headphono.us

I just got back from Graphing Social Patterns conference earlier this week in San Diego, where Dave McClure of 500Hats put together a fun and informative 2-day event. The events were littered with people you expect to see in this space. David Recordon was on the “Need for Feeds” panel. Chris Messina did a quick trip to present on DiSo. Charlene Li had an insightful keynote presentation about the future of the social space. Amit Kapur from Myspace and Ben Ling from Facebook both explained their respective developer platform strategies. The conference even featured those hilarious social network parody videos (courtesy of Dave).

There have been some good recaps of the conference by Andrew Chin, ReadWriteWeb, and MyBlogLog. So I won’t do another. Instead, I thought I’d share some of my notes from the conference. These are not intended to be complete, and may not accurately represent what the speakers/panelists intended. They are some of my interpretations, predictions and are based purely on my visual, aural and note-taking capabilities.

• Social networks/cloud:
  • General consensus is that the social networks of today have got to stop behaving like ‘walled gardens’; more cross pollination and data sharing
  • Some sort of social graph + personal identity federation breakthrough is sorely needed
  • There’s a need for implicit relationships (often inferred from real life relationships) eg: Neighbors are friends but often neighbors aren’t your friends on Facebook
  • Prediction: The major players (Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, AOL) will be the ones that breakthrough these problems
  • Business model for social apps is largely unclear; they are unable to monetize beyond ad impressions/click thrus
  • Prediction: Each person/user will have their own “personal CPM”
  • Social networks will have to compete to have the best experience for the high-influence individuals
  • Prediction: By 2013, social networks will become ubiquitous and taken for granted, they will be embedded everywhere; Question is how do we get there? What is the catalyst for wide adoption?
• Lifesteaming/Event streams:
  • Lifestreaming allows for checking updates across networks in one central location, is suggested to be a more ‘valuable’ feed as it is ‘filtered’ by the social graph
  • Need: Permissions are an unsolved problem (public vs. private events, shared among friends vs. everyone); need more fine-grained control without any surprises
  • Prediction: Filtering/value addition is the next big thing
• Facebook apps:
  • ~650 new apps a month (unconfirmed statistic)
  • app usage has flattened and may be trending down
  • most verticals are saturated
  • top 1% of the apps are used by 78% of facebook users (unconfirmed statistic)
  • tendency towards winner-take-all; either apps make it or not
• Myspace app platform:
  • publicly launching 3rd-party apps built on the OpenSocial developer platform by end of March
  • hyper-targeting is based on user profiling, machine learning and has shown up to 300% increase in click-thru rates
  • self-serve advertising system is intended for the long-tail of the advertisers
  • monetization models will only make sense once the problem of engagement is solved
  • engagement of the users in a social context will depend on the value the app/network provides
• Open Questions:
  • Is OpenSocial really open or is it directed/largely influenced by Google?
  • How can people reliably and easily port their data across networks? (Someone stated that Microsoft named it correctly as the Passport but implemented it completely wrong)
  • Is advertising the only monetization model for social apps/networks?
  • Is OpenID the solution to personal ID federation?
  • Is OAuth the solution to authentication?
  • Are social networks only limited to casual networks? Can they be extended to tradition enterprise software (Oracle, Salesforce, etc.)?
  • System-centric networks or citizen-centric networks? Hubs are social networks themselves or are the users the hubs?

Any thoughts on the open questions?