2007 was quite a year for our team here at Mind Drivers, the venture development company I co-founded in 2000. We completed the successful sale of InternetSeer, the leading website monitoring company. And we launched YouChoose.net and introduced Distributed Social Networking.
In early 2006, with the pending launch of competing formats for the new high-definition video technology, I started thinking about the opportunity of using the power of social networking to let the consumer decide the winning technology. Rather than voting solely with their money, risking it by buying a technology that would potentially become obsolete if the competing standard won, we envisioned letting them join together and agree to buy the format that won a vote among consumers. This was the genesis of YouChoose.net, where people could turn their passions into actions.
The inaugural campaign on YouChoose.net was thus “Blu-ray vs. HD DVD.” As the campaign took hold and people started voting, it became obvious that many of the people who voted had intimate knowledge of the technology and were sharing it in the YouChoose.net forums. But there were also a multitude of ‘format war’ discussions going on throughout the web, at websites such as engadget, on numerous blogs, and on the personal pages on facebook, myspace and other social networks.
And that led to a simple thought - why require people to go to a central location to discuss the issue with others? And why keep all of those great discussions separate, specific to each site they were located on? Why not connect all of the forums and let everyone share in the conversation? It’s one of those ideas that is so simple and valuable, you wonder why it hadn’t been done before.
This was the trigger that launched Distributed Social Networking, and in particular “Distributed YouChoose.” Today this is taking hold. People can grab a YouChoose distributed forum or campaign 'widget' and host that widget on their personal page or blog. Then anyone participating in the discussion on their page is also participating on every page hosting that widget. The discussion is magnified, creating a distributed 'conversation' that engages everyone across all of the host sites. It enables people to find and engage others regardless of their ‘home’ social network.
So far its only been released on an invitation basis. We will be going public with this technology and promoting Distributed YouChoose in February 2008. The true value of this will be demonstrated by how well it enables people to connect, communicate and join with others to turn their passions into actions. YouChoose is empowering that activity and intends to maintain its leadership role in that ongoing (r)evolution.
What’s your view? Is Distributed Social Networking the future? Is it a simple evolution in social networking or a true revolution?
