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Social Networking (Cont)
I attended a panel discussion on Social Networking last night moderated by my friend Lee Greenhouse.
The panelists included Mark Pincus of Tribe and Antony Brydon of Visible Path. I am an investor of both of these companies.
The other panelists were Andrew Weinrich founder of Six Degrees, who is arguably the pioneer of this whole social networking thing, and Adrian Scott of Ryze, and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn.
To be honest, I thought the discussion was boring and way too rambling and unfocused. But there were a few highlights.
In particular, I just loved Andrew Weinrich's initial vision for Six Degrees. He wanted to build a "social network operating system" for the Internet. Six Degrees was to be a huge relationship map that would get plugged into everything on the Internet; eBay, Amazon, Monster, Match, etc. When you used any of these and other Internet services, you would see what your relationships knew about, said about, or did with any of these services. That was, and is, a big idea, and I wish it existed.
I also liked a concept of network interoperability that came out in some of the comments, but was never really drilled down on. None of us wants to join 10 or 20 social networks. The headache of filling out the profiles, interacting with the systems, etc is just too time consuming for most normal people. But we'd all like to be part of LinkedIn and Ryze for business networking, Tribe for classifieds, Friendster if we are dating, etc. Will there be a way that I can have one profile like I have one email address and each social network just takes that profile applies its own business logic and rules for its particular application and delivers value to me? I don't know, but I'd like that to happen.
The other highlight was Antony Brydon's announcement that Kleiner Perkins had invested in Visible Path and that Ray Lane was joining his board. That's a big deal because Kleiner now has both a consumer-focused social networking investment, Friendster, and an enterprise-focused social networking investment, Visible Path.
I continue to think the enterprise model is easier to execute and should create lasting tangible value to its users more quickly. But I also have found LinkedIn to be useful and expect all of these services to be helpful to the users that have the time and energy to invest in them.
So my bet is that social networking is more than a fad that will come and go quickly. It's a real business opportunity, but it will take time before these services become useful to more than technology enthusiasts and online daters.
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» Social Network from Tom Watson
I've been resistant of these online social networks for some time. My thought had always been: if I wanted something from somene I knew, I'd email or call them - and they'd naturally give me the contacts I needed. And [Read More]
Tracked on Feb 13, 2004 1:55:01 PM
Posted February 11, 2004 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
Most of this seems to have been hit on before, I'm realizing that social networking is largely good for jobs/profesional contacts and dating, period. Well let's qualify that a little and wait and see how the revamped evite.com works
Went to a session of MIT's Eclub http://web.mit.edu/e-club/www/ last night where two guys presented a project I-seek http://50k.mit.edu/files/Fall2003_1KPublicSummaries.pdf . From what I could get, its software that goes into wireless carriers servers. It lets you know when you are in the proximity of someone who's a "match" to you.
This type of service, which I have strong reservations on, could only work if partnered with an existing large network, ie friendster.
Seems as if people are going to be stretching now, to find revenue generating models on social networking
Posted by: Adam Smith | Feb 11, 2004 2:13:17 PM
You mention social "network interoperability" without talk of the FOAF project. I'm not terribly familiar with the project, but it seems that it would behoove those social networking players to consider it, though I'm sure there's a lock-in concern.
Although FOAF describes itself as "a way to create machine-readable homepages in the Web" and the spec is in its pre 1.0 stages, it's a step in the right direction as an "online persona" to be thrown around to the social networking applications that a user is interested in.
Posted by: Alex Southgate | Feb 11, 2004 3:34:58 PM
For those who may be interested, a transcript of the BDI panel discussion is available on our blog.
Posted by: Scott Allen | Feb 11, 2004 6:44:58 PM
Let's say one day in the future we have distributed mind parallels to ant colonies.
Structured and catalysed federations of minds that share an ethos (say a culture). And these mind colonies connect with each other.
Let's say one day in the future we are closer to instantaneous complementing that we are today.
What is the space between social networks and mind colonies? What are the most pertinent differences between social networks and ant colonies?
Self-sustenance for inhabitants is one. What are others.
Please see Mind Colonies A-Z for the others.
It's happening -- it requires grasp that there are lots of problems out there and default each one is an opportunity. That:-
The harder a problem, the greater the reward, the less the competition, the more uncertain human resourcing* is.
The easier a problem, the lesser the reward, the greater the competition, the more certain human resourcing is.
That the sweetspot lies in finding low hanging fruits -- solving those problems that are not too hard such that resourcing is so hard, yet not so easy such that competition makes it unworthwhile.
[* humans organise all other resources, investments included]
Posted by: Bala Pillai | Jun 8, 2004 12:25:59 AM
Very good work, really well done. See you again sometime at this interesting place. Say hi to all people around the world.
Posted by: Bert | Apr 11, 2005 9:00:12 AM
Hi...I found a interesting site looking at the social networking aspect in gated online communities...
http://www.gatedonlinecommunities.com
Posted by: Marc L | Oct 24, 2005 3:59:24 AM
http://www.gatedonlinecommunities.com
Posted by: Marc L | Oct 24, 2005 4:12:13 AM
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