innovation playground Idris Mootee

Are You Suffering From Facebook Addiction Disorder (FAD)?

A growing body of research in the area of addiction suggests that Internet Addiction Disorder is becoming a real problem, it is a psychophysiological disorder involving tolerance; withdrawal symptoms; affective disturbances; and interruption of social relationships. The most common one is Facebook Addiction Disorder (FAD). 

To be diagnosed as having Facebook Addiction Disorder, a person must meet certain criteria. At least 2 or 3 of the following 6 criteria must be present at any time during a 6-8 months period:

1/. The first thing is tolerance. This refers to the need for increasing amounts of time on Facebook to achieve satisfaction and/or significantly diminished effect with continued use of the same amount of time/ The often have multiple Facebook windows opened at any one time. 3 is usually a sign and over 5 you're helpless.

2/. After reduction of Facebook use or cessation, it causes distress or impair social, personal or occupational functioning such as wondering why your Vista is so fast and improved etc. These include anxiety; obsessive thinking about what is written on your wall on Facebook etc.

3/. Important social or recreational activities are greatly reduced and or migrated to Facebook. Instead of sending an email you post a message on your friend’s page about canceling a lunch appointment. You now stop answering your phone call from your Mom and insist she should contact you through Facebook chat.

4/ This is getting serious if you start kiss your girlfriend's home page or a VRML virtual walk through a park is your idea of a date.

5/ Your bookmark takes 20 minutes just to scroll from top to bottom or 8 of 10 people in your friend's list you have no idea of who they are.

6/ When you meet people you start introducing yourself by following "see you in Facebook" or your dog has its own Facebook profile. You invite anyone you've met and any notifications, messages and invites reward you with an unpredictable high, much like gambling.

As we spend more and more time online no questions it can be addictive. Some say that there is no such thing as Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). I am not sure we’ve any answer for that yet. I am sure the pharma companies will be quick to say that there is medication solution out there with psychoactive drugs.

So how many kinds of disorders are out there? Are they really disorders of just the pharma companies twant us to believe there are. Here are my list and don't count that they will make it to the medical dictionary. May be a start-up can come up with an idea to help solve this problem.

• Facebook Addiction Disorder (FAD)
• Youtube Addiction Disorder (YAD)
• Google Search Addiction Disorder (GSAD)
• Widget Addiction Disorder (WAD)
• Twitter Addiction Disorder (TAD)
• Blackberry Addiction Disorder (BAD)

I did not include the Mac Addiction Disorder (MAD) as there is no cure for this. I have many friends who are suffering this and there's no sign that they are getting out. When we walk into an Apple store we realize that there’s nothing else for us to buy. That’s the first sign of MDD and I know many people suffer from this one without knowing it. The only cure is keep buying the next Mac products whatever it is. Is addiction a problem or information overload is the bigger problem? Between blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, MSN, LinkedIn, Digg, and whatever next new social networking apps, we can keep ourselves busy 24 by 7. There is still much hand-wringing and second-guessing among those who spend a lot of their lives online both at work and at home as to whether their online activities is any addiction problem. When telephone was available for the mass for the first time, a lot of people started spending a lot of time on the phone, was that addiction problem? Is iPod an addiction? There are people in my office listening to their iPods while at work and my teenager sons pretty much using their iPods 24 hrs, they listen to it even when they go to bed. Is that also addiction? Or it is just a fetish?

Call it Facebook addiction or fetish, I see this as progress of enlightenment for the modern life. Our modern culture is unconsciously penetrated by the information (useful and useless) and we are all struggling with them. Social networks collapse the difference between culture and practical life and our culture is codified and distributed through the Internet. As a result the ‘culture’ industry is now being expanded beyond fashion, music and magazines.

Many of these information that we’re exposed to on the Internet does not at all ‘signify’ true information or freedom from deception but it has reduced significantly the impact of any mass deception. The needs of people to connect, along with the growth of social connectivity, would raise the quality of the social whole to a new and higher level.The organic composition of our social networks is growing. That determines network as means of finding self-identities and not only as resources. Addiction may not be such a bad thing after all.

Have a great weekend.

Social Networks 2.0 - Data Portability and Gated Social Networks

I have so many responses from my last post, I wanted to explore that subject more next week so for those who sent me emails or posted here plese bear with me and I will get back to you on those discussions. For now, I want to share some thoughts on social networks. There's also rumor that Comcast's acquisition Plaxo will happen very soon, its Pulse social network service, with 1.5 million active monthly users, has been under the radar for a while. It's a smart move by Comcast, which can enhance the user experience across its 14 million high-speed Internet subscribers, 3 million voice customers, and 24.2 million cable subscribers. We are all wondering how social networking is likely to evolve once we get past the current hype cycle. It is always good to start from the motivations of these social networks.

I see five distinct types of motivation:

1/ I want to stay in touch with the cool people that I know and trust
2/ I want to meet new people for shared interest or expand business contacts
3/ I want to increase my online presence and publicize my persona
4/ I want to provide knowledge or share stories to help others
5/ I want to get some help

A recent pool shows that 87% respondents (Prospectiv surveyed nearly 3,000 users of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Hi5 and others) feel that very few (58%) or none (29%) of the ads and offers they see on social networking sites match their specific interests and preferences. These results clarify that members of social networking sites are open to ads as long as they are properly targeted to their interests. Of those surveyed, 58% said that very few ads match consumers' interests and preferences, while 29% said that none of the ads match consumers' interests and preferences. Only13% said most ads match consumers' interests and preferences. As a result 54% of consumers never click on ads on social networks, while 39% occasionally will respond to ads.

Ad model-based social networks is not a problem, 85% of consumers said they are more likely to join a free social networking site supported by advertisements and offers targeted to their interests rather than a paid social networking site without ads. Social networks are more sensitive to ads. Unethical marketing practices on social media websites usually backfire.  The relevance and context is particularly sensitive and any non-targeted, spam marketing will create more damage to the site and its advertisers.  I know many industries including pharma are dying to figure out how to use SN to market their products. On the other hand, their lawyers are struggling with liability issues.

Ad spending on social-networking sites will reach $2.15 billion in 2010 (this year forecast at $14 bil), according to eMarketer. MySpace will continue to dominate, accounting for 60% of total U.S. online social-network ad spend this year but it might change. Worldwide, social-network ad spending is forecast to $2.8 billion, that’s a lot of money. Social networks must put adequate ROI measures in place if the flow of ad dollars is to continue, says Debra Williamson, eMarketer analyst and author of the report. An updated report estimates $40 mil for Facebook widget and application ad spending in 2008, up from $15 million last year. I believe the are under pressure to develop an adequate ROI metrics to accommodate how to measure “engagement” and not “eyeballs”. Currently Facebook and MySpace together account for 72% of social network ad dollars.

Facebook and MySpace just announced their plans to make your social networking data portable and Google has announced “Friend Connect,” a similar service that will officially this week. Friend Connect is a tool which enables any website owner to add some code to their site and get a number of social features. All that stuff you usually can’t be bothered to install plugins for: user registration, invites, members gallery, reviews, message posting, and - most importantly - third party OpenSocial apps.

What does that mean? In practice, this is an intrastate to create common connection which means that anyone will be able to log in, for example, with their OpenID on some blog, and converse with their Gtalk, Facbeook or Linkedin etc.

Remember the first local social network Dodgeball which got bought by Google and threw away? Then there was Twitter. It’s evolved so much more that “what are you doing now?” which I still don’t understand the value. Yahoo! launched its own play FireEagle in private beta which is starting the location-craze again — with plans to have multiple input/output methods looming across the web and devices. So another “where are you application”.

The desire to network is as old as humanity and online social networking sites is now part of our life. The question remains will these communities will eventually be gated and what will be the implications? However, the trust issue for companies remains very real. You cannot simply allow everybody to see everything. The question follow is around data portability, that is allowing users to share their list with other websites. Let’s say if I visit a site as a member of a particular group I will receive special group treatments. That is a very powerful concept. It is like every site will have the power to personalize based on the information that this person carries and marketers can negotiate with these groups for permissions to market to. The Data Portability Project is a grass-roots advocacy group pushing the idea for users to be able choose to share some of their data between the services and being able to do so with peace of mind, security and safety.

What about Facebook and Google sharing information with each other (not that this will happen soon as they are about to go to war) -- why would anyone want that to happen? Google has all your search data, but they don't know about your friends. And conversely, Facebook knows who are friends are but nothing about your searches. You can imagine the power of the two.

Let me know if you like this scenario. Pls share your thoughts.

Newest Ventures - From Social Networks Search To Social Ventures

First day of a crazy week ahead. We'll start the week with looking at some news on latest venture funding for the last two weeks. Mobango received $5.7m for their mobile social network
. I was seriously exploring this idea with Keith Liu three years back but it was a little early because we're looking at GPS network deployment.

Another social network recommendations start-up called Redux just raised $6.5 m in series A funding from DFJ and individual Alsop Louie. They had previously raide $1.65 million in seed funding from two individual investors. Redux has created a social network with recommendations based on their unique algorithm and is creating a social network that helps people navigate through people, events, and other social network features and it learns about you by analyzing your profile and asking you a few questions. The more you use the site the more it can learn about your interests and social behavior. The algorithm also creates a relevance score for people that it believes you would most likely want to get to know and meet. They do the same for events and literally suggesting to you which parties to go to.

This is one of my favorite. Sellaband received $5m from Prime Technology Ventures.  It basically allows you to buy shares in unsigned bands and become a band investor (kinda like timeshare). They let you invest in the artist of your choice and they consider those that invest "believers". Each artist sells 5,000 $10 units. Once the $50,000 is achieved the artist receives professional studio time. After the studio time all the 5,000 believers will receive a Digi-Pack CD with the result of the artists professional studio-recordings. As a believer you will then receive commissions on future songs sold. It is a Dutch-based site and opened an office in New York late last year and since launch nearly two years ago has funded 18 recording artists from 11 countries. I love this concept. You can people you own a band.

Better World Books is a social venture to find literacy. They raised $4.5 m total in series A funding with $2.5m from the Social Enterprise Expansion Fund and $2m from 18 private individuals. The concept is simple, your purchases will be used to assist with literacy. On their site they discuss how three college friends formed this social venture, a business with the mission to promote literacy. They started with one book drive and have grown substantially since then.

Another one is TargetRX, a physicians and pharmaceutical community
 site that just received $9.6m aditional funding. They provides services allowing pharmaceutical clients to deploy better sales and marketing campaigns. TargetRX aims to determine the drivers of physician prescribing behavior which is obviously useful to the pharmaceutical customers. On the site it is stated that they have "developed a highly predictive, large-scale normative database of physician attitudes that it uses in combination with its patented proprietary analytic methods to provide pharmaceutical companies with powerful leading indicators of performance." The data is used to determine not only how they are doing but how they may perform in the future.

If you are planning to start a Web 2.0 video start-up, think twice. The online video category actually made up a smaller share of total U.S. Web visits year-over-year. According to new data from Hitwise, the Online Video category accounted for 1.09% of all U.S. Internet visits in March 2008, a decline of 7% compared to March 2007. I see more teenagers and teachers using it, but it is declining as a whole. Last month, YouTube accounted for 73.18 % of all U.S. visits to video sites, according to Hitwise. Still far behind, MySpaceTV received the second highest percentage of visits with 9.21% followed by Google Video with 4.06%. Hulu.com, which came out of beta the week ending March 15, 2008, was the 22nd most visited website in the category for March 2008. If you are thinking of video based start-idea, this is not the time yet.

Google Reader Goes 2.0? Wait A Second.

Everyone wants to bring new social networking ideas to their product and services, and that doesn’t exclude even Google. They just announced their latest 2.0 features in Google Reader. Google has allowed us to share with our friends our favorite blog posts we view using Reader. You get to select what you want to share. When you marked a new item as shared, your friends who use Reader would see it. Technically, your shared items were on a public Webpage, so they could have been seen by others who are not your friends, Only if those people could figure out how to find that page.

Google is now assuming that anyone you have had a conversation with using Google Talk is a friend, so they'll automatically be able to see and read what you've read and marked as shared. You can still manage your friends list and explicitly tell Reader not to share with some of your newfound friends. Of course, you'd have to know that Google had started sharing your items more widely, which many people apparently did not, even though Google alerted them through a pop-up window.

Google is desperately trying to play in this Web 2.0 space with social networking. It wants to make many of its applications and services more "social," to, for example, tell your friends what you are reading with Reader or cataloging with My Maps. But unlike Facebook, they have n ideas who your friends are. So they jump ahead and assume that anyone you’ve talked to is your friend and that you don’t mind sharing your favorite stuff. Let’s be realistic, not everyone on my Facebook or Linkedin is someone I called a friend. I guess it comes down what’s one definition of what a “friend” is and it differs from time to time.  This is not for Goggle to decide. There are often competitive issues even among my friends and colleagues.

Consider how two of my strategists use Google Reader's sharing feature: to alert another colleague about articles they believe of interest and one of them talked to a ex colleague who consulted with a competitor of one of our client. Do they really want their former colleagues to know what research they are reading related to their current projects? Probably not.

The popularity of social networking sites introduces the use of mediated–communication into the relationship development process. These sites can be viewed within a larger trend that shifts the influence of interpersonal correspondence to mediated messages. In an age of social media, do we really have any privacy? Form Oscar Gandy’s (1993) perspective, we probably do not. Using the metaphor of a Panopticon — an architectural design that allowed prisoners to be monitored by observers — Gandy argues that surveillance systems can exert the same type of control in contemporary culture. He states: “the panoptic sort is an antidemocratic system of control that cannot be transformed because it can serve no purpose other than that for which it was designed — the rationalization and control of human existence.” He calls for an agency to ensure the survival of privacy. Everyone organization involved in social networking really needs to think hard anytime they introduce a new “share” feature. It is amazing how much you can find out about one’s personal life by mining info from these social networking sites.

Social networking sites create a central repository of personal and collective information. These archives are both persistent and cumulative. Instead of replacing old information with new materials, all data are archive–oriented compilations of entries that can be searched and pieced together in an automated fashion. Should we be worried?

Build Your Facebook Widgets In 10 Minutes

Widgets are now part of our every life, a company called Widgetbox is making it even more simpler. They developed a solution that allows users to easily create Facebook applications in just a matter of minutes. We see widget downloads are at an all time high and there is a real demand ti provide developers with the go-to platform for building and distributing widgets, and provides consumers with an opportunity to discover and get fresh widgets for their social networking sites, blogs or personal web pages..

There are free tool enables you to convert your personal blog or Web site into a widget. Developing your own widgets is a breeze. Simply pick a layout for your widget, place the XML feed URL into the box, name your widget, add tags, and publish! It is that simple. Every site that you come across offers widgets. What does the widget do? You can copy the code of any widget and simply add to your Web site or blog, and well, the site where you got the widget from becomes active on your site or blog. Widgetbox allows you to add your widget across a variety of sites, blogs and social networking sites, such as TypePad, , MySpace, Facebook, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Freewebs, Hi5, Piczo, etc. So if you've ran our of ideas for Christmas, how about creating a few widgets for your friends?

Will Linkedin Finally Find A Strategy That Helps Them Take Off?

I don’t know how many of you use Linkedin. I became a paid user since yesterday. Linkedin is definitely one of the very early social network ideas started in the middle of the dot.com bust. For years they had been desperately looking for a business model and I think time has come for one. I think there are plenty of missed opportunities to innovate on the experience front which in turn would translate into greater traffic, advertising or subscription revenue.

I've heard news that they are resigning a new homepage with a focus on providing users with reasons to return more often. On-site messaging is one idea but not a big one.  There should ways to show network activity and that alone will drive traffic. I don’t think aggregation of news is a good idea and I think they are already playing with the idea.  They do need a much stronger presence on the web and without specialty applications that is difficult to do. They do have the options of providing an API and attract some developers. So far the only known partner is Business Week and they will implement a few features using LinkedIn’s API from the information in users’ profiles and associate it with the content in its articles. The idea is to display, via a popup, how many people in a company are directly connected to a user or in the extended network or geographical region of a user.

I am not saying LinkedIn will or will not become the Facebook of business. The number one big big problem is LinkedIn profiles are static and doesn't create a dynamic network unlike Facebook and others. It is simply an address book with some connectivity components. They really need to start thinking what Web 2.0 means for them.  For me, I want people to see the cool projects that I am working on or idea that I have but there’s nothing in Linkedin for that. Everything on my Facebook profile is linked. There are tons of other features I can come up with; I won't go through all of them all here.

Obviously they have been doing a couple of things right. But they have yet nailed the killer experience design needed to make this big. It is still too much of static networked-rolodex, I don’t think the solution is adding more features, but making some of features better and putting some 2.0 ideas to work here.  Expect user based continuous to grow and I think they are at the beginning of a hockey stick if they get this right.

The Coming Convergence Of Email And Social Networks.

Facebook are still attracting tens of thousands of new users each month and Google is trying pushing the social networking its OpenSocial initative. Not long ago Microsoft spent $240 million to buy a 1.6 % of Facebook (that gives Facebook a valuation of $15 billion and there’s almost no room for any option play for employees with this valuation.) Just when Facebook thinks that its 50-plus million users can now be mined for ad dollars. They received a harsh lesson and realized just how tricky it is to use the demographic and behavior information about its readers for targeted advertising. Everyone is thinking hard about innovative ways that can make social media the answer for advertising 2.0, which is a very wrong starting point in the first place.

Many marketers try to look for the next magic solution and thinking social media is it, but I can tell you it’s not. Can the YouTube and Facebook eventually become the ABC, CBS and NBC of the next century? Definitely not, but they will drastically shape the future of broadcast media. The social media concepts will have long lasting impact on the media industry. Where was Facebook a year ago? Where was MySpace 2 years ago? There will be a next Facebook in less than 12 months. This is just the beginning of another 5-7 year innovation cycle which is part of the evolution of the broadcast industry. I am not saying that this is the end of MySpace and Facebook. My point is that the social media leaders of today may not necessarily be the next mass social networks. The big question is whether or not members of social networking sites will accept advertising in any shape or form at all. We have grown used to the idea of free entertainment being supported by advertising. Do members going to these social networking sites because they want to get away from advertising or they don’t mind advertising at all provided they support those free services? The beauty of these models is it costs them nothing to market themselves or acquiring users. The cost of acquisition is practically zero because users join voluntarily and invite their friends and provide their own content through their profiles and interests. In addition, the cost of running these services is relatively manageable.

The most disruptive thing if the majority of people shift their behaviors from using a portal as their homepage and instead use their social network pages, this will be a big threat to those media companies who wish people will use them as their homepage. Imagine if, every time you logged on, you weren't greeted by Yahoo or Google or MSN, but a collection of news, music, videos, photos, shopping tips and blog postings, written or selected by your friends or whatever groups that you actively belong to. You can assess to different area which displays information from differetn groups. So you can ahve a professional or work page, a personal page and a family and hobby page. Instead of information spreading hub-and-spoke like from major media outlets, it would flow to consumers the way like people share their photos, through people they know and most importantly trust. So where is the future of big media company in this future? In that case it may no longer be optimal to have a dozen of media companies in the center controlling the flow of information. That’s why Facebook is not just a social networking site, but a platform for ‘personal connectivity’ and ‘sharing’. Another challenge for the news portal is that they rely on email for much of their traffic and to bring in consumers from outbound email marketing. These emails be end be landing on a social network site. Email and social networks eventually will converge and that is slowly happening. Here’s an example: One idea Yahoo is playingwith is internally called "Friend Finder" which analyzes a user's email traffic and indicates the friends with whom a user has strong email connections. It bases its findings on the volume of incoming and outgoing traffic and such factors as the frequency and speed with which the two parties respond to each other. The service works with emails sent by non-Yahoo users. Currently 20% of Yahoo email users are MySpace users and only 10% are on Facebook, but it is dangerous to base the future on these data. Features like this could eventually extend across email services. There are simply plenty of opportunity space here.

Will Social Media Spend Surpase Traditional Media?

If you think yes, media comanies are in big trouble. By 2013, advertisers and marketers will be expect edto spend more money on so-called conversational media (Social Media)--or online media that encompasses things like blogs and podcasts--than on advertising through traditional media (Print and radio etc) , according to a recent study from the Society for New Communications Research (SCCR). A ealier study on Social Media spending by Prospero reported that 88% of businesses expected to increase Social Media Spending in 2008 and further more when asked about social media return on investment (ROI), 35% reported positive ROI and 41% said that ROI was “unknown.” Responses to questions about how web marketers measure ROI reveal that direct sales revenue is not a top measure for determining social media success. Respondents said that total number of site visitors (17%) was the most important criterion for assessing social media performance. Total number of page views and number of subscribes / community members (15%respectively) were next, followed closely by length of visit on the site (14%)."

According to the Prospero study traffic to social media site is the most important determiner of ROI (which suggests investment in Social Media is advertising driven, perhaps more than it should be). On the other hand, brand "engagement" is the main measure of success for Social Media spend. Although there are no common defintintion of what "engagement" is. We do have one that we use with clients at Idea Couture and we have clear definition of each stage of the Customer Engagement Lifecycle as. well measurment framework. Will share more here later.

The SNCR study asked about 260 agencies about their plans to advertise and market in conversational media. Today, a majority of these agencies said that they spend about 2.5% of their total budgets on conversational media, but by 2012, they plan to tip that percentage to MORE than they spend on traditional media as according to the SNCR's study.

Today we are ooking at the about 110 million blogs, with about 120,000 new blogs created every day and about 1.5 million new daily posts, according to Technorati. Of those, a third are English, a third Japanese, and the rest are a mix of all. Although the growth of blogs is slowing, their importance and visibility among traditional media, companies, and entrepreneurs are actually increasing. I don’t even think social media has come close to reaching its true potential yet. Expect to see more innovaiton in this space.

Continue on "Widgetnomics"

I have seen people throwing out crazy numbers around usage of widgets. Those big numbers are being thrown around by widget developers and tracking firms and just smoke screen, becasue of the fact that many of those companies are not bringng in any decent revenue. So I dig this up from comScore ranking the most popular widget services. Popularity is one thing but figuring out a business model is another. This is not a popularity contest but it helps. Here they are:

1.  Slide
2.  RockYou
3.  Picturetrail
4.  Photobucket
5.  BunnyHeroLabs
6.  BlingyBob
7.  Poqbum
8.  Brightcove
9.  Layoutstar
10.  Musicplaylist.us

The number one on the list is Slide with 117 million people a month seeing one of its slideshow widgets distributed all over the Web.  RockYou comes in second with 82 million.  Other notables are Photobucket with a monthly audience of 28 million, and Brightcove with 17 million. Slides is based in San Francisco. Slide has developed customizable and easily assembled slide shows of photos that can be embedded in a blog or a MySpace page, sent out in an RSS feed, and streamed to a desktop as a screensaver. It is believed that they are funded by Peter Thiel, Vinod Khosla and others. Founded by Max Levchin and currently has 46 employees and have been in business for 3 years.

While slides show and video clips are graat, I really like the idea of drawing and sketching. That's why all of us use the ThinkPad Tablet and my business partners Scott and Keith are just using them like a notepad. I am the old fashion white board guy (with colorful markers). While many concepts cannot be communicated easiy through text, using visuals is an absolute must, and if you are a visual minded person, SketchCast is for you. SketchCast is a relatively new service that let's you create sketches and add audio to them. The concept is similar to screencasting, with the freedom of drawing whatever you want - to convey your message. Their idea is to help people better express themselves, but I think there are more applications i we use our imagaintion. I should try to create my next slide show with it and see how it works.

Blogging Gets Easier Everyday

I’d start by saying that I don’t think blogs are going away, I would say that we will see a period of slowing down in terms of the growth of new blogs or volume of content being generated, with the excpetion of micro-blogs which is a very different thing and will have a life of its own. I can see many new meshup ideas that combine micro-blogging with LBS and other things. Here is one example. This new Twittervision has a login feature now, but this new Atlas application looks pretty impressive. The Microsoft maps can be zoomed and you get better details.

Talking about microblog, HelloTxt is “an aggregate of microblogging services through which the user can insert their messages on all main microblogging services in both simple and simultaneous manner.” What does it do? For those who use Twitter, Jaiku, Yappd, Meemi, Beemood, and Tumblr, managing multiple microblogging services can be a pain, this thing centralizes the insertion of messages to these services, saving many trips to those sites.

They're saying that having to visit numerous microblogging services diminishes some of the advantages of the services. Namely, updating your status is time consuming and with HelloTxt, a single message will reach the different services. All login information and messages are encrypted, so you can feel safe using the service. This is a good solution. The site has a very clean design, well organized, and smart enough not to provide an over-abundance of features ( I have seen a lot demos lately people are trying to do too many things with their app). The problem is I think they do not have full mobile phone support yet.

An interesting one is Reuters and the Nokia have announced that they are working on a joint project to enable journalists to file and publish stories and multimedia news content from handheld devices instead of computers. It is called Reuters Mobile Journalism, the initiative relies upon connecting peripherals to Nokia's high-end N95 device--a Bluetooth-enabled keyboard, a small tripod for video interviews, and a microphone that can plug into the mobile handset--as well as software to make it easier to put together text, images and streaming media. Sounds cool.

Social Networks for Ad Men/Women and the Dead?

Ok, I am talking about two seperate sites. One is a social network for advertising practitioners and the other is for the deceased. The advertising professionbal social networking site is called Adgabber. Not a bad idea but not impressed with the execution as this one can attract some cool peole with all the cool ideas. The site is disappointed given it's potential. The other far more interesting one is a social network called Respectance whose mission is “dedicated to remembering those who have died.” They have raised $1.5 million in venture capital financing led by Solid Ventures and Big Bang Ventures. I honestly think this will work and I am surprised people only thought of this now. It is wonderful thing to have all those special memories of loved ones on a site that friends and relatives can visit, leave message and share warm thoughts. I can think of a hundred ways to make the experience special. The VCs definteily see the potential.

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Web 2.O And The 4Cs

Web 2.0 is a loaded term that is unarguably subject to enormous amount of hype but now also a lot of serious corporate interest. Different people define Web 2.0 in different ways, which are often confusing and is understandable (same as branding, strategy and many other words). I have written a lot the last few weeks on Web 2.0 and Media 2.0. However, the very fact that Web 2.0 is touted as being so many things underlines its strategic importance and implications for business. Web 2.0 encapsulates everything Media 2.0, Marketing 2.0 and Brand 2.0, which is best approached by breaking it down into the 4Cs: connectivity, community, conversations and most important of all co-creation.

We will be running a Web 2.0 boot camp for our clients in the next couple of weeks and these are the key themes which I will share each of them here:

• Web 2.0 means many things, but all anchor upon the 4Cs.
• Understanding the Web 2.0 customer value chain
• Introducing the concepts of “social utilities”, “social shopping” and “socialcasting”
• Opportunities and pitfalls of leveraging social networks
• The evolution of ecommerce and the four scenarios
• Transmedia storytelling and the new role of branding

The last one is the most interesting one as I will be showing videos and films that bring out ethnographic insights that illuminate many of our thinking. We have one strong commonality in that we all have our stories to tell, there were barriers to put these stories in a verbal manner and can be stored and shared, not to mention the efforts to find people who are willing to listen. The two most popular ways in the past is 1/go to the pub (old English tradition) and have a few beers and start telling strangers your life stories or 2/ pay $250 an hour for someone whether he/she is a psychiatrist or an escort (a Geisa as in old Japanese tradition) to listen to you talking. The exciting part is with Web 2.0 it is now becoming a rituals in our everyday lives. Exploring new ways to tell them and actually taking the time out to "listen" can bring happiness by recognizing relationships and likenesses on a human level, across continents. Today we have so many new opportunities to using a mix of media to tell, explore, reveal, and aggregate stories in such ways that make us feel connected even if you're alone. The concept of “long tail” makes a lot of sense here.

This whole transmedia digital storytelling are changing the ways our societal behavior too, it is becoming a “social tool”. People have the ability to build interpretive movies very simply and to lay sound tracks around the content and mesh them up. They can easily condition or "sculpture" the context around the content. The serious interplay between context and content is key to what film - and rich media in general - are about. Consumers can now create an emotional scaffolding around a story so that it connects first to the gut and then to the head? That’s why we are seeing this continuous growth in social networks. The question is what is the role of brands here? (Illustrations by John Wall for Idea Couture Inc.)

World-wide visitors to social-networking sites in September, in thousands, and change from a year earlier

	Unique users	% Change
Blogger	142,971	85
Windows Live Spaces	119,838	21
MYSPACE.COM	107,031	37
Yahoo! Geocities	85,994	-8
FACEBOOK.COM	73,521	420
WORDPRESS.COM	62,232	N/A
FLICKR.COM	40,906	98
Six Apart Sites	39,340	47
Lycos Tripod	35,379	-25
HI5.COM	35,064	51
FRIENDSTER.COM	26,504	74
Orkut	24,612	57
Yahoo! Groups	24,389	3
DADA.NET	20,196	32
BEBO.COM	19,722	142

Source: comScore World Metrix 2007

So What's Your Open Platform Strategy? Do You Really Understand The "Widgetnomics"?

Four months after Facebook unveiled its platform initiative, now everyone is talking about a platform strategy. Everyone in the technology ing space dream about creating the next web 2.0 platform. Virtually every major tech (software, mobile, hardware, broadcast, payment) company has a platform strategy, not to mention an equally elaborate set of plans to do whatever possible to stop any competitors from achieving platform status or anywhere near there.  Over lunch yesterday, one of my business partners was quick to point to the need of an open platform strategy for Apple's iPhone. That’s a little too simplistic if we consider the business strategy of Apple and the complexity of putting literally hundreds of small technological innovation into one big one. They simply cannot afford to open the floodgate to deal with all kinds of unpredictable technical issues due to many proprietary designs (hardware included) as well as the speed they bring these products to the market. There are many factors that make platform-based design a sine qua non . Design has become far too complex to allow engineers to start from scratch development and verification at reasonable effort every time. While time-to-market targets have reduced drastically to an unrlealistic level – development from scratch is very difficult challenge.  Apple performed a mission impossible job. And just reusing your own or third party IP modules is not enough, reuse as a methodology itself has to be optimized as well.  In many cases, it is no longer sufficient to focus on one specific bus protocol because of different applications require very often different bus protocols, for example by a given choice of an embedded CPU or a specific touch-sensistive screen. But it is an inevitable move for Apple, Jobs will announce the plan for third-party iPhone applications on Wednesday. Next Feb, iPhone developers will finally be able to obtain a software development kit that will give them the tools and the know-how to create safe and reliable applications for the iPhone without having to depend on "jailbreaks" programs. That means iPhone users will be able to add applications without voiding their warranties. It has taken a while and the reason being Apple wanted to find a way to be as "open" as possible to third-party development while still keeping a lid on viruses and malware as well as managing potential risks that could kill the iPhone before it becomes the iPod.

Platform strategy is always an interesting one which most people understand half of it only. Any platform innovation takes on very different properties depending on which of the following three strategies you have in mind:

1/Improve Cycle Time Productivity -This is the most basic domain of platform innovation—develop your own product line with a product architecture that people can build and extend upon.  Over a longer term, almost every company needs to undertake some form of architecture rationalization effort to migrate toward a common platform. The goal is to improve their productivity and reduce cycle time and time to market. So this is platform strategy 101.

2/Strategic Business Eco-system Building - This is a bigger idea, brining in innovation from partners and suppliers, the goal is to build out an ecosystem of partners who will add their efforts to yours to develop solutions that jointly compliment and reinforce each others’ strategic positioning. The typical mistake of these efforts is recruiting a large number of strategic partners, which is almost never a good idea. Rather the focus should be on a smaller group of intimate partnerships, making sure you actually bring together the best of breed companies that share a common industry vision or more effecitvely a share enemy.

3/Owning a De Facto Standard - This is the ultimate thing, in which your technology becomes a critical enabler of a whole class of applications or verticals or categories.  Microsoft, Google, eBay and iPod did that. There are many others too, GSM vs CDMA, PS2 vs Nintendo and XBox, ATG vs BEA, etc. Becoming the De Facto is like winning the lottery and you almost need to have this in your b-plan if you are pitching VCs for big dollars. Being a monopoly also has its price. You will become the incumbent and the core target of all these basement start-ups, those young smart guys in India or France is working day and night to put you our of business. You will end up being the Defender. Again, it is not a bad problem to have because you must be filthy rich by then.

Last few weeks, social networks Tagged, Hi5 and LinkedIn have made it clear they're working on application program interfaces (APIs) for developer platforms much like Facebook's. I’ve heard rumors that Facebook's chief rival MySpace.com is also working on something similar as well. Third-party developers are all scratching their heads just by thinking about the ideas of creating applications for a ten platforms. That will never happen. Customers' lock-in is always very tempting idea, doesn’t happen often and if it does, it doesn’t last long enough.

If you are successful, you want to push the open-innovation button and open your APIs. If you are failing, you might as well do that too. The idea of wooing developers to one social-networking platform makes Google, which has for several years been integrating with third-party developers on other properties such as Google Maps, an intriguing possibility in this fight for attention / big wins. There are rumors saying that the company is seriously considering opening the codefor Orkut, its social network, which is getting anywhere. Google might leverage some of its existing properties, like Gmail or new acquisitions like Jaiku, into a more coherent "social utility". Just by virtue of being a Google company, it gives you a ticket to enter the game.

Let me tell you why I am not keen in this idea. Facebook has stated that there are no confidentiality protections for developers who submit business plans to the company in the hopes of earning venture cash for their applications. Theoretically, this means Facebook could see a developer plan it likes and create something similar in-house. The other thing many developers have no idea of the platform economics, I have doing that for ages and I can just run the numbers from the back of a napkin and tell you whether it is a good idea of not in 5 minuets (That’s why I can't charge by the minute). If you decide to do that, make sure that the widget must be “monetizable” and try to create or maintain a “barriers to entry” for other. I called it "Wigetnomics".OK, just coined another  web 2.0 term.

Anyway, really need to go back to my day job. Will continute our branding discussion next week and talk about some joint outputs. Received many suggestions from many of you,with thanks.