According to Business Week, when Friendster opened their technological kimono to a dozen select developers, their unique visitors jumped 17. 76%. “This is our biggest [month-over-month] growth since launch,” Friendster marketing director Jeff Roberto told BizWeek.
Public or semi-public API’s seem to be all the rage in social networking this year. As we saw with Friendster, more flexibility, community involvement and innovation in social networking means more people coming on board. In 2007, businesses will need to start paying attention to social networks the way that they’ve been paying more and more attention to blogs.
This is not only true because more people will be using social networks. Yes, the increase in the number of users is important. But the real story here is about ease of dissemination. As users are able to add their own functions to popular sites, we’ll see a second-wave steroid effect on user-generated content. As we’ve seen in the past, increased interoperability and potential for customization in social media means that what your customers are saying about your products and services will go further, last longer and speak louder than it does already. That means even more loss of control of your traditional messaging.
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Richard Lipscombe 02.15.07 at 4:13 pm
Social Networks are the precursor to an emerging C21st business model I have been blogging about recently. My term for this new venture is Networked Clusters. They will lead us into new worlds of business that few have contemplated. Exactly what they will evolve into in 100 years time I have no idea. But for the moment they will lead us into mega organisations that are global and are forming whole new networked economies that rival nations and states for total revenue raising capacity. You can read more on my blog if this is of interest.
However the more interesting point here is what we might now begin to see happening with blogs sites and social networks. They will start to be controlled more - yeah just as the new business models become more and more open the existing social/business blog networks will become precious about content. Why? The radicals, thought gurus, respected thinkers, talent, etc who have sparked this movement will be replaced by “would be if they could be types”.. They will not have the intellectual curiousity, broad experiences, self-belief, etc needed to sustain an open network or blog.
Richard