SXSW Panel: The Future of Social Networks
Introduction
SXSW (South by Southwest) is a group of conferences and festivals that occur yearly in Austin, Texas, and focus on the Interactive, Film, and Music industries.
Last week, Charlene Li spoke on a panel on the topic "The Future of Social Networks". This topic is immediately relevant to Clearmix and the Clearmix PlatformTM, so we wanted to give both a summary of the content, as well as an analysis of how her views and ideas affect your community.
Summary
Charlene Li focuses on the integration of existing networks in her talk at SXSW. This integration of networks may not mean social networks like Facebook and MySpace, or professional networks like LinkedIn, but rather your complete online identity and experience. She delves into issues dealing with who to trust, how to trust them, and how that trust will affect your online experience.
Integrating your contacts, activity stream, and friends into a cohesive, collaborated service is what brings her to many of her points, including the exchange of some control for the benefit of greater general knowledge about users.
Going from here, her introduction of the current authentication mechanisms available highlights the challenges for businesses to choose between adopting a larger audience in exchange for this control, and how the bigger networks are able to share information together with a larger audience.
Her use case of the celebrity network, Insider, and their implementation of Facebook Connect highlights a very important topic that we described in February in Facebook Connect: Theory vs. Application. Namely, the ability to use existing and future social networks to grow your base and tap into a larger market. The Facebook Connect service lowers registration barriers, by allowing users to dynamically register through their Facebook account, but her focus here is the exchange of benefit between Facebook and the Insider. The Insider is given the opportunity to learn a great deal demographically about their users, who they only had general information about. This then leads to a "money motive" for Facebook that serves as the core of their Facebook Connect service. If the Insider is privy to this kind of information, and can use it to generate more worthwhile ads, then Facebook should earn some of the revenue that comes as a result of this.
Charlene Li's analysis of the future of social networks was very thoughtful, informative and very intimately related to a focus point for Clearmix: open network integration. Our current focus has been on media such as YouTube, Google Images, and Yahoo! Images; however her talk highlights the need to bring in not just media, but also context, to your community.
Analysis
Our immediate response to Charlene's talk was unbridled agreement. Her ability to articulate some of our core beliefs was a pleasant treat. Charlene does a superior job of highlighting the future of social networks in a general way, distinguishing her from so many who target her type of analysis to a more technical-focused group.
Integration with existing social networks is in fact the future of social networking. While Facebook, MySpace, and that breed of networks will never be able to meet every need of the general public's online presence, they will provide a gateway that will bring like-minded people together. The type of cohesion that will come from adopting open authentication systems like OpenID, Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect and MySpaceID will result in more successful niche communities which will prove to be more useful.
The future of online networking and interaction will not remain confined to 3 or 4 large networks. An analogy that we often use here is what has actually evolved with the technological interaction over the past 10 years.
The internet's adoption to the masses really came to fruition in the early 2000's, however it's most notable growth came between 1995 and 1999. The internet became a medium through which organizations and individuals could express themselves and their ideas. Before this time however, the PC was used primarily in a desktop, offline environment. People bought computers to play games, use word processors and spreadsheets, or for academic research. With the internet came a revolution in how the PC user could use and gather information.
The user was no longer limited to using a dictionary program, word program, music program or publishing program to perform a task offline. Slowly, the ability to do research, document events, or share music moved online. There was not one website which people went to in order to do this. There were a few thousand. Then there were a few million. And today there are billions. This general trend is indicative of online social communities. Facebook will not meet the needs of every person, just as Windows did not meet the needs for every PC user. Windows became the gateway through which people came online.
This is the trend that we believe will be at the center of user's experiences in the next 5-6 years. Facebook, and others, will become the medium through which people connect their real lives, and online lives. Today's larger social networking communities will not be static, and try to reserve all the traffic on their own. They will create tools that user's connect through.
Microsoft's most profitable entity was never Windows. It was in fact the Office suite. It may seem ironic that the platform on which the Office programs were built upon was not as profitable. This is due to the large overhead cost involved in creating such a flexible and powerful system. This is where large networks will shine. They have had the time and experience to create large scale, identity driven, communities, through which they can offer access to, in order to monetize. This point is what we at Cleamix agree most with from Charlene Li's talk.
Impact
The impact of Charlene Li's discussion won't be fully realized for quite sometime. The future of social networks is difficult to understand because of the abstract nature of online networking. Six years ago, it would have been difficult to articulate the real world impact that social networking would have. Not only the financial impact, but also the social. The communities and connections that would be made would have been difficult for people to understand.
Over the next 5 to 6 years though, the integration of a person’s online life will be much clearer. Sharing demographic information, friend lists, news feed activity, and real world relationships will become the norm for any new community. A community's development and adoption will begin not with standard feature development, but with integration with open authentication services which will bring context to the community immediately. This context will then drive the community to it's goal, tied directly to larger networks.
Similar to our analogy of Windows and the Internet, mainstream networks are going to be the proxy through which any meaningful, real-world connected interaction takes place. While many are quick to denounce Windows and Microsoft as out of touch and outdated, 90% of all internet traffic uses a Microsoft product as gateway. This may or may not remain the case over the next 5 to 6 years, but it is indicative of the long-term reach that these larger social networks will have. They will become the online gateway through which new communities develop.
Conclusion
Charlene Li's insightful talk on the future of social networks, and online networking in general, has brought forward some exceptional points and ideas that will begin to form in the coming years. She touches on privacy and security issues that will, and should, become a focus for communities, and has done a great job of articulating the options that organizations and users need to be presented with.
Clearmix's general direction has always been set as being as flexible and extensible as possible. While this focus entails both hardware and software, it has also taken into account virtual identities, and how their integration needs to be available, and itself extensible. When we work with organizations to develop communities, we stress upon them that they will not be able to compete with larger networks. However our purpose in doing so is to highlight the fact that they shouldn't be competing; that in order to grow a strong community, you need to take advantage of the work these large communities have done. YouTube has cataloged the world’s largest video collection, as Flickr, Google Images and Yahoo Images have done with imagery. While our integration with videos and images has begun, so too will our integration with Facebook and larger social networks.
A community that catalog's friends and real world relationships differs from a community that catalogs media only in context. Integrating the two together will make your community grow purposefully and relevantly to your organizations goals, and that is something we focus on intently at Clearmix.
