At the recent International Web Managers Workshop in York I attended a discussion session led by Brian Kelly entitled Building the Web Managers Community. This session allowed participants to discuss web 2.0 social networking tools and their role in supporting a community of web managers in sharing best practice and experiences.
My interest in this session stems from my long history of involvement in sustained open source development using a community led model. In this domain only four tools are needed to facilitate the community:
- mailing lists (or in some cases forums) – the fewer the better
- a web site (which may or may not contain a blog but should provide RSS feeds of news)
- a repository for documentation and, where appropriate, source code
- an issue tracker to help plan and monitor organised community activity
Despite there being only four tools in this list, a process for their use is vital. None of these tools are of any use without a process describing how the community operates and is governed. None of the communities I have examined in the various social networking sites have such a process, nor such a limited (but highly effective) set of tools at their disposal. This is true of all “social networking” communities I’ve seen, including those set up by people from successful “old web” communities.
Process is critical (note process need only be guidance in the form of best practice, it need not be rules). It is critical because newcomers to the community need to have a very clear understanding of which tools are used for what purpose. Without this process, and without tight control over the proliferation of overlapping tools available to the community, information is spread far and wide. Consequently its exposure, and thus its usefulness, is limited.
For a community to succeed participants must get more out than they put in, so limiting the exposure to useful resources is a major concern.
Since the four tools listed above, coupled with a clear description of their use patterns, have led to the development of highly successful and long lived communities within open source software development. I wonder if we really need more?
It is worth noting that members of those “old web” communities often experiment with social networking tools. I recall myself and many of my Apache Software Foundation colleagues getting all excited over one of the very early social networking tools, Orkut, launched in November 17, 2002. Despite our early enthusiasm, we quickly grew bored of it and returned to our tried and tested tools. Since then I (and many of my peers) have experimented with LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Orkut (again) and a handful of other such, so called, social networking tools. I have to say the functionality, and more importantly, the utility, of these sites has not really changed a great deal since 2002. I still stick to my four base tools within all my real community work.
In addition to the proliferation of tools within these environments I am also highly worried about the fact that these tools are walled gardens. Back in the early days of Orkut there was a hope that it would be the “one and only”, or it would create open standards for all that follow, yet I (and to a large extent we, where the we are existing members of successful online communities) rejected it.
Today it is clear that there are a large number of walled gardens in social networking domain. This is a problem because if I’m not a member of a site, I can’t play with the communities within. Since I don’t want to join and manage up to a dozen different social networking sites I have to pick and choose which I join in with. This is contrary to the a basic principle of a community led development – that everyone is welcome as long as they are willing to play by the “rules”.
If the tools are not fully open with respect to sharing their data across social networks (where permission is granted), then they are no use to my community development work. So again, nothingis compelling me to move away from the tried and tested tools listed above.
This whole “walled garden” mess reminds me of my early days using computers and modems to communicate. First of all I used bulletin boards (reasonably open thanks to Fidonet), then I joined Compuserve (totally closed), but had difficulty communicating with those on AOL, Prestel and others. Then came open standards and the Internet and gradually the walls began to fall. I quickly left Compuserve and switched to newsgroups and email, I’ve never looked back since.
Supporters of online social networking often argue that there are runaway success stories that indicate this is a movement that cannot fail. I disagree. In its day Compuserve, Prestel and many other such networks were a success, but only AOL can be thought of a survivor from these early days. Today AOL is not the walled garden it once was, it has remodelled in order to survive. [I won't even bother pointing at the dot-com bubble and all the "runaway success" stories within it that later bit the dust.]
I predict only one or two of the current Social Networking sites will survive, and they will be the ones that share their network data first.
“I predict only one or two of the current Social Networking sites will survive, and they will be the ones that share their network data first.”
I absolutely agree with this. I wrote about the Facebook platform a while ago and how I would be more excited if the API worked both ways – that is to say if Facebook allowed external use of it’s social network, rather than being the walled garden it is now.
Most, maybe all, of the components which would allow an open social network to be successful are in place (I’m pretty sure that OpenID is going to be important in this space very soon.) I guess the issue is going to be finding the business model to sustain a ‘coherent’ social network – I think it is the coherence or packaged convenience which appeals to people, which is currently provided by some kind of central provision in many cases (Facebook, MySpace etc.). The first of the big social networks to figure out how to make money while opening up the network to external re-use is going to be in a very strong position.
Paul
Paul,
I agree with your observations with respect to business models. Right now they are all hinging around the same model. They all appear to hinge around the fact that the more they know about their users the more valuable their data is to marketeers. If they open their data then they could lose this advantage.
It’s a tough one, but as you say:
The first of the big social networks to figure out how to make money while opening up the network to external re-use is going to be in a very strong position.
Hmmmm…. it might just be that my personal lexography is incomplete but to my mind the real question is what is a valid reuse application? I appreciate all the comments regarding walled gardens and the like, and perhaps I lack imagination here, but what possible applications are there for it to be reused WITH?
If you’re just talking about reusing it on other sites like Trillian did for instant messaging then really it’s just another standards war, and frankly so what? Has anyone found a way to make money out of IM or browsers yet?
If you’re talking about (say) a commercial site then the obvious answer is using it as a hosted service, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but you can’t create a network, so I’m guessing maybe they’ll try selling them. (only caveat being the UI is so bad I might have missed the button.)
Personally I think opening it too far would be bad, people value the controlled environment, that’s one of it’s charms, selling it as an Engine, fair enough but why bother when you can just use it in situ? I can see the purpose in giving an API for automated content management but again that isn’t really open.
Bottom line, as soon as you open it up to advertising you’ll lose subscribers by the million. I think this is more of a “me too” space, like Nike giving trainers to the cool kids so the sheep will buy them. Find the person with the most friends in each city (use mechanical turk, perhaps, or sell query results, more likely???) then add them to your hosted corporate facebook network and use the existing developer API to farm the niaive with thinly veiled tat.
Thanks for your comments Rich, you make some valid points, and ask a few questions. I’ll answer the questions first:
How long is a piece of string? Here are a few potential reuse scenarios:
- we have Bebo for youngsters, MySpace for teenagers, Facebook for Students and young professionals, and LinkedIn for career development (OK I generalise but you get my point). The customer doesn’t want to have to rebuild their network every time they outgrow one of these tools
- the value of a network increases with the size of the potential members of that network (assuming tools exist to manage information effectively) – sharing data increases the size of the pool
- Fred is starting a new project and needs to find people with XYZ skills, but Fred is in network tool X and the best person available for his team, Jane, is in tool Y, Fred never finds finds Jane
“standards wars” are important, without them nothing gets standardised and we end up not having an accessible web, railways, international telephony, snail-mail, affordable manufacturing etc. etc.
I think you’ll find there are a considerable number of highly profitable companies out there, yes. Although I agree, we are still in the trailblazing stage.
“but why bother when you can just use it in situ?”
My argument isn’t that I want to run my own social network (that option already exists with a number of social networking tools available on the market), my argument is that I want to maintain a single profile and be able to use it in all social networking tools. Of course, in reality I am likely to have a number of profiles, or at least a number of different views onto that profile.
What you’re really talking about (I think) is adding further privilege dimensions to your profile
That is only a very small part of what I am saying. Take another look at the use cases in my previous message, they were focussed on “profile migration” and “profile sharing”. It’s about maintaining a single, effective, profile, rather than multiple ineffective ones.
As for “standards wars”, as I said previously, they are an inevitable part of progress, we can’t avoid them. In fact all the “standards” that we need to have interoperable profiles are already there, the wars are already raging (FOAF, SIOC, OpenID are three, non-competing standards that apply in this domain).
inextensible except to the educated few who can be bothered, certainly I wouldn’t want to model my own profile (too much like work)
I think this is where I diverge from your view of social networking tools. For me *social* networking is done in my real life. I do business related “social” networking online. Sure, there are overlaps. I do use email for social purposes, but most of my email and Internet usage is business related. But I don’t want to limit my business contacts to those willing to join the same social networking tool as the one I opt for.
Ben Laurie poses an interesting question that addresses some of the issues raised in this post.