Sunday, December 05, 2010

Mark Suster: The Social Network: Facebook To Fragmentation

Rupert MurdochImage via WikipediaMark Suster's three pieces on TechCrunch are a nice summary of what has happened, and what is happening, although if any of this is news to you, I have to ask, where have you been?

When he starts talking about the future, it gets trickier. Social has so much buzz right now that it is hard to imagine the post-social buzz. But that there will be is for sure. There always has been. Social itself will morph. Social is one thing. Social and mobile as a combo is a case of two plus two being five. To that cocktail add local and global and you end up with two plus two equals 22. And it is not easy to figure out.

One good news is I see many, many players emerging.

Like Sam Walton said about retail, it can be reinvented over and over again. That is perhaps extra true of social. I am particularly keen on global + mobile.

I am going to part by disagreeing with Suster's very final thought, that the next decade belongs to Facebook. Not. The next decade belongs to another f: fragmentation. The largest names will not be that dominantly large.

As for this CalTech/MIT video below, it is lousy. They should simply have used YouTube. I gave up after 10 minutes of trouble.

Mark Suster (Video)
Image representing AOL as depicted in CrunchBaseImage via CrunchBase
Social Networking: The Past

6 C’s of Social Networking” – Communications, connectedness, common experiences, content, commerce & cool experiences ..... It isn’t new stuff. It just works better now ..... then came AOL. It preceded the WWW. ..... my Mom would call me proudly and say, “Honey, I’m on the Internet!” ..... At it’s peak AOL had about 20 million US subscribers..... $20 / month ..... $5 billion in annual subscription revenues leaving out advertising or eCommerce .... Brands didn’t advertise their web pages they advertised “AOL Keywords.” ..... I could practically change the words AOL and Facebook for much of this section ..... GeoCities & Tripod .... Yahoo! rose to prominence by offering a free, ad-supported alternative to all of the crap your mom got on AOL for $20 / month. ..... Yahoo! then bought GeoCities for $3.6 billion.
Social Networking: The Present

CompuServe, Prodigy, the Well, then the rise of AOL, Geocities and Yahoo Groups. ...... Plaxo (founded in 2002) ..... While Plaxo never figured out what to do with us once we were all connected online, LinkedIn did. .... our virtual resume. .... the success of the Web 2.0 companies versus the Web 1.0 ones were enhanced because they coincided with hardware
This is icon for social networking website. Th...Image via Wikipedia that allowed us to capture more content instantly – namely images and video – otherwide Web 2.0 might have been a lot less differentiated. Suddenly we were all creating blogs on Blogger.com, Typepad & WordPress. ...... the masses didn’t want to blog. They wanted to publish pictures ..... Friendster ... Friendster’s computer systems couldn’t keep up with the explosive growth ..... MySpace .... MySpace didn’t handle images or video well. ..... Fox bought MySpace for $580 million and then did a deal with Google worth more than the purchase price to serve up ads. For a nanosecond Rupert Murdoch seemed like the smartest guy on the Internet. Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion, which at the time seemed laughably high and now seems prescient. Google turned YouTube into one of the most valuable future Internet properties. ........ Murdoch seethed at these “startups” getting rich off the back of MySpace. The conventional wisdom at Fox’s headquarters is that MySpace had “made” both YouTube & Photobucket by allowing them distribution. MySpace vowed not to create anymore million dollar successes off of their backs that Google could then acquire. ...... Politburo-style innovation .... Enter Facebook. ..... slightly smaller in December 2007 then MySpace was. Facebook was everything that MySpace wasn’t. It was: up-market, exclusive, urban, elite, aesthetically pleasing, ad-free and users were verified. MySpace was: scantily dressed, teenaged, middle-America, design chaos and on ad steroids. ..... while MySpace was putting up moats to keep outside companies from innovating and making money off their backs, Facebook took the opposite approach. ..... So along come companies like Slide, RockYou & Zynga .... a 22-year-old Mark Zuckerberg completely schooled the 75-year-old Rupert Murdoch ..... Facebook went on become larger than even Google and Yahoo! in terms of time spent on the sites. ..... Twitter .... “asymmetry” .... users often share links with other people – one of the most important features of Twitter. ..... an RSS reader, a chat room, instant messaging, a marketing channel, a customer service department and increasingly a data mine. ..... In most instances news is now breaking on Twitter and then being picked up by news organizations. ..... 18 months ago 25% of all pitches to me were ideas for how to build products around Twitter’s API. Now I don’t get any. Not one. ..... let people get stinking rich off your platform and tax ‘em later. ..... Foursquare ... As our social actions become both public and location specific it opens up all types of future potential use cases. One obvious one is dating where players like Skout ..... For years I saw companies pitching themselves as “mobile coupon companies” and I never believed this would be a big idea. ..... if Foursquare has a “second act” coming it could be a really big company. ... When I go out I mostly prefer to eat in peace with my wife and friends without people knowing where we are
Image representing YouTube as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase
Social Networking: The Future

1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! .... current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook), Realtime (Twitter), and mobile (Foursquare) ..... there’s always a second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) act in technology ....... The Social Graph Will Become Portable .... topical social networks as evidenced in places like HackerNews or Quora. ..... specific social networks such as Namesake ..... 95% of my social networking time goes to Twitter. ..... all of those “Facebook Connect” buttons on websites are awesome for quickly logging in, but each gives those websites unprecedented access to your personal information. ...... Diaspora ..... Privacy Issues Will Continue to Cause Problems: Diaspora ..... Social Networking Will Become Pervasive: Facebook Connect meets Pandora, NYTimes ......
Image representing Sprout Social as depicted i...Image via CrunchBaseThird-Party Tools Will Embed Social Features in Websites: Meebo ..... Social Networking (like the web) Will Split Into Layers: SimpleGeo, PlaceIQ .... SimpleGeo is designed with the idea that startups can create new mobile products without having to each build their own mapping functionality. ..... Social Chaos Will Create New Business Opportunities: Klout, Sprout Social, CoTweet, awe.sm, (next gen) Buzzd ..... one of the cooler new products that will emerge in 2011 is being created by Nihal Mehta, who has pivoted from his previous company Buzzd ..... will address the world of what happens when businesses and consumers are increasingly mobile & social. ..... Facebook is so dominant it is astounding. ..... Facebook has become this generation’s walled garden .... Time Warner eventually spun off AOL for peanuts. AOL is in the process of rebuilding itself and emulating a little-known LA-based startup called Demand Media. ..... In May 2007 there were fears that Google was becoming a monopoly. ..... More than 10% of all time on the web is now Facebook. .... now they want to revolutionize email. ..... the next decade belongs to Facebook.

Social Networks: Past, Present & Future -


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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Google has been working hard to bring the web experience to your HDTV, but it hasn’t been an easy road thus far. Viacom has just been added to the growing list of networks that are blocking access to Google TV. So far the only networks that allow streaming content to be viewable on Google TV are TBS and Time Warner.

With popular networks like Comedy Central, MTV, Disney and CBS already out of the picture, your choices for streaming content from your Google TV are not looking good at all. Google TV is just in it’s infancy, so this is a sad situation.




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