Social networking

EU tackles social networking privacy regulations

European regulators have often been more aggressive and pro-consumer than those in the U.S., and now they’re looking at the privacy implications of open social network platforms like Facebook’s. Social network companies have been pushing open platforms that give third-party firms access to their users’ data. This is a revenue stream for Facebook, but regulators fear it’s a surrendering of user privacy, often without full knowledge and disclosure.

So far, the recommendations for further protection are just a part of a draft document that hasn’t been presented to the EC, but regulatory trends have been showing a significant pro-consumer, pro-privacy shift. The result may be increased difficulty in monetizing not only social networks but also other online trends like video. In the U.S., the House is also closing in on privacy legislation that may well impact social networks and behavioral targeting.

Google’s Wave redefines UC market; challenges Twitter?

Google may not be saying it, but they’ve just showed their hand in (and maybe redefined) the UC market. Google Wave, announced at the Google development conference, blends social network frameworks and policies with IM and email.

We’re hearing that Google will also be integrating voice and video communications with Wave, and the fact that they made the announcement at a developer conference shows that Google is planning to pull in support from third parties to enhance Wave’s capabilities.

We’ve commented for some time that communications needed to be built around a new social network framework and not just around voice calling, and Google seems to be doing just that. Wave is a kind of smart document that carries communications along with it, facilitating its own collaborative framework. Thus, it is something like a service template and something like a business document or personal letter/email combined.

The problem is that Wave won’t be available until late 2009 at the earliest, according to the rumors we’ve heard. That means that there’s plenty of time for others to jump in and make some of the same points—and maybe faster. Based on what was said at the developer conference, it’s hard to see how Google could advance their timetable.

Social networks drive telecom services change

New research has demonstrated the impact of social networks on basic communications behavior was demonstrated by research just published showing that membership for social media has surpassed use of personal email for communication.

It is this radical behavioral change that we think is central to the process of planning next-generation services. Not only is social networking a different model, it is a model anchored in a web portal, and thus easier to exploit with OTT technology than with telco technology.

The pace of market change is not slowing, and addressing the new situation will be critical for telcos if they want to pursue their monetization goals. It’s even more critical for vendors that want to sell them equipment, because not only is the investment in future infrastructure dependent on monetization, providers are looking for active vendor participation in solving their problems.

The wisdom of mobile social networking strategies?

One of the interesting outcomes of the Mobile World Congress this year was the interest shown by mobile operators in social networking. Operators appear to be continuing their strategy of driving non-voice service dependence even at the expense of commoditizing bandwidth for mobile, a kind of “rob-the-future” risk balancing act.

Social networks draw on the same demography as heavy mobile users—youth. Social networks are also “viral” in that their success is self-perpetuating, socialized by the very community that makes up the audience. However, the push for non-voice customers through accepting over-the-top data drivers, smartphones or open handsets all create the problem of validating a pure transport/connection model for the operator, which admits to disintermediation.

This is interesting because the “sink-to-the-bottom” model is the one that seems most comfortable to operators, but it’s also the one most problematic for equipment vendors. Commodity services admit to no equipment differentiation either. We wonder if the rapidly increasing operator frustration in equipment vendor support for more service-related monetization strategies (now finally driving vendors to make at least strategic commitments to services) may be overtaking events.

Could operators be giving up on “intermediation” and services? If so, that will dramatically reshape the industry. A surrender to the OTT players would also rob the network operators of mobile advertising, which could well replace most forms of local advertising over time. But mobile operators are even advocating better rapport with developers and OTT players.

Cisco breaks out with Eos social networking

Cisco has taken a big step outside its traditional networking boundaries in search of additional revenue opportunity. Perhaps its most significant excursion is the one into the application software space with Eos, a social networking system that is targeted at media companies but applicable, we believe, to enterprises and network operators who want to build and sustain online communities.

It’s not clear whether Cisco has customized excessively for the media company sector or is simply looking there as a good starting point. While Eos is billed as a social network, it’s our view that it’s a community connection tool designed to allow other elements (Cisco and third parties) to be integrated into a social network and relationship framework.

Given the powerful role that social networks could play in collaboration and communications, Eos may be a very useful tool to Cisco in creating a service-layer presence in 2009, something that vendors will need to do to sustain their growth not only next year but in the next decade.

Cisco’s new broad, vague Web 2.0 program

Cisco announced a broad if somewhat vague program to bind the Elements of Web 2.0 applications into a cohesive whole. The details on this vision were extremely difficult to extract, and we could find no Cisco material online to offer more insight. But it appears to us that Cisco is proposing a broad concept of service-from-mashups where APIs used by various social networks, sites, and even operators could be combined in some centralized way to create new services.

What is even less clear is exactly what role Cisco proposes to play in this. Will it offer a product set, host a service, or both? All this said, we admit that it just might be that Cisco is looking at the area of reformulating service creation—a major focus of our own interest—and also the area of using social networking and similar Web evolutions as the basis for collaboration and communication, another thing we believe to be essential in shaping the next generation of services.

In short, Cisco may be on to something and we’ll try to figure out what exactly it is.

Regarding the fate of VC-funded web businesses

Analysts and venture capitalists (VCs) are joining forces to warn that the days of running a web business for years with no revenue are over. The latest round, generated by Gartner, is aimed at the social media players who are the latest in the net-company crowd to get funded and are still largely unprofitable. We believe that the whole venture process is tainted by hype-based promotions that border on pyramid swindles, so winding back in VC investment will likely have little real impact on the market. However, it will certainly have an impact on employment in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and there may be a period when even good startup ideas have little access to capital, especially in the first half of 2009.

AOL profits way down; Time to sell

Time-Warner’s AOL unit saw profits fall by 26%, and has been in talks to split and sell off AOL to boost the parent company’s financials. The drop in AOL’s fortunes came not because of a shift from an access model to an ad model per se, but because of the shift to broadband Internet.

Broadband is not an ISP business; it’s an access carrier business. However, the fate of AOL as a portal is linked to broader problems on the Internet, which include an increased polarization of sites as search, entertainment or social networks. There are strong incumbents in the first space. The second is yet to be proved as a source of financial gain, and entertainment is where everyone who isn’t a search player wants to be. Crowded markets don’t make money for anyone, and the faddish nature of Internet viewing won’t help. T-W should sell AOL off now while it can.

Microblogging: Trouble for network bandwidth?

Twitter, the “What are you doing” less-than-texting concept, is gaining a lot of buzz, users and funding. Monetizing any social network has proved difficult, and Twitter’s simple approach makes it harder than usual to see how ads might work there, but it still raises a troubling question for networks. Is the real service of the future more signaling than bandwidth? Clearly you can’t be twittering video stuff to each other; and few people have the time for an activity that must occur regularly and also consumes a lot of capacity.

If casual social microblogging is the prototype of future services, then network bandwidth and bandwidth production could be in deep trouble. We believe that the telco side of the market needs to be thinking about how to make casual bit-intensive activities as attractive as short text messages and blogs, or face some unpleasant consequences.

Comcast to buy Plaxo

Comcast is buying social network and photo site Plaxo, and plans to integrate it into Comcast’s offerings, perhaps even creating a set-top box that could be used to “tune” to Plaxo sites and view pictures. The move is one of several recent steps taken by content and network firms to gain access to web properties for exploitation, and it seems to show that the whole sector is now looking for positive symbiosis among a variety of customer-reaching strategies, perhaps to stave off price competition. In Comcast’s case, we believe it is a step to attempt to hold profit and revenue in a market where satellite and RBOC competitors are generating significant pressure