I’ve been reading some posts in recent days concerning the confusing array of social networks all fighting for our attention. Each one requires registration, the creation of a profile, exploring the system then making some use of that network. Who has time for all that?

In this space there are pioneers, immitators and innovators. Pioneers and immitators are more obvious while innovators stand on the shoulders of pioneers and the successful immitators and create something worthwhile using the building blocks of their forerunners.

I think this is what we’re seeing with social networks but I don’t agree that it’s all bad. If I think about this in terms of search engines, Google, Yahoo! and the like are well done and tremendously useful for general search but it’s challenging to display appropriate results for purpose specific (vertical) search. This left an opportunity for other’s to innovate (”Search 2.0″) such as kayak.com for travel, SimplyHired.com for employment and even Spock, the human search engine.

I’ve spoken to many people about their loyalty to the myriad of social networks and some say they have accounts on many while others use just a few. The folks that tell me they use many are typically bloggers, marketers or software developers which makes sense while the less “outlet hungry” people seem loyal to a handful at most.

I use Facebook daily and LinkedIn once a week or so to check in on what’s happening. I have accounts on other networks such as Bebo and Orkut that I use infrequently to educate myself for future development projects but not for anything else. I receive invitations to many others from friends and colleagues but I don’t *need* to use them as all my personal and business interests are covered by those that I do use. I think ultimately this is what will shake out for all of us, we’ll use the ones that make sense to us and ignore the others.

There are thankfully several initiatives under way that attempt to unify registration and profile sharing e.g. http://www.dataportability.org/ and http://openid.net/. I have no doubt these efforts will be successful as he number of social outlets increases.

So how does this relate to social network fatigue? I believe that as long as a social network delivers a compelling even if not unique service it will be a choice made by the individual based more than likely on where most of their friends hang out or if it serves a specific purpose. Those that don’t differentiate themselves from the maddening crowds will simply dissappear.

Whatever happens, it will at least be interesting!

Yours Socially,

Mark Wayman

So the design mavens at Facebook are working on a new profile page layout which should hopefully improve the cluttered mess that most active FB users currently experience. This is a sneak peak at what they have in mind:

As you can see there’s now a tabbed interface which should help. The space for each tab is also a lot wider although to me the newsfeed looks a little too wide maybe? I wonder if there will ever be a way to completely configure the profile to your liking. We’ll see…

I’ve noticed that viewing profiles with dozens of applications takes a long time so I hope this will alleviate/improve this issue.

I’m pleased to see that the Facebook design team continues to review how we use Facebook and work to make it more usable.

Yours Socially,

Mark Wayman

So far we’ve created some simple Facebook applications to evaluate the API, languages (PHP/MySQL and C#/MS SQL so far as well as IFRAMES vs. FBML pros/cons), advertising choices as well as the various psychological “hooks” that are the mainstay of engagement and viral distribution. Early days but very interesting.

As we continue to gain experience and insight we’ll be folding our gained knowledge into larger, more comprehensive social-network spanning ‘category’ applications. This is our ultimate focus and where we feel the real social land grab exists.

The diagram below illustrates this approach:

An application is created in one social network and then tweaked for optimum engagement, viral flows etc. then is deployed to other social networks allowing users from any network to interact with users of any other via the application in their respective social network.

The application could exist in one, some or all of the social networks as well as within a traditional Website or a mobile platform and may even add value via Location Based Services (LBS) depending on the application. 

With enough experience/confidence/financing it would make sense to create and test your application for all the major social networks and deploy simultaneously for maximum distribution and to prevent fast moving imitators.

This is very high-level but explains our strategic intentions without disclosing our (and our partners) application ideas and concepts!

I hope this brief summary is at least useful.

Yours Socially,

Mark Wayman

Turning social applications into commercially viable ventures is of course why we’re all here investing our time into this fascinating new social network medium. 

I have been pondering micro transactions for some time so was pleased to be contacted by Sudha Jamthe and Sumit Gupta with a proposal to evaluate their micro transaction platform, SocialMints.

http://www.socialmints.com/

Our latest entertainment application King of Vegas was an ideal candidate. It allows a new user to play 2 of the 6 available gambling games immediately after installing the application with $250 to wager.  Instead of forcing application invites on King of Vegas, we “reward” an invitation sent with $100 with a bonus of $1,000 for every invite that is accepted. The player also earns an additional $250 every time they visit the application within a 24 hour period. As a company we feel strongly that forced-invite applications have a very limited life on Facebook and are not the way to grow a loyal, engaged user base.

http://apps.facebook.com/kingofvegas/

King of Vegas employs several mechanisms allowing the player to “unlock” the other 4 games:

• Earning money playing the 2 “open” games will eventually unlock all the other games so you never have to send an invite if you’d rather invest time playing the games
• If you choose to send invitations, a small number of accepted invitations unlock each game in sequence
• Just sending enough invitations even if they are not accepted will eventually unlock the games

Invitations are an essential part of any successful application strategy but it needs to be a respectful “deal” with your customers. We pay for the creation and ongoing availability of an application for their enjoyment and they repay us by sharing the application. That seems like a fair deal to me.

We worked with the SocialMints team to add another option to unlock the applications. If a player wants immediate access to a particular game why not charge a small fee of $1 to unlock it? I liked the suggestion so we implemented it today (2/13/2008) as an additional unlock mechanism.

King of Vegas is still only a few weeks old so it’s early days but we’re looking forward to seeing if this is an appealing option to our players.

SocialMints integration was not time consuming and our experience with their team has been superb. Their engineers were knowledgeable and extremely responsive. If you are interested in exploring micro transactions check out www.socialmints.com.  

“SocialMints helps you to monetize your Facebook Application(s) today. Just like facebook made $24M on virtual gifts last year. Social Mints is the first social currency on facebook with real monetary value. We provide you with payment solution pre integrated into facebook which facilitates secure one click pay on facebook. If you have 100k active users, you could be earning at least $3,000 per month.”

- Sumit Gupta

The micro transaction arena on Facebook is still in its infancy so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Yours Socially,

Mark Wayman

Most of my recent events have been focused on Facebook and the SNAP Chat #4 event I attended last week was no different. Lee Lorenzen of Altura Ventures gave an excellent overview on the current state of the social space specifically relating to Facebook.

Lee is a very engaging presenter, speaking from his passion for entrepreneurialism combined with his deep experiences on both sides of the table (developer and investor) making for a well rounded perspective.

I agree with Lee’s point that the time is now to establish the social equivalent of a successful Website idea but in the social space; a “virtual land grab” for fast paced innovators. With a little smarts and some drive, capable social application development shops should be able to build a significant client base at a vastly lower cost than would be necessary using traditional marketing techniques for Website solutions. 

As developers we should look at existing successful Websites categories then innovate in similar ways on the social networking platforms. It’s important however to not just replicate an idea but to take full advantage of the social graph and the virality tools that are generally not available via a typical Website. Remember that social networking environments also allow for ideas that wouldn’t necessarily do well via a plain vanilla Website so there’s room for huge innovation without a substantial capital investment. Experiment on a small scale, educate yourself and keep rolling those lessons forward into your next “big idea“.

Social networks are inherently trust-based, recommendation positive environments allowing free viral growth and inexpensive “awareness” efforts via in-network advertising and for-pay application installations. To me, one of the most powerful aspects of social networks is inexpensive, efficient distribution.

This point was perfectly made by Lee when he compared spending 9 YEARS growing shop.com’s client base to 500,000 then reading about iLike adding 600,000 new clients in about 9 HOURS on Facebook. What more compelling evidence do you need to determine where we direct our efforts?

Lee’s presentation was supposed to be followed by an investment strategy and outline discussion from George Zachary of Charles River Ventures. Unfortunately George was struck with food poisoning the evening before so couldn’t make the presentation. Fortunately his last minute replacement was Jim Scheinman co-founder of Bebo and now “Entrepreneur-in-Residence” at Charles River Ventures.

It was a Facebook biased crowd and Lee had given a compelling presentation so to follow with a generic investment conversation using Bebo as an example could have been challenging. I thought Jim did a superb job educating us on financing and focusing on what we all want - the success of our applications however we each define that.

Jim shared some valuable observations on many subjects. He reminded us all that the social world is bigger than just Facebook especially when we consider international markets. There’s an extremely large English-speaking world out there and other social networks have an impressive adoption rate overseas. Bebo is wildly popular in Europe, Australia and New Zealand and according to Mashable bigger than Google in Ireland!

Jim discussed investing as it pertains to social applications and gave some good tips and pointers. I particularly liked his differentiation between a “lifestyle” and a “world changing” business. In his verbiage a lifestyle business serves a purpose, and is profitable in the millions of dollars whereas world changing businesses fundamentally change the way something is done and makes considerably more in terms of revenues.

Jim’s current focus at CRV is to concentrate on “The Next Big Thing”. What a dream job that would be!

He made himself available for discussions immediately after the event as well as handing out his contact information which is a little unusual but definitely welcome. I spoke with Jim after the event and found him to be open, honest and engaging.

I’ve been digesting the many stimulating ideas and techniques from that evening as I ponder what Social Gears will be working on as our first social network spanning application. Will Social Gears be a lifestyle business or world changing? Only time will tell…

Yours Socially,

Mark Wayman

I’m fascinated by the social networking world and I’m an avid watcher of how Facebook application developers are experimenting and innovating.

It’s not news that there’s been a rapid adoption of social networks but it’s been interesting for me to see how developers are adapting as their clients (app. users) are changing and as the social OS changes rules. In some ways it’s like watching evolution via a high speed time-lapse camera.

I spend some of my time reviewing the top Facebook applications and understanding the “pull”, the human psychology, the virality “hooks”. Nearly all of the meteorically successful applications use a forced invite mechanism for their virality.

Crude? Yep! Does it work? Yep!

I then look at the “application” page for the comments and always see many pointed, often abuse-filled post on application developers not forcing invites to “get to the gold” of their app. and how those people have uninstalled the app.

The question that naturally follows is shouldn’t application developers stop “force invites” to generate rapid-growth virality? The answer in my mind takes a leaf from the spam book. Spam wouldn’t exist if it didn’t make more money than it cost to generate and clog up our inboxes.

At the moment “spamvites” work because Facebook users obviously are more than happy to send them. How long will it be before your social credibility with your “friends” is lessened by you spamming then? Only time will tell but I see a near future where you’ll lose favor with your friends for sending invites that you know they don’t want to receive.

Now I’m not anti-invites as I think they have their place. Applications that we enjoy cost money to create, host and enhance so there has to be some payback for the creators. Where I have issues is being forced to send an invite before an application will work (e.g. display your results, include your picture in a review list, etc.) at all.

I’m all for developers being creative and opening up more of an application e.g. additional features/choices based on you doing something they want. That is an exchange and not a bribe! 

For now the forced invites are incredibly effective in generating a massive client base that can then be monetized by the application developer. How long this will last only time will tell.

Yours Socially,

Mark Wayman

We’re all familiar with the “friend request” mechanism in Facebook. I’m also assuming that most of us know the conventions for meeting others in the real world. I wonder then why so many people act in such an anti-social way when making friends on Facebook?

I’ve received several friend requests in the past few days from people I have never met before including one from a marketing director. Now, I’m a friendly enough guy and I’m very open to meeting new people but I’m left scratching my head at the standard friend request with no “personal message”.

Why do you want to be my friend? What happened to “Hello”? I am all for friending people who seem interesting but the lack of any additional message leaves me cold. Imagine being at a business mixer and someone you’ve never met walks up to you and hands over their business card then just walks away. That in my mind is what our lazy frienders are doing.

I don’t ignore the friend requests but I usually message that person with something like:

“Hi <name>, I received your friend request with no message. What is your interest in social networking and connecting with me?

Cheers, Mark.”

It doesn’t seem like much to ask people to mirror what they would do in the real world to be social. Am I being too English and polite? You tell me.

Here’s a friend request I sent to Marc Andreessen:

As of this writing Marc hasn’t accepted but at least I introduced myself!

I now have many accomplished Facebook friends that would have been challenging to meet outside of Facebook due to their schedules. I doubt a cold friend request would have been accepted. Come on people put some humanity into it! 

Yours Socially,

Mark Wayman

It’s a phenomenal human trait that one conversation can turn on a light and change your every-day focus. Let me explain…

I attended the Facebook Developer Garage - Palo Alto event on August 25th on a curious whim as a friend of mine was going. I had only a passing interest in Facebook at the time having seen it mentioned in the media albeit not as heavily as it is today. I was researching social networking for a new project of ours, (www.salons.com) so, I thought, “why not see what all the buzz is about?”

I brought a couple of our seasoned developers (Jeff Roberts and David Mullan) with me in case there was anything worth hearing about. The intrigue began as soon as we arrived and saw that it was ’standing room only’ even though we were early. I was also amused to see that - at 42 - I was one of the oldest people in the room.

Dave Fetterman and Caitlin O’Farrell did a great job of running the event which included an overview of the open platform and some personal experience type sessions from some of the early developers. R. Tyler Ballance from Slide gave a good overview of what we should all be considering when creating “worthwhile” applications.

I listened very carefully while leaning against a wall at the back of the room. Eventually, the penny dropped for me that Facebook had given developers free (albeit a little cryptic and undocumented) access to their pro-sharing, high-trust audience completely free of charge. What!? Why?!

I chatted to a few of the younger developers in the room, who all seemed to take this in their stride as if this was normal in a “well, why wouldn’t they” kind of way. I thought Google’s “Do No Evil” mantra must be catching on.

I stayed around at the end and spoke to a collection of people including Dave Fetterman and the consensus as to “Why?” was that the Facebook folks couldn’t possibly dream up all the ideas that the developer population at large could, and that innovation and new Facebook apps. would keep Facebook vibrant, worthwhile and growing. By giving us access to 35,000,000+ people (at the time) free of charge, they made sure that we would give it our collective best. Oh, so true.

What an incredible quasi co-dependent, mutually beneficial relationship. The drive back from PA to the east bay switched from chatty to silent as we each pondered the possibilities. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep that night.

Our decision after several weeks of discussion was to form Social Gears (www.socialgears.com) to create our own Facebook and OpenSocial applications and to create compelling applications for clients.

We’re learning the subtleties of Facebook as quickly as we can and so far it’s been a blast. We continue to learn both the technical and psychological aspects of this new and extremely stimulating world.

We’ve created several Facebook apps. as of this writing and are working on several more ideas. Check out www.socialgears.com for details.

Yours Socially,

Mark Wayman

Network Earth, Inc. Forms Social Gears, LLC to Develop Social Networking Applications for the OpenSocial and Facebook Environments

The announcement is made as the company unveils its initial Facebook application, FirstLookz and releases a beta version of Salons.com.

Press Release - PDF

Wappingers Falls, NY (PRWEB) November 28, 2007 — Network Earth, Inc. (http://www.netearth.com), an international technology company that specializes in Web-based software development for businesses, today announced the formation of Social Gears, LLC, (http://www.socialgears.com) a social application development company. The company’s core focus will be on creating engaging social applications for Google’s OpenSocial and Facebook’s social networking environments.

In addition to developing applications for other companies, Social Gears also announced that it has launched its own Facebook application called FirstLookz (http://apps.facebook.com/firstlookz). The FirstLookz application allows its users to receive anonymous first impression feedback from virtual strangers based solely on a single photograph. Users can then repeat the process with additional photographs and compare the difference in perceptions.

We are additionally looking to significantly expand our Facebook and OpenSocial development efforts.

Simultaneously, Social Gears launched a beta version of Salons.com, (http://www.salons.com) a salon search and social networking site for the $55.9 billion hair and beauty industry. The Salons.com Website will contain more than 300,000 salons and will allow users to interact and network within a niche vertical creating an opportunity for the estimated 1.7 million beauty professionals, stylists and salon owners to interact directly with consumers.

“With industry giants such as Google, MySpace and Facebook leading the expansive growth in social networking, we’re proud to cut the ribbon on Social Gears,” said Mark Wayman, Co-Founder of Network Earth. “FirstLookz and Salons.com are the first of many social applications we will develop. We are building applications that integrate across Facebook, OpenSocial and traditional Websites, leveraging the best of each environment.”

“Over the next few months, we expect to add significant functionality to Salons.com with a focus on promoting the stylists and increasing exposure for salons,” said Stephen Fells, CEO of Network Earth. “We are additionally looking to significantly expand our Facebook and OpenSocial development efforts.”

About Network Earth:
Network Earth, Inc. is an international technology company that specializes in Web-based software development for businesses. Network Earth’s expertise includes application and Website development as well as new venture startups. It was founded in 1995 by two British technology experts in order to take advantage of new business opportunities in the burgeoning Internet and World Wide Web arenas. Today, the company’s core internal products include AgencyLogic PowerSites, a single property Website tool for the real estate industry, Salons.com and FirstLookz.com. For more information, please visit www.socialgears.com, www.netearth.com or www.salons.com.

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