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The Social Web Economy: What Are These People Building?

Posted: 09 Sep 2008 09:50 AM CDT

This is a continuation in the series on “The Social Web Economy“

Over that past few weeks we have defined all of the participants in the social web economy but now we’ve got to figure out what exactly they are building. Often times it is difficult to understand what exactly is being built and given that this is still a nascent industry roles overlap both of individuals as well as companies. Along with roles of individuals, the positioning of products frequently overlap but in a rapidly growing industry there's enough room for everyone to participate.

While this fast growing environment can't continue to grow indefinitely, there has never been a better time to be a participant or a company in the social web economy (unless of course you count the bubble as good times). As this industry begins to solidify itself, I’m confident that we will see the rapid consolidation of companies as well as many companies that will join the what Techcrunch has coined the "deadpool", the place where failed startups go to retire.

Over the coming weeks I will cover the various types of companies in the social web economy which includes:

Product Companies
Distribution Companies
Social Web Agencies
Ad Networks & Sales Teams
Analytics Companies
Media Companies
Communications/Public Relations Firms

Each of these companies contribute in some form to build the products and services that millions of users will hopefully end up using on a daily basis. I'll cover what's the biggest challenges facing each type of company and how where they fit in the social web landscape.

Next Post: “The Social Web Economy: Product Companies”

Gigya Connects MySpace and Facebook APIs

Posted: 09 Sep 2008 08:35 AM CDT

Today Gigya announced that the company’s Socialize service will begin granting access to the API on Facebook and will integrate with MySpace later this month. The company is trying to bridge the gap for social application developers that are forced to spend time porting their Facebook applications to MySpace. Theoretically this implies that Gigya is also building a connector between OpenSocial and Facebook.

The service also competes directly with Google Friend Connect in that users can access their friends on any site that uses Socialize. Honestly, I’m not quite sure how significant of an announcement this is since the real challenge is sparking developer adoption. All the leading widget platforms enjoy boasting about the impressions that they have (such as Gigya has more than 150 million people that see their widgets each month) but few boast about developer adoption.

This has been a serious challenge for all the widget platforms and will most likely continue to be an issue as larger brands like Facebook and MySpace have been successful at individually attracting a substantial developer base. Another question I have about this new service is whether or not websites cater to both the MySpace and Facebook user bases.

I’d imagine that most developers that integrate with the social graph APIs (Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability and Google Friend Connect), will simply select the platform of their choosing. Gigya claims that they already have access to 50 million contacts since the launch of their Socialize service. The main purpose is to organize your friend lists across social networks in a single place.

Their are numerous services which provide similar aggregation services yet many have failed to take off as most users prefer to stick with the big brands: Facebook and MySpace. There is potential for this service to gain traction but for now I remain skeptical. Personally I don’t believe that the solution is to create a temporary offering which bridges the gap.

Now that a company has already done so, there is a decreasing advantage for Facebook and MySpace to remain disconnected. It will be interesting to see if services like the one Gigya announced today will be a catalyst for the progression of data portability.

MySpace Launching Gears for Profiles

Posted: 08 Sep 2008 05:57 PM CDT

-MySpace Logo- At Techcrunch 50, Chris DeWolfe of MySpace announced that MySpace will begin enabling users to access their profiles offline thanks to integration with Google Gears. This feature will enable users to access a history of their profiles that they’ve had on MySpace. While no thorough details were provided it sounds like a system similar to the Wayback Machine which keeps a history of the crawlable web.

MySpace previously enabled gears for their inbox and enabled users to take their inbox offline, something Facebook has yet to do. They are now extending this feature according to Chris DeWolfe. I wish I could provide more details but unfortunately this is all that he said. It definitely sounds like an interesting feature in theory given that people change their profile so frequently.

After growing up on a social network, it would be extremely useful to look back at an archived version of your personal profile. This feature also highlights how important it is for users to monitor anything they place on their profile. While DeWolfe did not say that anybody can access a user’s archived profile, this is one more step in that direction.

It will be interesting to see how this new feature is implemented. Chris DeWolfe also said that MySpace music will be launching later this month.