Doing Words

Death of social networks? Not that way, and not yet!

// February 26th, 2008 // 0 Comments // Products, Social Media, strategy

Mark Jones of Filtered Media is predicting the death of social networking. I don’t think death is coming any time soon, and certainly not from Google and Gmail as Mark suggests. I think the bigger future threat for MySpace and Facebook are microblogging and social messaging layers over the top of the social networks.

Yes, social networks can’t sustain the current growth. There will be a plateau. Following the plateau will come more realistic valuations, rationalisation and acquisition by the networks.

Yes, to some extent social networks will atomise – social networking platforms are already starting to blend in the features of other web platforms via their APIs and developer platforms, and it makes sense that some of that platform functionality will bleed out into email, search, blogging and other web platforms over time.

The ‘friend spam’ we see now on Facebook is a function of the immaturity of the social network businesses themselves, which are still learning how to manage open platforms, and to some extent a learning process for users – it’s already unfashionable to be the friend who sends too much social network spam – soon, it will be social suicide.

I can’t see Mark’s ‘Email 3.0′ spelling the end of social networks. If I were an 18-25 year old, why would I need to wrangle with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail if I can use Facebook’s email to stay in touch with everyone I know? Hotmail spam vs Facebook spam? Give me the latter any day.

Why would I need to search from the Google homepage if Facebook was my homepage and I could launch a Google search from a Facebook app in my profile page?

Google’s become the default for us 30-40 year olds, and Yahoo! is the default for our parents, but Facebook and MySpace have an opportunity to be the default starting point for our kids. …if they seize the opportunity and execute well, which so far they have had trouble with.

Email is inherently a functional product – I need to have something to communicate to someone before I send an email. However social networks work best when I can use them as inspiration for finding something to say to my friends. I may not have any news myself today, but by browsing what my friends have been up to recently, there’s always something that I can comment on, criticise, debate or LOL at.

Social networks will remain a place that people go to ‘hang out’ with their friends and meet new friends online. There will be fewer of them in the future, and the big ones will probably be owned by larger networks as MySpace is now.

But just as social networks have an opportunity to steal the email, search, media sharing and buying/searching eyeballs from the incumbents, there is already a couple of threats to the social networks: social messaging businesses like bluepulse (who are more comfortable if I disclose that I’m contracting for them any time I mention their name online, bless ‘em!) and microblogging services like Twitter.

Social messaging businesses threaten social networks because they may steal away the user’s all-important ‘status message’. Without the status message being updated there’s half the value of the Facebook newsfeed gone, and the newsfeed is everything to Facebook’s business. If I can more quickly and easily update what I’m doing now from my mobile phone on bluepulse than I can on Facebook, then sure, Facebook may lose me (that’s “me the hypothetical 20 year old” not “me the 43 year old”.) Facebook’s mobile product is still lame: you can’t sign up as a Facebook user from a phone, and many of the key features are missing from the mobile product. Using MySpace’s mobile product is like travelling back in time to 2000 and back in space to Boondocks, Carolina. I don’t see any sign that Facebook or MySpace ‘get’ the importance of building a better mobile product yet.

Microblogging services like Twitter can also steal away the status message traffic and user loyalty from the social networks, by making it all about status messages, and then using the social network’s own APIs to let the user update multiple social networks from one spot, saving time and money, both very precious to 18-25 year olds.

MySpace shows just how much it cares about kids

// April 4th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Advertising

MySpace shows it cares about kids
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) tech charity initiative has a new competitor from the most unlikely of places – Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace, in conjunction with… gee… well, it seems to be I-Deal Direct, Inc. of Chicago, Illinois, operating under the domain name of ShoppingSaverCenter.biz.

Previously not very well known in charitable circles, it seems that I-Deal Direct is using News Corp’s global youth MySpace audience to help supply free laptops to Australian children previously only able to login to their MySpace homepage via a shared family PC, a PC at school, or perhaps a PC at their local library.

The ad makes it seem like only the one millionth Australian visitor to the MySpace homepage will be given a free laptop, but it seems like I-Deal Direct has since massively broadened the offer to include every young Australian who visits MySpace, since the ad appears again and again, on every MySpace account I created in my testing.

In fact, not content with providing a free laptop to every young Australian, I discovered upon clicking-thru (I will delete my cookies) that I-Deal Direct is also going to supply them with free big-screen LCD or plasma TVs. That’s a laptop, and a free big-screen TV, for every Aussie kid who clicks on the ad… hmm…

When will this extraordinary altruism end, I hear you ask? Well, it would be more accurate to ask: when will this extraordinary altruism begin?

Because of course, reading the fine print on the landing pages, I-Deal Direct is engaged in shady harvesting of email addresses and demographic information.

While stating you need to be 18 or over to participate in its ‘program’, I-Deal Direct leaves that checkbox ticked so you don’t have to untick it, and then when it captures all your name and address details, doesn’t include birthdates after 1989, so there’s no way you could tell them you were under-age if you wanted to. Click on from there and you are presented with a seemingly endless scrolling page of opt-in and opt-out offers from hundreds of different marketers. It seems like I-Deal Direct has aggregated every online offer-based affiliate marketing program in existence and is intent upon walking you through them in succession (including (I add with some considerable embarassment and annoyance) an offer for Quickflix, an online DVD rental business of which I am a shareholder.)

Click ‘submit’ on one and the page refreshes to introduce another offer. I lost count of the pages I clicked through. And when I tried to leave, a bunch of pop-up and pop-under windows tried to dissuade me with just one more (and then just one more) unmissable offer. Who else but a teenage kid is likely to keep entering in their details, those of their friends and family, in the vain hope of qualifying for some of the free stuff they saw in the ad on MySpace?

I don’t mean to pick on I-Deal Direct. After all, there is a sucker born every minute, and this is certainly not the only shonky marketing data collection agency marketing online. It’s just that I’d like to be more certain that I-Deal Direct were waiting until the suckers were over 18 if they weren’t using MySpace so prominently.

And I’m more than a little disappointed with MySpace and News Corp. You’d never expect to see a bottom-feeder advertiser like this on the homepage of news.com.au or foxsports.com.au for a variety of reasons – it cheapens the masthead brand, risks the relationship with the consumer, and lowers your apparent CPM amongst other marketers. It also makes you look just plain shoddy.

If it’s too shonky for Australian adults, we should definitely not be seeing this kind of ‘scamarketer’ on MySpace – the largest single online destination for Australian kids. If I were a premium youth brand marketer, I wouldn’t want my brand anywhere near this on MySpace.

Excuse me, I need to go wash my hands and delete my cookies.

MySpace shows just how much it cares about kids

// April 4th, 2007 // 0 Comments // Advertising

MySpace shows it cares about kids
Originally uploaded by thatjonesboy.

Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) tech charity initiative has a new competitor from the most unlikely of places – Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace, in conjunction with… gee… well, it seems to be I-Deal Direct, Inc. of Chicago, Illinois, operating under the domain name of ShoppingSaverCenter.biz.

Previously not very well known in charitable circles, it seems that I-Deal Direct is using News Corp’s global youth MySpace audience to help supply free laptops to Australian children previously only able to login to their MySpace homepage via a shared family PC, a PC at school, or perhaps a PC at their local library.

The ad makes it seem like only the one millionth Australian visitor to the MySpace homepage will be given a free laptop, but it seems like I-Deal Direct has since massively broadened the offer to include every young Australian who visits MySpace, since the ad appears again and again, on every MySpace account I created in my testing.

In fact, not content with providing a free laptop to every young Australian, I discovered upon clicking-thru (I will delete my cookies) that I-Deal Direct is also going to supply them with free big-screen LCD or plasma TVs. That’s a laptop, and a free big-screen TV, for every Aussie kid who clicks on the ad… hmm…

When will this extraordinary altruism end, I hear you ask? Well, it would be more accurate to ask: when will this extraordinary altruism begin?

Because of course, reading the fine print on the landing pages, I-Deal Direct is engaged in shady harvesting of email addresses and demographic information.

While stating you need to be 18 or over to participate in its ‘program’, I-Deal Direct leaves that checkbox ticked so you don’t have to untick it, and then when it captures all your name and address details, doesn’t include birthdates after 1989, so there’s no way you could tell them you were under-age if you wanted to. Click on from there and you are presented with a seemingly endless scrolling page of opt-in and opt-out offers from hundreds of different marketers. It seems like I-Deal Direct has aggregated every online offer-based affiliate marketing program in existence and is intent upon walking you through them in succession (including (I add with some considerable embarassment and annoyance) an offer for Quickflix, an online DVD rental business of which I am a shareholder.)

Click ‘submit’ on one and the page refreshes to introduce another offer. I lost count of the pages I clicked through. And when I tried to leave, a bunch of pop-up and pop-under windows tried to dissuade me with just one more (and then just one more) unmissable offer. Who else but a teenage kid is likely to keep entering in their details, those of their friends and family, in the vain hope of qualifying for some of the free stuff they saw in the ad on MySpace?

I don’t mean to pick on I-Deal Direct. After all, there is a sucker born every minute, and this is certainly not the only shonky marketing data collection agency marketing online. It’s just that I’d like to be more certain that I-Deal Direct were waiting until the suckers were over 18 if they weren’t using MySpace so prominently.

And I’m more than a little disappointed with MySpace and News Corp. You’d never expect to see a bottom-feeder advertiser like this on the homepage of news.com.au or foxsports.com.au for a variety of reasons – it cheapens the masthead brand, risks the relationship with the consumer, and lowers your apparent CPM amongst other marketers. It also makes you look just plain shoddy.

If it’s too shonky for Australian adults, we should definitely not be seeing this kind of ‘scamarketer’ on MySpace – the largest single online destination for Australian kids. If I were a premium youth brand marketer, I wouldn’t want my brand anywhere near this on MySpace.

Excuse me, I need to go wash my hands and delete my cookies.