Posts from Social network

John Battelle wrote a gushing post about Color and what it means for mobile/social/local/realtime, augmented reality, and more. There are most certainly some big ideas in the Color app. I've never put a mobile photo app on my phone but I put Color on it last night. I don't have any of my family  on Color yet, but I hope to get them all on it today (I'm on spring break with my family and some of our kids' friends). Then we'll see what all the buzz is about.

Regular vistors to AVC know that I am in the "many social graphs" camp and most certainly not in the "one graph to rule them all" camp. I believe we will have at least dozens of social graphs in our lives. But even more, I believe that we will have social graphs that come and go and that are formed implicitly not explicitly.

My first experience with this sort of implicit social graph came almost six years ago via my musical neighbors graph at last.fm. I don't think I actually know any of these people in real life, but they are the last.fm users who have the closest taste to mine in music, right now. That right now is important because my musical neighbors graph looked differently last year and will look differently next year.

Last.fm uses my listening history to create an implicit social graph in real time. Color uses my location to do the same for photo sharing. There are a bunch of social news discovery services out there that use my current reading history to determine a "news/interest graph" implicitly in real time.

This is the next frontier in social networking for a bunch of reasons. First, curating social graphs is a pain. It takes work. And simply importing your Facebook or Twitter graph is suboptimal for most social services. You then need to add and delete to get the right graph for the right app. And second graphs change over time. Who has time to constantly manage their social graphs. So they get stale and one day you say "why I am following this person?" or "why is this person a friend on Facebook?" And maybe most imporantly, sometimes you only want a social graph for a weekend, a day, an hour, or a minute. The only way to make that work is to construct it implicitly.

So I don't know if Color will turn out to be a big deal or not. I don't care that they raised $41mm. Seems like most anyone can do that these days. But I do care that they are pushing the envelope in social graph construction in an important direction. That's why Color is on my phone this morning and why I'm going to get my wife and my kids and their friends on it today and see what happens.

I've been thinking for a while now that there will not be one social graph to rule them all (Facebook) but that we will eventually have a multitude of web/mobile services in our lives, each with a social graph we curate specifically for that service. That's been my gut instinct as I do not believe the Facebook social graph is the right graph for Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Etsy, Svpply, Boxee, etc, etc, etc.

But what has been less clear to me is how we will make it easy for people to do this curation. I posted some thoughts on this subject last week. And I've continued to puzzle on this topic since.

Yesterday, in a series of chats with my colleagues at USV, it started to become clear to me that the mobile phone address book may well be the answer.

I have been using a bunch of mobile messaging apps with social graphs in them. Examples are Kik and Beluga. When you download and startup these apps, they do a query of their user base against your contacts and allow you to easily and quickly add all the people who are in your contacts to your network in these services.

Of course, you could do the same thing with Facebook's API (unless you are Twitter who they continue to block from doing this). But the truth is that most people have very large social graphs on Facebook and probably don't want 1000+ people being added to their mobile messaging app. Those same people might have 100 or so people in their mobile phone contacts and these people are certainly exactly the kind of people you would want to add to a mobile messaging app.

Mobile messaging is clearly a perfect match for a contact book on a mobile phone. But all web/mobile services can and should use this move to quickly build application specific social graphs. The people in our phone contacts are our "strong ties" and we should want them in most any social graph we curate.

Every big powerful technology company has met a new technology that has undone their dominance. For Microsoft it was open source and the Internet. For Google, it appears that it may be social. For Facebook, it appears that it may be mobile.

I'll say right upfront that this may be a feature that many people don't need. But I need it so I thought I'd post it anyway.

As software becomes social, the creation of the social graph on each web service becomes a chore. I do not believe that you simply want to port your social graph from Facebook and Twitter into new web services. I believe you want to curate the social graph for each and every web service. And that's how I try to do it on each new social web service I encounter.

The people I want to follow on Etsy are not the same people I want to follow on Twitter. The people I want to follow on Svpply are not my Facebook friends. I don't want to share my Foursquare checkins with everyone on Twitter and Facebook.

I am slowly but surely building social graphs on Etsy, Svpply, and Foursquare (and many other services but I thought I would focus on these three for this post). Each service has a slightly different relationship model. On Etsy, you join circles. I am in almost 100 circles on Etsy, some of which I would like to join back. Svpply uses the Twitter follow model, and close to 100 people are following me, some of which I'd like to follow back. Foursquare uses the Facebook model and there are 3815 friend requests for me there. I am sure there are a bunch of people in the 3815 that I'd like to share my checkins with.

So here is the feature I want. I would like to be able to run these people through all my social graphs on other services (not just Facebook and Twitter) and also my phone contacts and my emails to help me filter them and quickly add those people if I think they would make the social experience on the specific service useful to me.

I don't want to get emailed everytime someone follows me or friends me. I'd like each service to build up a list of relationships and let me query that list against other social graphs. I think that would be a much more efficient way to build social graphs.

I do add people myself. I use Twitter's Who To Follow service to build my Twitter social graph. I join circles in Etsy when I see a seller who has a store I like. I follow people on Svpply when I see something they added that I like.

But the more people you have in your social graphs on these services, the more valuable they become. So making it easier to curate application specific social graphs is a big part of making the services more social and richer experiences for all of us.

So I finally got around to downloading iTunes 10 and playing around with Ping.

I agree with Swizec who makes all the points I would make in much more colorful language.

In summary, Ping is not very social and it is not really about music. It is about music purchases and celebrities.

If you want to see a social network about music, check out last.fm. It knows what I am listening to right now no matter where I am listening (not in iTunes hopefully). It knows what music I like and it doesn't ask me to tell them what that is. It knows who likes the same kind of music I do.

Ping shows what a command and control culture thinks a social network is. I am sure millions of people will use Ping. And I am equally sure that it will not advance the state of the music business one bit.

I read Om Malik's early take on Ping. I was shocked that I would have to download software to create a social network and said so in the comments. Of course that is what Apple would do in its iTunes centric view of the world. But tying Ping to iTunes is wrong. And tying Ping to music purchases is wrong. And tying Ping to top artists is wrong.

I didn't find any of my music friends on Ping. Just a bunch of tech pundits and VCs who had to check this thing out. So I'm headed back to the places I hang out with my music friends online; Tumblr, last.fm, hype machine, Soundcloud, extension.fm, etc.

I hope you'll join me. And while I am on the subject of music, you might enjoy listening to my internet radio channel this weekend. It is called fredwilson.fm and it was built on tumblr, streampad, and soundcloud. Not one bit of Apple technology in it.

My partner Albert posted this on his blog yesterday:

But I see at least one flaw with this plan for domination. I simply don’t believe that there is a single social graph that makes sense. I may very well follow someone’s booksmarks on del.icio.us that I don’t want to have any other relationship with. Or take the group of people that I feel comfortable sharing my foursquare checkins with — these are all people I trust and would enjoy if they showed up right there and then. That group in turn is different from the people I work with on Google docs for various projects which is why I would be nervous about using the Microsoft docs connected to Facebook. Trying to shoe-horn all of these into a single graph is unlikely to work well.

He's talking about Facebook and the new services they announced this week at f8. Clearly Facebook is executing fast and well at a scale that few Internet companies have ever reached. It is very impressive to watch.

But I am with Albert on the issue of one social graph for the entire web. I don't think it will happen either. And we are putting our money where our mouths are by backing companies like Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Disqus, GetGlue, and others (remember del.ico.us?) that are building different social graphs.

Today Facebook is the mainstream social network and where most people keep their entire social graph. The other services I mentioned, with the exception of Twitter, have not built large mainstream social graphs. But I think they will for the exact reasons Albert articulated.

I want to share some things with the widest group of people that is possible. Those things end up on this blog and/or Twitter. I want to share some things with the smallest group possible (like checkins on Foursquare and financial transactions on Blippy). That behavior requires a very tight, very private social graph. 

Facebook sits in the middle of all of this and has created the largest social graph out there. These other social graphs can and will grow in the wake of Facebook. I am not sure if Facebook's ambition is to create the one social graph to rule them all but if it is, I don't think they will succeed with that. If it is to empower the creation of many social graphs for various activities and to be in the center of that activity and driving it, I think they are already there and will continue to be there for many years to come.

I want to thank my friend Mo Koyfman and my partners Brad and Albert for helping me crystalize my thinking about this over the past few weeks. It is a very important topic for those of us who invest in the social web.

Three years ago most western european countries had a local social network that was the most popular social net in the country. Today Facebook is dominant in most of western europe and those local social nets have largely been bypassed.

It would seem that Facebook leveraged the size of its network (approaching 500mm people worldwide) to beat its competition in social networking. But what's interesting to me about that is that it also means that it leveraged a network that was larger out of country to beat an incumbent who initially was larger in country.

For the sake of this argument, I am assuming network size and network effects was the cause of Facebook's success internationally against local competitors. It could be that it was not network, but instead features that won the market for Facebook. Certainly it was some of both.

I come to this "argument" with a deep respect for the power of networks, particularly online, and so I believe that in fact Facebook was able to leverage the size of its out of market network to compete in market against a local incumbent who had a stronger in market network.

And why exactly would that work? Well first of all, many people have social networks that span geographies. And those people tend to be influencers who are important in the value of an overall social graph. I think it is also true that in many parts of the world, big american brands are powerful in local markets. And so its probably also true that there is an allure of being part of a big american social network. I've been told that there are only four countries that are mostly impenetrable for a US internet company; russia, china, japan, and korea. We will see if that is true in Facebook's case.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was making my way around Paris, checking in on Foursquare. In every place I went to in Paris, there was an existing mayor and plenty of tips. But it was rare to check into a place and find someone else checked in as well. By contrast in NYC, I rarely check in these days without finding at least one other person checked in.

In talking to some local parisian web entrepreneurs, I heard about a local Parisian company called Tellmewhere that has 500,000 users, mostly french. Read Write Web has a good post up about Tellmewhere right now. So maybe the reason I found the usage of Foursquare in Paris to be light compared to NYC is the presence of a strong local competitor.

And thus my question that started this post. Do network effects span geographies? Does the fact that Foursquare is approaching 1mm users worldwide make a difference in Paris or will Tellmewhere, with 500k users who are mostly here, continue to dominate locally?

If we can use Facebook as a guide, it seems eventually the largest network wins. But can we use Facebook as a guide and is that universally true on the web? Let the discussion begin.