Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The last posting I wrote about Spock has touched a nerve among more than a few people in the blogging world.  Both Irwin and Andy have responded saying "enough is enough! who needs another social network".  Andy writes:

Do we really need more networks, or do we need to get more from the ones we already have? As Plaxo looks more like LinkedIn, and as LinkedIn tries to keep up with the Facebooks, the whole idea of social networks, to get closer, not farther from people has really started to wane, and we may be seeing something more necessary the OPT ME OUT NOW option that would prevent the impersonal "join my network" emails that are doing nothing but creating the equal of Internet "in box pollution." In affect the value of the "network" which is really at the core of all these is being burned at the altar by a "get big fast" VC fueled management style these networks all have in common.

Spam aside, our idea of social networks is undergoing a dramatic change.  When Facebook opened up their "social graph" to third parties they profoundly altered the balance of power around directory.  Recall this paragraph from the Voice 2.0 Manifesto:

…in the Voice 2.0 world, individuals own their own directory listings.  What you wish to list in your directory listing, including the fundamentals of name, address, and contact point(s), is your business. It’s your identity, and you get to manage it — not the carrier. Directories can be extended to include the idea of persona’s (work, home, leisure), interests, and a myriad of other kinds of personal information. Directories also become repositories for subscriber preferences, credentials, social networking details and potentially even financial information  for voice enabled transactions.  In the voice 2.0 world, the directory is an opt-in enabler for applications, commerce, and identity.

Sounds familiar doesn't it?  It should. It's the same information you find in your Facebook or LinkedIn profile. Your profile is your opt-in directory listing - the identity that you get to manage. 

Social networking sites are evolving from being the repository for your personal network to your address book, and ultimately to a full people search engine. Today's phone book is a primitive paper DNS system for e.164 phone numbers. In fact, it's not even as efficient as DNS, because it doesn't have any ability to replicate changes when they occur.  Tomorrow's system will be a completely different kind of "phone book", though — one that's built on identity, trust, recommendations and relationships.   It will be a social directory built on the graph of relationships we maintain every day.

In an ideal world, a social directory like Facebook or LinkedIn would:

• Allow me to efficiently segment my profile based on the viewer.  (As an aside, Facebook's decision to allow people to construct lists based on their friends doesn't go nearly far enough.  It's a timid half-step.)
• Interoperate with every other social graph tool out there so that I needed to only maintain one identity. After all, in the real world we each have one set of social relationships, not the multiples that multiple social networks would imply.
• Automatically update every other address book and social graph so that I wouldn't need to manage multiple instance of my identity.  Plaxo's killer feature should be a core component of the social directory.
• Expose my identity and profile information to applications as I permitted and required it to.
• Allow me to search other profiles through my relationship network, and rank those results based on the information I need, plus factors like reputation, location and so on.
• Permit all kinds of communications based on privacy and profile segmentations. 

We're headed in the right direction on many fronts.  The cries for help from folks like Irwin and Andy are simply an indication that we've got a long way to go on some crucial issues like interoperability and profile segmentation.  

Om Malik is crowing about how great Google Calendar on BlackBerry is.  I don't use Google Calendar, so it's hard for me to really pass judgement on it, as I am not about to go and shift one of my core business productivity tools for a "test drive".  It's a fact, thought, that more and more Google applications are showing up on BlackBerry as native BlackBerry applications. Calendar, mail, maps… it certainly gives me pause.  Is it any coincidence, given that Google set up shop in Waterloo in January of 2006?

The RIM team is smart.  Having built a business out of being the indispensible business person's tool for email, address book and calendar, they're now going after the consumer.  Partnering with Google delivers a well accepted suite of consumer applications onto the BlackBerry. 

The non-profit Pew Internet & American Life project regularly cranks out incredibly valuable market research.  Their latest study on Teens and Social Media is no exception.  It compares use of different kinds of social media between boys and girls, and the different media channels they use.

To give you an idea of the quality of the data in the report, here's one table that caught my eye.

That there's a pronounced shift in media usage underway in the next generation shouldn't be any revelation.  However, the fact that the telephone is still such an important part of their lives was quite surprising to me.  My view has been that teens are primarily text and IM communicators. 

For Facebook marketers, Rodney Rumford has a couple of choice items up on FaceReviews this morning:

1. His Facebook Marketing and Apps slides from the graphing social conference in October are a worth a look.  They're a basic overview of all the ways you can market a Facebook application.
2. His interview with the creators of SendHotness (the most viral application in the Stanford Facebook class) is pretty interesting too.  The SendHotness guys have done a couple of counter-intuitive things in their application which really sent installs through the roof.  Measurement is the key to everything they say.

The team at Digium cranked out a nice little momentum release this morning, announcing "the one millionth download of Asterisk in 2007".  Was that one million downloads in 2007, or the one millionth overall since the inception of the company?  Either way it's a huge number, when you consider that Asterisk is a PBX.  How many PBX's has Nortel or Avaya sold in the lifetimes of their businesses?

As the release noted, it's been a huge year for Digium, with acquisitions, new executives, partnerships, and awards.  Buried in the news was the fact that they have been profitable 24 quarters in a row. A remarkable achievement, but not that surprising to those of us who've been watching the company for the last several years.  For example, if you had the opportunity to visit any of the VON conferences over the last 3 or 4 years, you would have seen the Asterisk presence grow from a single small booth to engulfing a full third of the show floor.  That growth has been at the expense of the large traditional players, all of whom have seen their share of the VON show floor (and the market) shrink. 

Congratulations to my friends at Digium on a banner year.  Mark, Bill, Danny, Kevin, Jim, Schuyler and everyone else… you've done an amazing job.