Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

Michael Arrington is bitter regarding Yahoo's recent announcement of "Inbox 2.0", their attempt to wrap social features around the Yahoo email platform.

Arrington writes: "It makes me sad because it is absurd for Yahoo to keep launching new social networking products, almost monthly, without what appears to be any sort of high level strategic vision.

A few months ago it was Mash, followed by a quiet closure of Yahoo 360. Earlier this month they let loose a new college/alumni network experiment called Kickstart.

And now Inbox 2.0, but without any statement about integration with Mash or any other Yahoo properties. And, how does their recent acquisition of Zimbra fit into Inbox 2.0?"

To me it's pretty obvious: The social-networking phenomenon is, to some extent, about luck. Sure, functionality plays a role. And the tone matters. But ultimately, some social-networks get big quickly because they hit the right early users, the ones with large enough personal networks to push the service out quickly. Then the magic of viral marketing takes over and growth accelerates.

The cost of building new social networks is low. Ning and other basically let you do it for free. If you want to own your platform, you can build one for less than $100k.

If you're Yahoo, and you keep seeing social platforms launch and grow large quickly (at your expense), you have to start to wonder if you ought to just get a bunch of small teams working on launching home-grown networks. Sure, many will fail, but if even one succeeds, you're guaranteed to make all of the money you invest back.

Labels: social-networking, Techcrunch, Yahoo

The New York Times has a superficial review of Yahoo's new Mash social network here.

I feel like I've had this conversation before. Oh, wait, I did - with David Carpe when he suggested Google was trying to do the same thing.

The point remains the same: big companies don't make cool social networks. Viacom's MTV has failed at it at least once (Flux). Google's Orkut failed (except among Brazilian cocaine dealers). Yahoo 360 failed. MSN Spaces failed.

Social networks need to be tied very closely to a community, so much so that they appear to be an organic extension of that community. No one is going to use a network imposed from above and [in horrible little nerd voice, while rubbing hands together] linking all of Yahoo's internet properties together into one world domination machine to finally destroy those lucky, pre-IPO jerks over at Facebook!

Honestly, just because it sounds good in a meeting doesn't mean people will use it. It would have a better chance of survival if they stripped the Yahoo brand off it entirely.

Labels: Mash, social-networking, Yahoo

David Carpe, of passingnotes.com, has an awful post on what he thinks Google is going to do in 2008:What Google is Really Doing for 2008.

Carpe's big idea is that Google is going to flip a switch on what will be the biggest social network in the world by knitting together each of its different social apps (Google Pages, Calendar, Gmail, etc.). He thinks this is going to blow MySpace / Facebook / etc. off the map.

What Carpe doesn't realize is that Google's not cool. It's slick, it works really well, it 'organizes the world's information'. But it's not cool. And social networking sites, at least the ones that target teenagers (the heaviest users), need to be cool. They need to stand for something, whether it's music (like MySpace or Last.fm) or college gossip and hookups (Facebook) or whatever. By standing for something, and basing their design decisions around that one thing, the best networks create communities with distinct feelings.

So, David: Who, exactly, identifies with 'organizing the world's information'?

Labels: facebook, Google, MySpace, social-networking

Just met with Ben Turner-Brown, Sales Director at Pitch, the recently (November 2006) launched, London-based, mobile social network. By advertising on MTV and other youth-oriented TV channels, Pitch has managed to get 40k users to opt in to its service. Pitch allows all of the usual social networking functionality, plus access to a large catalogue of mobile content, including ringtones, wallpapers, etc. Users are monetised via sale of their attention to brands in the form of advertising in various formats. [Note - this theme of the value of attention is one to which I'll return later.]

So far, Pitch is serving 700k impressions per month to the 40k users - meaning 17.5 impressions per user per month. Since Pitch messages all users roughly 3x per week (12x per month) and counts those as impressions, the actual number of 'active impressions' (where the user actually goes to Pitch) is only 5.5 impressions per user per month.

The questions, as always, comes down to how many of those 40k users are generating 'active impressions' - and how valuable those active users are to brands.

Still, it's a great start, one that bodes well for the mobile content space.

Labels: advertising, content, mobile, social-networking