Krishwords

People in tech blogosphere are aware of this for sometime now. But I still thought it is worth posting it here in this blog. David Weinberger writes on Huffington Post

The new ad infrastructure enables Facebook to extend their reach onto other companies’ sites. For example, if you rent a copy of “Biodome” from Blockbuster.com, Blockbuster will look for a Facebook cookie on your computer. If it finds one, it will send a ping to Facebook. The Blockbuster site will pop up a “toast” (= popup) asking if you want to let your friends at Facebook know that you rented “Biodome.” If you say yes, next time you log into Facebook, Facebook will ask you to confirm that you want to let your friends know of your recent rental. If you say yes, that becomes an event that’s propagated in the news feed going to your friends.

Fred Stutzman nicely differentiates social networks into ego-centric networks and object centric networks. Social Networks like Facebook and Myspace, where the user profile is the center piece of the network, form the ego-centric networks and sites like Flickr and Youtube, where photos and videos form the center piece, are called object-centric networks. He then argues that ego-centric networks are more vulnerable to mass migration than object-centric ones. In order to highlight his claim, he quotes what’s next moment as the tipping point.

Of course, the problem with ego-centric networks lies in the fact network-reestablishment is the main chore. Talk to individuals joining Facebook today - what are they doing? They’re using inbox importers and searching to find their friends/ex-classmates/etc. It’s a game, it’s fun for a bit, but then (say it with me readers) “What’s next?” Yes, the what’s next moment occurs. This is not to say the network becomes useless: no, it’s very useful rolodex, and the newsfeeds introduce concepts of peripheral participation (or social surveillance), but the game is in essence over.

This is very true. I see that more and more in my facebook usage and there are many others who face similar situation. A living example for this phenomenon is Robert Scoble. If we compare his days after he got interested in facebook with today, we can observe this effect. In the early days of his facebook life, he was extremely motivated and he was very active in facebook. In fact, there were moments when people “unfriended” him because information from his profile were filling up the news feeds of those users. Once he hit the ceiling on the maximum friends allowed for any user, he faced with what’s next moment and his facebook activity came down. Even though he is still an active user in facebook, it is nowhere near the peak. When this kinda effect hits upon people in large numbers, we will see massive migration of users and eventual stagnation or death of the social network. Fred’s concept is very interesting and I would like to have some data on this so that we can build upon the concept further.

Tim O Reilly highlights clearly what is expected from Open Social

Let’s start with the first one. If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that’s a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

The best quote I have seen about Google’s mobile initiative comes from Forrester Analyst Charles Golvin through GigaOM

The impact is broad across all players in the mobile environment, driving innovative developers to craft new applications that leverage both the mobile networks and the Internet, and helping to change the way consumers behave when on the go. Google is far from the only beneficiary, as competitors like Yahoo (YHOO) and even Microsoft (MSFT) stand to benefit should they embrace this approach; the impact will build slowly over time as initially the devices using this platform will form a very small percentage of the market.

I would extend the same quote to Google’s Open Social initiative too. We are seeing pundits wondering about the lack of any open social apps or user experience. In order to really feel the impact of open social, we may have to wait for quite a long time. It will slowly build over various social networks and eventually into the user’s psyche.

PS: Please don’t get me wrong on my posts. I am not supportive of any of Google’s business strategies. I am only supporting their efforts to open up both the social networking world and the mobile world. These two strategies are going to be the first step towards achieving a future based on open standards.

Robert Scoble interviews Marc Canter about Open Social. He does a great job of explaining what open social is. He is talking about open social has opened up the gates to what he usually calls as “adding social to software”. This is the kinda vision I has when I wrote about Decentralized Social Networks. Listen to Marc Canter. You will learn a lot about opening up of social networks.

Today, Nick made a post on the effects of abrupt termination of facebook accounts. Facebook should have a flexible policy wth regards to the termination of accounts. I really appreciate their intention to avoid spamming but they should have a two tiered approach where they warn the user first and give the user a chance to mend his/her ways. They can terminate the account if the user violates the terms for a second time. This way, it could help those user’s who violate the terms without even realizing it. Come on, how many users take their time to read through the TOS. Since people are investing quite a lot of their time on facebook, they should have a courtesy to warn first before terminating the account. It will save the accounts of those users who are not aware that their actions inside the facebook violates the TOS. If the termination of accounts becomes widespread with more unintentional users getting their accounts disabled, there is a good chance that people will not invest their time on facebook. I hope facebook is more sensitive to the time invested by their users on facebook.

Earlier this week, Allen Stern of Centernetworks called Twitter a publicity network, along with other social networks like facebook. He argued that a platform like twitter can be used by a smart marketer to publicize their product/service. He quoted Mashable as a perfect example for using twitter as a publicity network. I definitely agree with him on how these platforms can be used (gamed, if you are an anti-marketer person) for publicity purposes. But, his post got me thinking about the nature of twitter platform as such. Is it an instant messenger or is it an IRC kinda chat client or is it a social network or is it a publicity network, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since facebook opened up its application platform, the blogosphere is full of hype paralleled only by the hype during dot com boom days. The hype these days is almost at the delusional levels, with valuations going to 100 billions. I am not an anti-facebook person. I use it extensively. As Robert Scoble points out, it is a modern day Rolodex for me. It is a pretty neat tool for managing my personal and business contacts. With the opening up of its application platform, facebook helps me with some of my social and business tasks. In this post, I am going to cut through the hype and put some perspective on what facebook is in realistic terms. Read the rest of this entry »

According to Businessofcinema.com

Eros International has collaborated with Internet television service Joost (www.joost.com) to provide more than 200 Bollywood movies and over 600 music videos from Eros’ catalogue including films like 1942 A Love Story and Salaam-e–Ishq.

This move is fascinating because Joost consumes quite a lot of bandwidth and bandwidth is expensive in India. Who are they targeting? Non Resident Indians? I don’t think Joost will pick up in a big way in India till they sort out the broadband mess. NRI community using Joost is a small audience for this deal to be significant. Unlike many people in India, I wouldn’t put Bollywood on par with Hollywood in getting worldwide audience. Under such a scenario, this deal doesn’t make any sense to me. If you have an alternative opinion on this, feel free to add it in the comments.

If you are a firm believer in the disruptive nature of second life like me, here is an interesting video about how San Jose State University is doing distance education through second life. Also check out Deepak’s blog for information on how scientists use second life.

PS: Deepak blogs along with me at TechBizMedia.