the past. Imagine the pitch – you can add friends from any OpenID network to your SNS. This has huge, democratic possibilities. This feels natural for SNS – walled gardens don’t. If you’d like to find out more about OpenID, you can refer to this primer I wrote about it on the ClaimID blog, or you can email me and I can help put you in touch with folks who will be able to help you. Once you grasp OpenID, and see how naturally it works with SNS, you’ll see what a valuable direction it is to take your product.

OpenID is coming – the tipping point grows closer each day. This is a tremendous opportunity – and I do hope you’ll consider it seriously. This is the way of the future.

Noticed / Research — 6 Comments
31
Oct 06

Friendship in Youth Social Networking

I came across a Harris Interactive poll entitled Friendship in the Age of Social Networking Websites that contained an interesting statistic – the average number of friends teens keep on respective buddy lists.

The poll found that teen have an average of 52 friends on the IM buddy list, 38 friends entered in their cell phone – but they have 75 friends in SNS. The poll also found a 75% of teens use SNS. This is a useful point of comparison for researchers interested in the nature of friendship on SNS. Are there transferable ratios between various communication devices that hold steady for young people? Can this shine light onto how many “real” friends teens have in social networking services?

In Ling and Yttri’s chapter “Control, Emancipation and Status: The Mobile Telephone in the Teen’s Parental and Peer Group Control Relationships”, they showed that the average Norwegian teen (groups 13-15 and 16-19) had 90 friends in their register. On a weekly basis, they called little under 10% of those individuals. On a monthly basis, that ratio rose to about 25%. Of course, using a phone call as a measure of frienship is suspect – we likely have plenty of friends that we don’t call often, and this doesn’t make them less of a friend. However, the statistic is useful as it shows with how many of those friends teens are maintaining active relationships.

The other statistic from the Harris poll that interested me was a question about what types of friends teens and young people have. The poll found that for children 8-12, only 8% had friends who they only knew online (web friends), but that number grew to 36% for teens 13-18. The poll also found that 37% of children 8-12 actively maintain online/offline frienships.

Thoughts — 11 Comments
2
Oct 06

Selling Social Networks

One of the interesting sessions I attended at BarCampNYC involved the monetization of social networks. The golden rule of sales is knowing your audience; as social networks are dynamic, the level of complexity in monetizing social networks proves to be rather high. I though it might be interesting to bring my perspective on social networks to this monetization debate, with the hopes that I might be able to illuminate some interesting opportunities.

In the BarCamp session, 5 main concepts of monetizing social networks were introduced by the moderator. Looking at social networks as a truly new media, it made sense to explore my take on each of these concepts, one at a time. Towards the end I’ll introduce some other opportunities that I feel exist.

1) Ads – or, the interestingness problem
The poor state of advertising in social networks is widely reported. Users don’t click through ads, rates are depressed – obviously something is amiss. The problem, as it happens, is in the nature of the medium.

We click on ads for a number of reasons; one of the predominant reasons is distraction. As we transverse the web and encounter different content, advertising often serves as a contextual escape. We grow tired with content, we exhaustively explore a topic – so we then click on ads. The problem with social networks is that the users of social networks fail to tire of the content.

A social network is largely based around actions (responding to messages, posting to walls, managing friendships) and experience (browsing and finding new people and content). In the state of action, it is hard to distract us – the management of our friend networks is vastly more valuable than time spent exploring advertisements. In the state of experience, we are exploring peer-produced content – which proves to be almost exhaustively interesting.

When we experience this content, we are learning about people, exploring networks, bringing more richness into our online and offline experiences. In this state, it is again extremely difficult to distract us with advertising. Put simply, the content we’re experiencing is too interesting – we don’t get distracted.

2) Product affiliation groups – or, the non-scalability of affiliation
If we aren’t going to be distracted by contextual ads, advertisers will leverage our consumer culture to let us “befriend” products. The logic here makes sense – all people, especially young people, ascribe a remarkable part of their identity construction to their possessions.

Our possessions – things we want and things we own – are part of our identity. The theory behind befriending products is it lets us explicitly state our brand affiliations. You may not know what type of jeans I wear, but if I befriend Levis, you can see my affiliation with the brand. The problem with affiliation is in its lack of scalability.

Indeed, part of our consumption behavior is the consumption of identity goods – but the majority of our purchases are must more pedestrian. The food we eat, the toiletries we use, the tires we put on our car – we don’t derive a large part of our identity from these goods. It is unlikely, then, that many people will care to befriend Listerine or Goodyear tires.

That affiliation is non-scalable doesn’t mean it can’t be profitable – sites that target a demographic can niche in to that demographic’s product desires. It can even be less explicit – when you friend Kanye West or Dane Cook on Myspace, you’re joining that product affiliation group, the only problem is Myspace isn’t getting part of the cut.

3) Partnership Opportunities – or, limitations of partnership
Social networks, especially those like Facebook and LinkedIn, have very targeted demographics. As a result, it makes sense for companies interested in these demographics to partner with them. For example, Apple’s iTunes partnered with Facebook, while Simply Hired partnered with LinkedIn.

These partnerships make a lot of sense, but with very targeted demographics, partnerships work to the exclusion of the rest of the market. Will Microsoft’s Zune attempt to make inroads in Facebook now that Apple is a partner? Would a competitor of Simply Hired be excluded from LinkedIn? These partnerships make a lot of sense for the partnering companies, because it is the established partner that wields power. Nevertheless, partnerships, successfully implemented, do seem to be a solid monetization platform for social networks.

4) Micropayments – or, the selling of value
Micropayments are an interesting take on monetizing social networks. The general idea behind micropayments is that a social network’s userbase will pay small amounts of money for things that make their experience better. For example, someone might pay 15 or 25 cents to purchase an upgrade to their site. Considering the marginal cost of such upgrades are virtually zero, micropayments could be very lucrative at scale.

We’ve already seen micropayments implemented in Cyworld. However, one must proceed very carefully with micropayments. Cyworld is truly an outlier example of a social network – it is a cultural phenomenon equivalent to Myspace. Designers of upstart social networks that are attempting to monetize on micropayments do not get to play by the same rules as Cyworld.

So how do you effectively implement micropayments? First, you must be sure that the micropayment infrastructure doesn’t bound the network or limit use. To do this, you must give the user a rich experience from the beginning – no giving the user a bare-bones site and expecting them to micropay from the beginning. Give the user lots of addons, and as they progress as a user of the site they will start buying other add-ons. For example, when offering upgrades via micropayments, always offer a free upgrade as well as the paid upgrades. This gets the user in the mindset of purchasing – and once they see that everyone else has the free upgrade, they will want to express their individuality by purchasing upgrades.

The user must also feel like they are getting value from the micropayments. To do this, the service must acknowledge the simple economics of micropayments – that marginal cost is virtually zero. This means that the micropayment offerings must have value and not only appear to be pay-to-play obstructions in the site. When I pay money I want to get something – your users sense this at the very core of their being, so it is wise to acknowledge it and design value into the system. Finally, don’t expect micropayments to cover all the bills.

Cyworld gets to make a big part of its revenue from micropayments because it is a cultural phenomenon – the scale is very large. You should only expect the vanguard 10% of users to participate in micropayments for a long time – until your site mainstreams more effectively.

5) User payments/gatekeeping fees – or, the virtual country club
It only makes sense that some social networks will introduce fees for participation. Of course, this flies in the conventional logic of network effects, but for some it is a valid strategy. Thinking broadly about social networks, there are networks that we have economic incentive to participate in.

Specialty information sites, prestige networks – there are lots of social networks we pay to access in the real world, so it only makes sense that we’ll buy into this in the virtual world. However, doing this properly is a real challenge – and it requires a significant leap of faith. If social networks can target specialty networks, users will pay to keep the service online, because the service has real value.

Now, lets explore some other potential ways to monetize social networks.

1) Exogenous or alternative markets
In Second Life and a number of gaming applications, there are real-world markets for the selling of virtual goods. Some of these goods can command substantial fees – real estate in Second Life sells for thousands of dollars. Obviously, there is a substantial opportunity for networks to mediate these transactions (like ebay) or for the social networks themselves to take tax-like transaction fees. Implemented properly, this could be a substantial revenue-bearing micropayment-like infrastructure.

2) Brokering of trust
The notion of monetizing expert advice is nothing new – but unfortunately it doesn’t scale. Our network models can easily spot global experts, but regional and local experts are much harder to define. A social network that introduces logic of trust can broker access to these experts. We’re already doing this – looking at the blogosphere as a social network, we see people who list their phone number for consultancy calls. Its one thing for me to want to speak to a social media expert in Los Angeles or Silicon Valley, but what if I want to speak to a social media expert in Falls Church or Toledo? A social network that could reasonably identify experts on a wide range of topics could prove very useful.

3) The negotiation of community
Facebook has show us the value of situationally relevant social needs. As we move through our lives, our social needs are constantly in-flux, and we aren’t comfortable with using global social networks to satisfy those needs. Social networks that address particular needs can probe to be very useful and valuable – and perfect for monetization. For our global internet, we are made up of small networks that have needs – needs that can be addressed by complimentary social networks.

Social networks are difficult to monetize because they are a new and distinct form of media. While they exist inside the structural framework of the web, users of the sites look at them differently and experience them differently. Therefore, monetizing these networks are challenging and are benefitted by building monetization in to the site as oppose to bootstrapping monetization on at a later date after users are comfortable with the site. I hope this guide has proven useful to you – it was fun to write.

Update: This post has been Dugg – if you’d like to digg it as well, here is the link.

Thoughts — 10 Comments
7
Sep 06

How Facebook Broke its Culture

In talking this Facebook controversy through with a number of reporters, I came upon a few insights about feeds, which I thought I’d share.

  • Facebook’s shaky standpoint. Facebook takes the stand that feeds introduce nothing “new”. Unfortunately, this logic fails because information disclosure is both quantitative and qualitative. Facebook (sort of) gets to claim there is quantitatively no more information being shared (more on this later). Qualitatively, the difference is huge. Information disclosure is multidimensional. Each day, when you put on your clothes, you have assumptions that a certain audience will see you in these clothes. Imagine if every day when you got dressed, everyone saw what you were wearing – wouldn’t you agree that is vastly different? And wouldn’t it make you feel a little weird? Now multiply this by every information facet shared in the Facebook. Perhaps now the problem makes more sense.
  • On the nature of friendship in the Facebook. My research has shown that facebook users average hundreds of friends. This means that the nature of friendship is different and culturally unique in the Facebook. Friendship in the Facebook is cultural currency – I link to you and you link to me. Implicit in this is a one-time exchange of social capital, nothing more. However, friendship is an absolutely core element of the service – and with this change, the nature of friendship in the service, and everything that goes along with it, changes. From now on, when you friend someone, you’re agreeing to let them have a feed of everything you do – this is a huge difference from the previous notion of friendship, which users were quite comfortable with.
  • On how users explore each other. The common argument for feeds is that “the information is out there anyway.” So it stands, if you wanted to, you could replicate the functionality of feeds by checking your friend’s profiles every day. This argument fails because this is not how Facebook users use the service. Facebook users log in to check their messages, respond to pokes, use profiles as “white pages”, coordinate events – they aren’t logging in to surf profiles endlessly (sure, they do this when they have an exam the next day, but it isn’t the normal activity). Why is this? Well, put simply, you know your friends. And the people you’ve friended that aren’t really your friends – sure, you’ll check them out from time to time, but that’s not how the site is used. In essence, profiles are just a small part of the site.Users understand this. When they update their profile, they are updating it for a micro-audience of a subset of their friends. They aren’t expecting everyone they know to see (or care) about every last minute change in their life. People have a mental model of disclosure, and this change breaks that mental model. Even though “nothing is different”, it is clear that something absolutely is different. The privacy of being average is gone.
  • On updates. Previously, the Facebook would let you know if people updated their profiles, if they changed certain key elements of their profile. With the feeds feature, everything everyone does is shared. Yes, perhaps its fair to say you’ve updated your profile when you’ve added new favorite movies and the like – but a chronicle of every friend you add and every wall message you write? Whatsmore, every friend you add and wall message you write broadcast to your entire friend group? This makes people seriously uncomfortable.
  • Chilling effects. Facebook feeds are the ultimate chilling effect. If you knew everything you did was going to be broadcast to everyone you know, wouldn’t you second-guess yourself more? Nuff said.
  • The falsity of the pageview argument. Apparently (according to the A-list), feeds are a move that undermines Facebook’s quest for pageviews. In that sense, we’re supposed to feel all fuzzy about how they’ve introduced this “useful” service against their best interests. False. Facebook users don’t check all of their friends profiles – they keep up with a small number of close friends and people they have crushes on. They don’t surf to all of their friends profiles every day, nor do they care to. By placing “feeds” in front of users, they are incentivized to check the profiles of people they see in their feeds – thereby increasing page views. That this move isn’t self serving is completely false – again, it shows how the A-List, Arrington on down, absolutely don’t understand the nuance of Facebook culture.
  • On a broken culture. What if, one day, you woke up and found that the rules that governed the society you lived in have been dramatically changed? Facebook has a very strong culture, and its users are deeply invested in the service. This strong blow to the core component of the site – friendship – coupled with this complete lack of privacy means the culture of the Facebook has changed. Its users are stunned, reeling – the same way you’d behave if you found out that you had to share every minute detail of your life with everyone you know. In my opinion, this blow to the core culture of the service is the most dangerous thing. Damaged cultures often never fully repair themselves – just ask Friendster.

As a researcher and analyst, I like to stay above being prescriptive. However, the more I analyze this, the more I am becoming convinced that Facebook is wandering into very dangerous territory. So I guess you could stay I’m stepping out of my analyst role, and trying to be a user advocate. Facebook employees – if you read this – know that what you have on your hands is serious as a heart attack.

I like the Facebook. I like what is has brought to campus. I like(d) the way it treated its users. I’ve invested a lot of time in the Facebook :). But more than I like the Facebook I like my fellow students, my cohort – and I like seeing them comfortable with their online identity. It amazes me that, if this thing was rolled out differently – opt in, with the users being able to select what parts of their profiles could be sent into the feeds – they wouldn’t have this mess on their hands. Instead of revolt we’d be talking about an edgy new feature that lots of users would like. But we don’t have that – and I’m starting to worry that it might not be possible to put this cat back in the bag.

Thoughts — 2 Comments
17
Jul 06

Situational Relevance and Facebook’s Summer Traffic

A week or two ago, Comscore Media Metrix reported its new internet audience numbers. Fred Wilson covered the rankings, and created a nifty graph that compared the rank of a few social sites, Facebook amongst them (addt’l coverage from Read/Write Web, Silicon Beat, Jeff Clavier). For all the hype about Facebook, it was interesting to see that the traffic for the past few months was largely flat.

Today, Stowe Boyd covered some of my recent Facebook research and came to pretty much the same conclusion that I did – things are looking very good for the Facebook. UNC’s freshman Facebook adopters are signing on at better rate than last year, they’ve got many more friends in many more networks than last year. Since last year saw adoption top out a 94-95 percent (something I consider to be a virtual 100% adoption) – the Facebook appears to be on a course to hit these goals amongst their core audience even earlier this year than last.

I found this situation to be quite interesting. On one hand, we have proof of a rapidly growing Facebook – but on the other, we’ve got numbers showing a stagnant Facebook. As it turns out, both numbers are correct – and they stand to tell us a good deal about situational relevance.

Situational relevance is a fancy-sounding word I’ve used to describe how information needs drive use of a service like the Facebook. Simply, a student’s social information need is to understand the campus social world around them. As the Facebook is a frighteningly thorough guide to the social world around them, students find it to be a useful resource in learning about and exploring the social world they are trying to master; it answers their situationally relevant information need.

Of course, the information needs of students change over the summer. Their social orientation changes from the expansion of the social network (i.e., meeting lots of new people in class, at parties and researching them) to the management of the social network (keeping up with friends over the summer). As students aren’t aggressively expanding their social networks over the summer, the Facebook becomes less situationally relevant. In fact, over the summer, the Facebook isn’t all that situationally relevant – explaining the contraction of growth shown in Wilson’s graph.

You may wonder – the contraction of growth is a downturn in a sense, but if the Facebook’s key play was only situational relevance, wouldn’t the downturn be more profound? In a word: yes. There are two key factors (amongst a few others) driving summertime traffic. First and foremost, the Facebook has done a good job diversifying its networks. Through the addition of high school and work networks, the population of the Facebook is diversified as to soften the blow of the summertime slump. Without work and high school networks, the downturn would be profound. Second, there is an audience that has a situationally relevant need in the summer – incoming freshmen. These freshmen (1/4 of Facebook’s college population, and easily 1/3 of Facebook’s college traffic) are using the Facebook to explore the new world around them. In my study of the 2006 UNC freshmen, I saw higher rates of adoption, vastly higher numbers of friends per freshmen, and more heterogeneity in network participation by freshmen.

These two reasons, coupled with viral use of the Facebook by summering users (the Facebook is still used heavily to keep in touch, look at friends’ new pictures, track birthdays) explain why Facebook’s expected summer traffic dip is a plateau instead. Information needs drive adoption and use, but the needs don’t disappear during the summer. Facebook answers a lot of these needs with product offerings; of course, the information needs aren’t as strong, but the increased diversity of the networks and freshman adoption help pick up the slack. If my analysis holds, we should see traffic growth come back in the Fall, starting in mid-August as students return to campus and start making new connections, expanding their social networks and operationalizing their information needs.

In other news, I was quoted in an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about college athletic departments and their relationship with the Facebook. This follows on a USA Today article in which I was quoted about a similar topic. All hand-waving aside, I certainly look forward to friending Wayne Ellington, Tywon Lawson, Brendan Wright, Alex Stepheson and Deon Thompson ;)

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