What is the meaning of “social” technology today and into the future? The word in general is about interdependent relationships, cooperation and society. The word as it relates to the internet has typically referred to sites which enable people to define linkages between friends.
Social technology is evolving. I suppose bulletin boards were an early prototype of technology-mediated social interactions, though without the persistent linkages seen today in sites like Facebook. But the “social” trend really got going with sixdegrees.com, which was based on the concept that we are all connected by no more than six degrees of separation. (You may remember the play, the movie, and the apparently very real science of connecting everyone in Hollywood to Kevin Bacon.) If you could model those degrees of separation, you could find out through whom you know the president, for instance. Maybe even call him, since you have a friend in common.
Friendster continued the trend and was similar in concept to Sixdegrees. At that point, the notion of a “friend” was well-understood to mean someone you actually knew. Then MySpace launched with the idea that the problem with Friendster was in fact the trusted relationships and what people really wanted was self-promotion. They were right, and now Tom has over a hundred million “friends.”
With MySpace’s success, the dam broke, and now it seems every site is a “social” site of some sort. The understanding of technology-enabled community and interaction has been distilled over the past several years and is being applied as a sort of “wrapper” around existing businesses, and in some cases with great success.
We now have social gaming communities, social t-shirt design and commerce sites, social restaurant reviews, social music discovery, social job search and of course social pornography. All roads lead to Rome. While social networking sites place at the center of their value proposition the very thing that drives them, (that is personal connections) “Social” has also become a feature that can enhance the user experience of other products and services. While it may be enough to buy any old stuffed animal for your kid, why not buy them a Webkinz instead so they can go online and watch it come to life and interact with other Webkinz? That’s added value.
While I could write another thousand words either praising or damning this trend, the point would be moot because the trend is embedded in the collective consciousness of society and, more importantly, the products and services we use.
Let me instead opine on its significance in the mobile space. Here are the trends we see:
Mobile social application development increases – I know this is hardly testing my mettle as a seer, but an increasing percentage of mobile applications (just like the increasing percentage of web services) are “social” in some respect. On one hand, this is good, because carriers can justify their investment in infrastructure to support always-connected communication services. On the other hand, China and India, with their gigantic potential user bases but woefully slow networks, will have to wait. The biggest implication for carriers is content rating. As long as there is no useful mobile content rating system, carriers (which are heavily regulated by governments) will continue to take a conservative approach to user-generated content, which will hinder adoption of high-value services. In the meantime, mobile social communication service providers will continue to quietly build a user base that circumvents and ultimately disintermediates the carriers unless some action is taken.
Mobile application deployment misses the boat – Mobile application deployment today is a deplorably high-friction process, characterized by fractious, high-cost and high-involvement development and processes that retard innovation and restrain choice for the mobile consumer. The iPhone application deployment model made a light go on in several heads of people in the mobile space. The answer? “Make our application deployment work more like the iPhone App Store.” And so 2009 will be the year of “app store mania” with the RIM app store, the Nokia app store, the Windows Mobile Skymarket, Samsung’s Smartphoneshow, the Google Android Marketplace, plus a continued effort from Palm, more navel-staring from Adobe with Flash Lite (not sure what the problem is there - they should have won by now) and of course J2ME and BREW are not going anywhere anytime soon. The result of all of this simplification of the application deployment process will be fractious, high-cost and high-involvement development and processes that retard innovation and restrain choice for the mobile consumer. There is obviously a better way than this further balkanization for mobile developers, and it involves fixing the deployment approach, but standardizing the development approach by not promoting proprietary SDKs. In any case, as cool as any of these deployment technologies or approaches may be, they all fall short for social application deployment, and social applications are the future. Application deployment technologies must 1) integrate with the device (which I realize some do) and 2) integrate with a sharable base of active users. (Which all don’t.)
Devices integrate tightly with 3rd-party communication service providers – Nokia recently bought Oz so that hundreds of millions of Series 40 phones wouldn’t go out the door without consumer e-mail and IM. Such services undoubtedly have vast user bases, and so enabling them in the mobile space makes sense. But forget about the existing user bases of Gmail and AIM, which are principally web-based. The real opportunity for growth here is for the 3rd-party service providers. Compared to the relatively paltry potential customer base of around 500 million web users, the 3 billion mobile users may, in great numbers, find consumer email, IM, chat, social networking and other social applications very valuable. That means large social networking sites are going to have to change their web-based mindsets if they are going to reap the reward of device integration; They will all have to offer mobile-based registration or watch their competitors add users in the billions. It also means that OEMs are now in an arms race to provide ever-richer device-integrated functionality, which is good for consumers. Lastly, the OEMs, by moving in this direction have their choice of business model: In markets where they have control, they have a differentiated offering plus a service revenue stream, and in markets where the carriers have control, they can offer a value-added revenue stream to the carriers that is built into the value of their devices when the carrier buys them.
Core device functionality becomes social – Even without 3rd-party integration to social communication services, the mobile device is going social in a big way. EVERY carrier and OEM has defined a project called “social address book.” It means different things to different companies, but all of them recognize that the address book has to evolve to function more like a “friend list” on a social networking site. The same is true of the camera and gallery. A camera with a persistent wireless connection should not feel as offline as it does today, and it will evolve to a “participatory panopticon” function which will enable concepts like citizen journalism, lifecasting and surveillance. The “gallery” on mobile devices is also very offline and will evolve to act more like a shared photo album. Remember that no Flickr is required to do this – all the photos in all the mobile phones all over the world can be made sharable solely through some technology development by OEMs. Even the native state is going to evolve: Look for “friend feed” style updates pushed right to your device’s active home state, and integration of instant communication functionality including other aspects of the device like location, status and availability. The lines are blurring between hardware and software, and it is an exciting time to be an OEM if you don’t have your head stuck in the sand.
A middle layer of active agent technology evolves – “Online” is a web-based term that has useful meaning when using stateful communication services such as social applications because it denotes instant availability. That means you can ping someone via IM, see their presence on Facebook or click into a game of Texas Hold ‘em poker. While versions of such services make sense in the mobile space, the notion of “online” does not because unlike your PC, you do not actively sit in front of your mobile phone for 10 hours a day. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to receive a message notification or play poker with someone, though it may mean that there are times when you want to receive relevant RSS feeds but not other types of messages. Furthermore, many social applications are profile- and rule-driven, such that, even when you are not “actively” engaged, your profile may be engaged on your behalf, acting as an agent of sorts. We see examples of this in social gaming today: On Zynga Pirates right now, I am accumulating $50,000 in gold an hour, even though I haven’t played in a week. A higher-level technology layer that can act as a shared resource for multiple types of communication service providers such that it is a “feature” of those applications would go a long way to making mobile devices “socially enabled.” In essence, your mobile device will be a sort of communication assistant rather than a terminal.
