O’Reilly’s
Graphing Social
Patterns conference, which was held this week in San Diego, brought together key people who are shaping the newly
born social platforms industry; platform providers, app makers, investors,
advertising networks, etc. Our own
Sean Ammirati was one of the speakers and has
already covered some of the most
important bits from the conference, including
Charlene Li’s keynote. In this post, we’ll quickly recap and highlight some of the important announcements and important
data that we were able to extract. We also have a short interview with RockYou! founder and CTO
Jia
Shen.
Keynotes
GSP kicked off with the Charlene Li keynote. Charlene talked about the social graphs
provided by the Facebook Platform and OpenSocial as “the air of
tomorrow’s web.” What she meant was that the social graph is going to be an essential
piece of tomorrow’s web, and the sites which don’t embrace it will
most probably become extinct.
The second keynote came from
Amit Kapur of MySpace. Amit gave important insight
about the monetization of their network, but admitted that “social networking is hard to
monetize,” which is something we have also heard from Google. Amit said that regular contextual advertising doesn’t work well for
social profiles and that’s the reason why MySpace is focusing on their own
monetization technologies, which they call, HyperTargeting. HyperTargeting is
already in use by big clients such as EA, Microsoft, Taco Bell, Proctor & Gamble, and FOX. But
he added that they are also planning to release a self-serve solution for
long-tail advertisers. Presumably, it will be a social doppelghanger of Google AdSense.
The third keynote was given by
Benjamin Ling of Facebook. He made some
important announcements, including the new E-Commerce APIs that they are planning to
release soon, as well as the new user-driven localization solutions that they
will provide for app makers. Facebook Platform investors at the event were unanimous in their belief that the E-Commerce APIs are big news, because it means new business models and revenue sources for app producers. On the
other hand, their localization solutions seem to be just another step in their
recently debuted internationalization efforts. Indeed it would be inconsistent to
offer a localized platform which barely has any localized apps on it. And the
good thing is, since this is user-driven, the costs for app makers to get
international is low and also linearly dependent on their merits.
Day One Announcements
Following the keynotes, there were a number of interesting announcements made, including:
- NetVibes introduced Ginger. Ginger is a social version of NetVibes
that allows you to pull in friends from your existing social
networks, share news with them and follow their reading activities. In other
words, as NetVibes’
Chris Damsen noted, Ginger makes Facebook, your private
place on the web, a more public place. - MyBlogLog introduced
Bluetooth capabilities and a new FriendFeed-like feature. The Bluetooth feature allows you to see other MyBlogLog users who
are close by. When we tested it with
Ian Kennedy of MyBlogLog, at least 10
MyBlogLog users who were attending the conference showed up on our list. In some
sense, this new feature brings MyBlogLog’s distributed social networking
into the real world. - Bebo,
Myspace, hi5, and
Friendster are launching or have already
launched their own OpenSocial-based platforms. - Chris Messina of
Citizen Agency introduced his
distributed social network project, DiSo. DiSo’s architecture depends on
existing open standards such as OpenID, XRDS-Simple, and microformats. It
sounds very geekish for now and is too-focused on technical aspects,
instead of the social realities that actually make a network work. But it
has the potential of becoming the “Linux” of social networks.
Day Two
Compared to day one, day two began with more technical topics. MySpace’s
Jim Benedetto gave some information on
their new platform, which extends existing
OpenSocial v0.6 standards with MySpace specific features like bulletin boards.
The interesting point about the MySpace Platform is that it is going to launch
very restricted. All app
submissions will have to go through a safety review process by humans.
Hence there is going to be an unavoidable lag between releasing an app and its
availability on the network. But all these limitations will be slowly removed with
a measured approach, according to Jim. He said that this is to prevent spam and protect
the long-term value of the platform.
As most of the app developers in the conference noted, including representatives from
RockYou! and Slide, restrictions by platform providers will definitely cut down their fast viral growth opportunities, but the
applications that create a real value for the users will still be able grow
virally, perhaps at a slower pace but stickier.
One of the shortest but definitely most informational sessions of the event came
from Roger Magoulas of O’Reilly Media. He showcased some very interesting
numbers and statistics that O’Reilly has collected from the Facebook appsphere. In summary,
he showed that:
- installation numbers are no longer as big as they used to be
- active usage rates have dropped significantly too
- most of the apps are released under the “just for fun” category
- there is more adoption and engagement in “games”
- there is a tendency towards winner-takes-all; 1% of apps have 75% of app users, 20% have 99%
Later, in a session that brought together top Facebook game developers, including
Mark Pincus of
Zynga, there was agreement that social games will replace casual
gaming, just like Facebook messages are replacing emails. Also Mark noted that live
games don’t work so well on Facebook, because once people leave the game, they
don’t come back; so in order to create real engagement, asynchronous
models (as in Scramble) are far better, because people love to email their
friends and call them back to the game.
Some other interesting notes we picked up during the course of the event:
- Facebook advertising is starting to get very profitable.
Peanut Labs announced that
they distributed $200K to their members just in the past 1 week. - New advertising models (besides CPC and CPM) are emerging inside the
Facebook Platform. The CPI (Cost Per Incentive) model of
SocialMedia and the CPE (Cost Per
Engagement) model of VideoEgg are just a couple of examples. With CPI, the user is
invited to install other apps; with CPE, the user is shown a lightbox page which appears as a new layer on top the Facebook canvas page
that he was actually looking at. - Facebook called on people to produce productivity apps and focus on the
long-term value, not viral growth. - The OpenSocial crew presented
Shindig, an open source,
Apache-incubated OpenSocial framework for those who are interested in hosting OpenSocial apps
inside their network. They have also introduced
CAJA, a Javascript
sanitization sandbox which allows Javascript code to be embedded into
OpenSocial apps safely. - Investors noted that app makers shouldn’t expect to become instant
millionaires with their applications. They also highlighted the importance of
long-term value and stickiness. - Facebook app makers are concerned about Facebook’s moves to release
their own apps; like Pages. They think that Facebook should just provide the
platform and not be involved with new apps anymore.
A Brief Interview with Jia Shen
At the end of the day, I had the opportunity to sit down with
Jia Shen, the CTO and
co-founder of RockYou! and ask him a few questions. Jia
acknowledged to me that his company has had a tremendous advantage over others by entering the field early, he also said that these platforms are becoming less
permissive for viral growth because of their new safety restrictions – which is
why those who plan to make a Facebook app are strongly encouraged act as quickly
as possible.
I asked Jia about their ad network, how it was going, and what is the percentage of
revenues from non-RockYou! inventory. He told me that it is going well and that the
non-RockYou! inventory now accounts for a majority of the revenues generated on the network. He
noted some of their clients include Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and Sony. He also said
they are not planning to enter the long-tail advertising race right now.
As for localization and the growing number of international social networks opening
up new platforms; he said that they will look at the specific characters of the
network that they are entering and make necessary changes to their apps if
required. But he added most of their apps are generic so they don’t expect big
changes. I asked him whether they’re planning to make acquisitions to get the
leading app makers in outside markets, and he told this is not their primary
strategy yet, but if they do, their first target will be big demographics such
as apps for Spanish speaking countries.
Jia also said that they have no preference between the Facebook Platform and OpenSocial,
they will embrace both, but they support standards and the idea of
writing once, running everywhere.
Conclusion
All in all, GSP was a very useful event for anyone working in the social networking industry. There were a number of enlightening sessions
and key people who drive the social future of the web were in attendance. As Charlene Li noted,
users will get suffocated without the portable social graph; so as a web
developer, you’d better catch up with these latest developments and get ready
for the future of the web in order to keep your visitors happy. The move of Sheryl Sandberg from Google to Facebook is more than enough
to tell you where we are headed.
