I recently returned from a great vacation with my family, my wife Kim and sons Mitchell (12), Matthew (11) and Charley (8) on BaldHeadIsland in south coastal North Carolina. It’s a great place, with a private island feel. It’s got one of the best-preserved maritime forests, where we saw alligators, deer, foxes and turtles (lots of turtles). But not that many people. Our first day at the beach we could see a total of about 10 families. Larry, one of our friends who has been coming here for 16 years, said it was “exponentially more crowded” than usual. We had fun with that. All week, when we saw more than a half dozen or so people in one place, we’d joke about how it was “exponentially crowded.” (Fortunately Larry’s got a good sense of humor, and combined with plenty of vacation beer, rolled with the joke.)
But I wasn’t really writing this to talk about BaldHeadIsland. What it got me thinking about was how connected we all are. I never was out of touch. My main connector was my blackberry, although I occasionally used my laptop. But the hardware wasn’t what drove the connectivity. It was my ability to access information whenever I wanted. Status of YouChoose projects – I could view that on our wiki. Preparations for an upcoming trip to the West Coast – I could set up meetings and update flight arrangements with just a few clicks. And discussions with YouChoose clients (my focus is on professional sports teams) – I could communicate easily by phone (albeit from the 2nd floor porch for better reception).
Some people miss the point of this connectivity. It isn’t just so people can work longer and harder. It is so they can relax better. Knowing that I wasn’t missing something important was comforting. Being out of touch used to induce anxiety. The connected world , despite media reports I have read to the contrary, reduces stress.
Distributed Social Networking will play a big part in the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign. While most campaigns have figured out how to grab 'friends' on facebook and target email, they have not yet leveraged the opportunities available from employing Distributed Social Networking. The ability for candidates to communicate with their supporters, and for those supporters to communicate with their friends and other supporters - across the web - is just now becoming a reality. YouChoose is presenting proposals to the candidates that should lead to big improvements in how some of the leading candidates engage their supporters and add to their list of friends.
In the meantime, here's an example of how a candidate is reaching his supporters through a YouChoose distributed Campaign and Forum widget.
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?
Facebook represents the ultimate extension of the vanity pages and website communities that originally emerged in the 1990's. Epitomized by Geocities, the early website communities (we didn't call them 'social networks' back then), gave individuals the tools and website hosting to simply put up their own website. I founded an early ecommerce community, spree.com, in 1996, so am quite familiar with the players. After an initial multi-year surge in popularity (and market value) the original social networks became neglected and lost the luster they had during the Internet bubble. Then myspace appeared. And friendster. And facebook. As their various fortunes waxed and waned (up to now mostly waxed), one feature stayed constant. They were all 'destinations.' You 'went to' myspace to check up on your friends. Facebook took this to the logical extreme, becoming a 'platform.'
When I launched this blog last summer, it was because I saw this as the END of the evolutionary path started by geocities more than a decade ago. Despite its rousing success, I see facebook as a dinosaur of social networking: highly evolved out of the original community form, but sharing most of the same DNA. Like the dinosaurs it will likely last a long time, but if it doesn't evolve into a more distributed form, it will become extinct when we get a planetary impact. In this case the impact won't be a comet, but distributed social networking.
OpenSocial is one piece of distributed social networking. It will allow sharing of profiles and other information across social networks. It opens the various destination social networks by creating a common standard for sharing information. It lets information be 'distributed' across multiple destinations.
It won't surprise me to see facebook adopt OpenSocial. Ultimately that will be demanded of them by their users. It will take a bit of time for OpenSocial to get wide traction, but I posit that by this time next year facebook will be a participant.
Nobody's going to accuse me of being overly prolific on this blog so far, and I apologize to the three of you who have read my blog :), but I've had some distractions over the past month. Good ones, but distractions nonetheless. Mt primary distraction, I am pleased to say, has been the successful sale to a major media company, of InternetSeer, the website monitoring and small business services provider that I formed with Mark McLellan, Kane Bender and Gene McWilliams over 7 years ago. The company grew into being the largest provider of website monitoring in the world and reached profitability in 2003. But with our focus on distributed social networking, it didn't fit with Mind Drivers' current direction. Congratulations to everyone on the Mind Drivers team who made this exit possible.
I've also been spending my remaining time in mapping out the distributed social networking future for YouChoose.net, which, as a destination social network, has been growing rapidly since our beta launch in February. Last month we attracted more than 100,000 unique visitors and grew membership by 70% to more than 17,000. Over the next week we will roll out a series of major enhancements the have resulted from user feedback.
I don't get out much, at least haven't much lately. So I had some fun participating on the Social Networking panel at Drexel University on Friday. It was also interesting. Although there were some students in the audience (of about 150) the audience skewed mostly older. I found two questions the most interesting and will relate them and both my response, and responses of others on the panel and audience.
1. How do you gain trust online? I wish I was quick enough to give the same answer I got from Chris Colton, who works with me operating our marine communities (www.sailnet.com, www.speedwake.com and ecommerce site www.marine.com), when I related the question to him. Which was, essentially, the same way you gain trust offline. Tell the truth! My answer was slightly longer: be massively transparent and tell the truth. The most interesting response from another member of our panel was that "marketing can build trust." I politely disagreed by agreeing that marketing can help to build a trustworthy image, but that keeping trust can only be accomplished through truth and transparancy.
2. The second question of note was really more of a comment. One of the older members of the audience got up to state that he read The Wall Street Journal and New York Times editorial pages every day and that bloggers will never write blogs of the same quality as those editorials. Wow! After waiting for any comment from the panel, which remained silent (maybe dumbstruck?), I offered that "I couldn't disagree more." First of all, many of the same people writing those editorials are also blogging. Secondly, I totally disagreed with the elitist undertone of his statement. Just because someone hadn't chosen "journalist" as a carreer, didn't mean that person wasn't potentially an even better journalist than some professional journalists. There are millions of top-quality writers in the world, who before the reach of the Internet, had silent voices. Now they can be heard. It's obvious to anyone under 30. What was surprising to me is how incomprehensible that idea is to - still - a large segment of the population. But citizen journalism is coming of age, and quickly.
Tomorrow I am on a presentation panel at Drexel University, at the invitation of Mel Baiada. Mel endowed the University with the Laurence A. Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship in Technology. The panel is discussing social networking and I will introduce a peek at my ideas for Distributed Social Networking.
I am the head of Mind Drivers, a venture development company focused on online community and commerce. We are big believers in "Distributed Social Networking" and are developing a number of DSN applications.
