Google's (or your?) Social Circle

We have been hearing that Google is trying to build some social networking features over its existing infrastructure. Google's CEO has also mentioned that they are not trying to make another Facebook or another social media website. Here is a sneak peak of what Google  is trying to do in the social media area : Social Search. As more and more people get connected to each other, what people read and recommend online will become a critical part of Google's search algorithms. We've always thought of what Google knows about us. If you have a Google account, please visit this link http://www.google.com/s2/search/social#socialcircle to see what Google knows about your social circle. Many ads that we see in our Gmail inbox or even through Google search are irrelevant. Imagine the power of ads based on recommendations and online behavior from your friends. This will not only be a big plus for the online searchers but also for a great revenue source for Google as it improves its click-though rate for ads. This will be put them in a good position against Facebook who, if the rumors are true, is going to launch email service next week.

Advantage: Facebook

In yet another example of Facebook moving in on Google's territory, the social media behemoth now facilitates location-based advertising through mobile devices (at this time limited to the iPhone).

To my mind, this is a huge threat to Google. As the article mentions, Facebook has tremendous scale. But more importantly, their strategy drives at the heart of how we tend to make purchase decisions. We are by nature social creatures. Our circles of friends and family are probably the biggest influencers of what we buy. Furthermore, many items have their intrinsic value enhanced by network effects - videogames are more fun when you can play them against your friends, books are more enjoyable when you can discuss them with others. And, while many of us have learned to tune out the noise of online advertising, we still pay attention to what's happening with the people we know and like.

Help! They Hijacked my Facebook!

This article discusses the new security policy that Facebook has put into place as a reaction to users' accounts being broken into due to logging onto public computers or unsecure networks. Facebook now allows users to request a temporary password from their mobile phone. The temporary password has a 20 minute lifespan which shortens the opportunity window a cybercriminal has to break into the account. Facebook also now allows users to remotely view the locations where their account is currently logged in and confirm whether the users are legitimate based off the location of the login. Hacked accounts can be logged off and the user is prompted to change their password.

Hacking into a person's Facebook account doesn't at the surface seem very profitable. Are they going to look at my pictures? However, when you think about it, Facebook has a lot of information about your life. It potentially shows where you live, your birthday, phone number, who you are dating and most importantly a concise digital list of all your buddies as well as their basic information. A hacked account can potentially expose a person's entire social network to malware by using the trust associated with friends to trick users into visting potentially dangerous sites. While many are reluctant to click on a link from a stranger, they may not be as guarded when a friend sends a similar link. As Facebook becomes more and more integrated with a users daily life, it becomes a bigger and bigger target for cybercriminals. Scary stuff!

Expanding the Facebook & Microsoft Partnership

On Wednesday, Facebook and Microsoft jointly announced new "social" functionality within the Bing search engine.

This is a really interesting development which highlights the value of Microsoft's stake in Facebook and Facebook's desire to move beyond social networking. This is another example of the "Facebook layer" which I blogged about previously.

By adding personalized search results based on users' Facebook connections, Bing is narrowing the results in hopes that it will enable users to get to the information they are seeking more quickly. Also (and I admittedly not certain whether this is a new feature), if you search for a person on Bing now, next to the search result related to that individual's Facebook profile, there is an option to add this person as a friend directly from Bing.

It will be interesting to see whether this enhanced user customization enables Bing to eat into some of Google's market share.

Facebook, Amazon and Procter & Gamble

This recent press release from P&G--the makers of Pampers is particularly intriguing.  Facebook and Amazon experimenting to embed linked e-commerce capability for mainstream companies such as P&G.
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CINCINNATI, Sept. 30, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- There is no doubt that moms and dads spend a great deal of time on Facebook and today, Pampers announces it will make purchasing some of their favorite Pampers and P&G products a little easier by launching access to Facebook shopping capabilities via the Pampers Fan Page.  Starting today, parents can buy Pampers brand diapers and wipes (plus an assortment of other P&G brand products including Tide, Oral B, Olay and Pantene just to name a few) via the Pampers Facebook page, a community of more than 350,000 fans.  The e-commerce capabilities are powered by Amazon.com, which will provide customers with the Amazon.com transaction experience they have come to know and love; free shipping on all orders over $25 and free two-day shipping for all Prime members.  

The announcement arrives just a few months after the brand's success with its Facebook pre-sale of Pampers Cruisers with Dry Max, which sold out its 1000-pack allotment in less than an hour.  The e-commerce capabilities will first be leveraged by Amazon.com.  While Pampers is the first P&G brand to introduce a gateway to e-commerce shopping capabilities via a Facebook "shop now" tab, P&G plans on expanding this offering to other brands' Facebook pages and retailers in the coming months.

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NY Times online has more details here. 

Facebook Social Plugins: Now 2 Million Websites Strong

This is an impressive number for you to ponder.

White space for content discovery

I found IBM's framework for defining the new business models in the media industry is quite insightful, and reading the complete report made me ponder the changing media stack.



Here's the traditional stack as I've drawn it out. In the traditional world of the lower left quadrant, we've seen that content discovery is a function fulfilled by the content distribution layer. Publishers, movie studios and game developers spend millions to make sure you know about the latest Harry Potter or Grand Theft Auto.







But I'm curious about the content discovery process would work in the other quadrants, and in the "New platform aggregation" section in particular, as we move into the future. My sense is that content discovery will develop into a full-fledged layer of the stack, which will look like this.

And while companies like Google, Facebook and YouTube are already playing a role in content discovery, I think there's still plenty of white space there. Google and YouTube can help me search for content - but I have to be looking for something. Facebook can help me find something even if I'm not looking, but I'm dependent on the tastes of people in my network who post links to content. There's definitely scope for something that will know what I like (or learn, like Pandora does) and trawl the "out there" for user generated content that I will enjoy. Does anybody know of something like this that already exists?

Will Facebook Beat Google in Advertising Dollars?

BusinessWeek's front page article this past week was on Facebook: "Facebook Sells Your Friends." It explores the idea of Facebook as advertiser juggernaut. I thought the article made a really interesting comparison of Facebook to Google:

"I can target my exact audience, rather than trying to come up with a proxy for it," like looking at search terms or which websites people visit, says Belden, who was spending about $4,000 a month on Facebook earlier in the year before he was forced to rein in his marketing expenses because of budget issues. He adds: "If I was bidding on expensive Google keywords like 'solar,' I'd be going against guys with a much larger marketing budget."

Should Google be getting scared? Especially now that Facebook is branching out with the "Log in with Facebook" and "Facebook Currency" options?

Facebook poised to expand options for being harassed by high school classmates/ the drunk girl you met at the bar last night

An newly announced partnership between Facebook and Skype paves the way for Facebook Video Chat which seems like the next logical step and will put them in once again in direct competition with Google, this time Google Voice.

Money Quote:
"The move by the pair–which have tested small contact importer integrations before–is a natural one for the social networking giant, which is aiming to be the central communications and messaging platform for its users, across a range of media.

Facebook’s goal, according to sources: To mesh communications and community more tightly together and add more tools to allow users to do so. "

Facebook Phone: Fact or Fiction?

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/20/facebook.phone/index.html?iref=allsearch

Facebook has long denied that it's "building" a mobile phone, however that doesn't mean that they're not in the works to plan out the development of such a mobile device. Given the failure of Microsoft's KIN phone with its discontinuation only 6-weeks after it was launch, why would Facebook want to venture out into developing a social networking phone?

One thing I absolutely love about my iPhone is that it gives me immediate access to my treasured networking site, Facebook, while allowing me to have direct access to email, the web, and hundreds of other apps. I'm not certain what purpose the Facebook phone will serve as a standalone, which is why it's looking to partner with Samsung or HTC would build the hardware for an Android-powered phone that would have Facebook's social-networking features deeply integrated. But really, are we in a day and age where we need a dedicated phone to "poke" our friends and immediately untag unflattering pictures of ourselves before anyone has the chance to see them? I think Facebook should learn from Microsoft's failure of the KIN and completely pull out of this venture before facing a similar fate.

Facebook Phone, Platform and Social Layer

Here's a recent interview with Mark Zuckerberg that is interesting and relevant for our discussions.   Please review the full interview as it may give insights into what 'social' may mean for your sector.

Some of the highlights from the interview....

Our strategy is very horizontal. We’re trying to build a social layer for everything. Basically we’re trying to make it so that every app everywhere can be social whether it’s on the web, or mobile, or other devices. So inherently our whole approach has to be a breadth-first approach rather than a depth-first one. And we work on all of these different things at the same time, so I’m sure whatever leak you got was probably accurate for whatever the person said. But it was probably just one part of what we are doing. Anyhow. I just wanted to give that context.

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For example, take Instant Personalization. Our goal is to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience. So you go to some apps, take Rotten Tomatoes, which we just launched last week. If people had to click this blue button to Connect, then some percent of them would, but it would be the minority because you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get before you click it.If you had to put up some modal dialog then that would be crazy from a UX perspective. But the fact that they can do that instant integration for the users that want it means that everyone has a good experience as soon as they get there.

On phones we can actually do something better. We can do a single sign-on if we do a good integration with a phone, rather than just doing something where you go to an app and it’s automatically social or having to sign into each app individually. Those are the two options on the web. Why not for mobile? Just make it so that you log into your phone once, and then everything that you do on your phone is social.

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It also highlights the complex ways in which Facebook competes and connects to Apple, Microsoft and Google.

For our next session--the connection between Facebook and the Automotive Sector

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Not sure if it is a fair comment or not but I thought it was timely! Source

Google's Social networking Building Blocks

Here's an article that has useful information on Google's recent acquisitions pertaining to social networking.  According to the article, it has made

five acquisitions in the field: SocialDeck, a mobile social gaming company;Angstro, a social networking search application; Like.com, a social fashion store; Jambool, a social gaming virtual currency; and Slide, a social game maker. It also has a large stake in gaming giant Zynga.

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Think about these as part of the exploration-exploitation axis and what they could mean in its positioning against Facebook.

Competing in the Courtroom

As a company using advanced technology that is vital to your business model, how vulnerable can you be if you do not have a defensible patent position?

Before today, I had never heard of Interval Research Corporation.

In 1992, Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, bankrolled this tech incubation lab with 100 million dollars. The goal was to create a "research setting seeking to define the issues, map out the concepts, and create the technology that will be important in the future...[pursuing] basic innovations in a number of early stage technologies and [seeking] to foster industries around them -- sparking opportunity for entrepreneurs and highlighting a new approach to research."

Interval Research was shut down in April 2000, but not before it had secured 300 patents, 4 of which are now owned by Interval Licencing LLC, a vehicle that Paul Allen is now using to sue Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and others.

One of these patented technologies allows a site to offer suggestions to consumers based on what they are currently viewing, another allows readers of an article to rapidly find related subject articles. The remaining two are related to what is happening peripherally to a user's main activity, such as flashing video images or updated stock quotes, news or ads.

If the patent infringement can be proved, the damages could be vast.

Incidentally, Amazon has been left out of the list of defendants, even though we know that one of Amazon's practices is to offer suggestions to consumers. I wonder if a strategic deal has been made, or if Amazon has a solid defensible position for its technology that does not infringe on Paul Allen's "patents".

So far, it seems that the defense that the sued internet companies are planning is based simply on the fact that Paul waited too long. It will be interesting to see if that will be enough to fend off the lawsuit.

If Paul Allen had sued a long time ago, it may have been harder to prove the monetary potential of the technology, which would affect the dollar value of settlements.

Here's a copy of the lawsuit filed:

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/intervallicensingcomplaint0827.pdf

According to the Wall Street Journal, NTP, Inc, another licence holding company which successfully sued RIM in 2006 for $612 million dollars, is now suing Apple, Google, HTC, Microsoft and Motorola over infringement of 8 patents related to the delivery of email over wireless networks.

I find it very interesting that an innovative company that struggles to develop technology and make it work in the marketplace can remain so vulnerable if their technology can be proven to infringe on a patent held by someone else, and I am curious as to how executives at the likes of Google and Apple would approach innovation, if they know that "patent trolls" - companies that hold patents but don't do further development work - are waiting in the wings to pounce on their hard earned profit in the form of damages.