Social networks, development prospects and ways to monetize. Part 2
The second part of my report at the UA WEB conference about social networks. The theme of the part: the development of social networks .
For those who missed, I advise you to first read the first part.
Today, there are a number of trends in the development of social networks in the world and in Russian Internet:
1. Socialization of everything
2. Development of niche social networks
3. Technologization of already existing
4. The introduction of social networks in the business
5. Mobile social networks
6. Combining and sharing information
')
All these trends are quite understandable and logical, they are a logical continuation of the current situation.
And the situation is this: a large number of social networks in the world, the most popular now are MySpace (more than 220 million registrations), FaceBook, Classmates and from professional LinkedIn, in Odnoklassniki Run (more than 10 million registrations), VKontakte, MoiMir and from My Mokrug professional, in Ukraine it is Connect, Friends.ua and starting ID.UA - Network of Networks .
The level of development of social networks has almost reached its peak, and at the moment we almost every day can observe the birth of new social networks. Recently, it has become precisely niche social networks: for millionaires and top managers, for dog lovers, for disabled people, or for the memory of loved ones who left this world. This is a normal trend, which was caused by the saturation of the market with common “for all” networks. Quite often you can meet interesting topics, sometimes simply absurd, some of the projects will survive, and some will go away with time.
Among the most interesting ones, such projects as MyChurch.com (http://mychurch.com/) - a social network for creating your own churches, Moxie Moms (http://www.moxie-moms.com/) - a social network of moms , Geni - Genealogy - Free Family Tree (http://www.geni.com/) - a network of relatives, or our Runet examples: We remember ... (http://mipomnim.ru/) - a social network for the memory of the dead, DrugMe. ru (http://www.drugme.ru/) - a social network for the sick and recovering.
There are also closed social networks, for example, PRO2 (http://pro2.ru/) or social networks of millionaires. By the way, we can expect a surge in popularity of closed social networks in the near future.
Interesting fact: recently you can meet parodies of social networks, for example - Odokokamerniki.su
(http://www.odnokamerniki.su/) - parody of Odnoklassniki.ru with a prison theme, which then tried to sell for $ 20,000 thousand on searchengines.ru
By the way, some experts believe that 2008 will be the year of business social networks . In addition to new ones that should appear, active development of old ones is expected, including the integration of the professional social network LinkedIn with the service for storing the to-do list, contacts and other business information - Plaxo.
Most of the niche social networks are unique in their own way; they will find loyal users and occupy their niche.
The social networking market is becoming saturated, and as a result, competition between them is increasing. As in any business, innovation is one of the key methods of competition . In our case, these innovations are manifested in the birth of new social networking functions, and more and more often these functions are implemented by the users themselves due to the fact that social networks open an API (Application Programming Interface - Application Programming Interface, which makes it possible to develop applications that work with these networks) for developers. The API is quite popular with FaceBook and, more recently, the API has appeared with our clone, VKontakte. Technologization will only grow over time, especially in RuNet, we can expect a surge in this trend in the near future, when quantitative saturation ends.
A separate item is to highlight the personalization of social networks for a specific user, when people go to social networks and see only what they want, information is offered on their interests that were defined earlier, their friends are just a click away from them, etc.
Communication technologies are being actively built into social networks, for example, in the largest social network MySpace you can already make calls via Skype; as well as this social network has a large number of applications.
In addition to technologization, the emergence of social networks of a new type can be distinguished. One of such networks is e-mail networks developed by Internet giants such as Google and Yahoo! In the past 2007, information leaked to the Internet that Yahoo! is already working on a service that will determine which letters are important to the visitor, and, accordingly, they will appear above the others. Personal profile pages will be added to this system, in which personal information will be stored and used. The source of the information was Saul Hansell from the New York Times. Modern email services have huge archives of personal information, and its use is only a matter of time. As usual, the runet is not far in this direction, for example, the social network MoiMir from Mail.Ru is partially integrated into the mail service and actively uses it. Although on the other hand, social networks of this type are well forgotten old ones: from the history of development and the very concept of a social network, it is clear that the e-mail itself is a social network, and these functions only improve the interaction of people.
The trend of the emergence of new social networks can be viewed from the other side. Now the social networks themselves are becoming substitutes for various sites. This is especially noticeable for professional media: according to one of the versions, social networks pose a danger to such companies. And in all likelihood, the media have already understood this and are preparing to defend themselves: according to rumors, the largest Western media are now preparing social functionality for their projects and will soon make an attempt to cross professional online edition and social network.
Some experts conditionally divide the development of social networks into 3 parts : the first is the social networks of the mid-90s, the pioneers with the simplest functionality, the second is the creation of social networks with broader functionality for basic interaction (from 2000 to our days), and the last third part is social networks that solve specific problems: search for employees (business networks), games (game networks), information search (content networks), etc. According to this theory, we are now gradually moving from the second stage to the third.
Social networks have long captured the minds of ordinary Internet users, and now it's the turn of business. Talk about the use of this tool in business has been going on for a long time, but they were not in a hurry to introduce such innovations. Technologies improved, conversations increased, and this inevitably led to the emergence of the first successful examples.
One of the first serious and interesting techniques was the introduction of social networks into the business strategy of the American company Cisco Systems, Inc. , the leader of networking technologies for the Internet.
Specialists of this company work in different countries of the world, which inevitably caused communication problems. To transfer very important information to the employees of this company had to convene a two-day conference with the necessary specialists from different countries, which naturally was very inconvenient and, most importantly, it required significant funds. As a result, within the framework of the cisco 3.0 initiative, a solution to this problem appeared - an internal corporate social network, which contained all the necessary information and various methods of communication within the company, which was especially convenient for employees from different countries. This social network has internal corporate blogs, educational materials, video links, encyclopedias, and other elements of social networks. In the same 2007, cisco opened the “Communications Center of Excellence (CCoE)” to help its employees in using this social network and all its benefits.
In addition to solving the communication problem, the social network solves many other problems, for example, with its help, employees actively communicate with each other, learn about each other's successes, and the team building and team building process goes well.
This company has proved by its example the effectiveness of such tools as social networks in different business processes. I am sure that this is only one of the first steps towards introducing such tools into the business of this particular company and many others.
We should not forget about the other use of social networks in business - it is getting information: about consumers, about competitors, about employees, about applicants and much more.
One of the steps of technologization of social networks was their development using mobile technologies.
There are two directions for the development of these technologies:
1. Mobile social networks
2. Mobile tools for interacting with Internet networks
Mobile networks , which are quite popular in the West, are also known as MoSoSo , an acronym for mobile social software, they almost always work with the help of special software (hence the word software). One of the first examples was the Dodgeball social network (http://www.dodgeball.com/), which was created by two graduates of New York University, Denis Crowley and Alex Reinert back in 2000 and was later bought by Google. The principle of operation of this social network is quite simple: a person comes to an entertainment institution, sends a message from a Dodgeball mobile phone with a location, which in turn gets to his friends and friends of his friends; as a result: he can meet with large numbers of people who were nearby and who are somehow connected with him. Over time, an analogue appeared in runet - CatchUp (“KetchAp”, from the English word “catch up” or “catch”, catchup.ru ).
From mobile technologies you can also distinguish social networks that use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi technology (http://plazes.com/).
Currently, mobile tools for interaction with Internet networks are actively developing. So, at the end of 2007, mobile versions were immediately opened by two giants of the Runet: Odnoklassniki.ru (http://wap.odnoklassniki.ru/) and MoiMir (http://wap.my.mail.ru) from Mail.ru. The mobile version of the social network VKontakte (http://wap.vkontakte.ru/) also has a mobile version, and in February 2008, the professional community E-xecutive also appeared (http://www.e-xe.mobi ). Next up are smaller social networks.
Western counterparts have had mobile versions for quite some time. Currently one of the latest ones is being tested - the mobile version of the professional social network LinkedIn, which is understandable, because professional networks have much less mobile service users.
In the current abundance of social networks in the world there is a need to collect everything in one place, from which the tendency to unite social networks and exchange information between them is reluctant. The question arises: “Why is it reluctant?” - the answer is simple: in fact, social networks are competitors, and with this step one competitor helps another. Especially difficult it happens in runet. If in the west, combining competitors to capture a larger market share and gain a synergy effect is quite normal, then with our “divide and conquer” mentality everything happens more complicated.
The first step to merging was the project OpenSocial - from Google . OpenSocial is a set of APIs that allow developers to access information on social networks that have joined this project, which makes it possible to create applications that work with many popular networks at the same time. Developers can get information from user profiles, information about friends, actions, and many other equally useful information. Thanks to Google, applications that work in several social networks began to appear. Such huge social networks as MySpace, LinkedIn, Hi5, Bebo, Ning, Plaxo, Six Apart, Friendster and many others have already joined this project, and the total number of users exceeds 250 million.
In runet, the first step towards unification was the Best Persons project with their motto: “The best people. We unite social networks ". The essence of the project is reduced to the banal collection of links to profiles of a person in all social networks in one place, as well as indicating your interests, adding friends and some other functions, although the project is developing quite quickly, and perhaps more interesting functions will appear in it.
Separately, it is worth remembering the rumors that the special services have long had software that collects information from all popular social networks. Although this information has not yet been confirmed and remains only rumors.
There is no analogue of OpenSocial in RuNet yet, and the website Best Persons does not use other social networks, it only tries to combine them. In general, the API is just starting to appear in Runet: for example, a clone of the FaceBook - the social network VKontakte is just beginning to test its API, hoping to repeat the success. March 19 API VKontakte was open to third-party integrated Flash-applications.
Recently, an interesting tendency can be observed: “ socialization of everything ”, when a huge number of sites already appear with a minimal set of social functions, and the old ones are being developed with such functions. Under the pressure of success of social networks, selling them for huge sums, which in turn causes a lot of information in the press, affects the loyalty of users and the result is a snowball effect, which as it moves gains popularity by itself. As a result, the overall situation forces many startups of internet projects to incorporate social functionality into any project. Of course, such decisions are far from always correct, but, nevertheless, we already observe such a tendency.
If this trend continues, very soon we will be able to observe social functionality in almost any more or less serious Internet project, whether it is a news site, an online store or a search engine. And what is most interesting in many cases is effective, but not in all. Therefore, it is worthwhile to think carefully when creating a new website: is there a need for social functionality, what will it give, and not to do it just for a tick.
Some experts believe that the future of the Internet lies in 3D interfaces. Therefore, it is logical to assume what social networks will be in 3D . In fact, there are already similar social networks - these are online worlds. In them, people can communicate, add each other as friends, visit certain places together and interact in every possible way. If we take the concept of modern social networks and wrap it in the idea of ​​a 3D world, we will get something like the following: a photo or a questionnaire creates a 3D image of a person, after certain information there are his friends. The most popular educational institutions will be created in the form of 3D objects, which will allow for classmates to meet in a virtual school building. The user’s profile can be his real or fictional home, which will contain information about the user: a diploma of graduation from a higher educational institution hangs on the wall, next to his children's photos, a favorite movie or TV show is on TV ...
And for professional networks, there will always be meetings and negotiations in the largest business centers of the world in virtual space for a nominal fee, you can see an approximate human response to certain actions, you can draw charts on a flipchart and show presentations using a projector. But this is still only a fantasy: 3D web is still for the most part a future, perhaps not far away (for example, IBM already develops something close to it and Linden Lab).
Even from the world of fantastic social networks can distinguish a social network, crossed with artificial intelligence. One can only imagine what opportunities such a network will open: the system itself will know what the user needs, what advertising to show him, who he knows, and who he doesn’t, whom he would like to meet. Artificial intelligence will learn and improve itself, and in general it will be a goldmine for those who first create such a network, although, of course, at the moment it is not possible to do it, but no one bothers to develop such a miracle.
Copyright 2008, Nikita Andreevich Semenov
SECL GROUP , CEO
This part is finished, the most delicious is left - monetization ...
For those who missed, I advise you to first read the first part.
Today, there are a number of trends in the development of social networks in the world and in Russian Internet:
1. Socialization of everything
2. Development of niche social networks
3. Technologization of already existing
4. The introduction of social networks in the business
5. Mobile social networks
6. Combining and sharing information
')
All these trends are quite understandable and logical, they are a logical continuation of the current situation.
And the situation is this: a large number of social networks in the world, the most popular now are MySpace (more than 220 million registrations), FaceBook, Classmates and from professional LinkedIn, in Odnoklassniki Run (more than 10 million registrations), VKontakte, MoiMir and from My Mokrug professional, in Ukraine it is Connect, Friends.ua and starting ID.UA - Network of Networks .
2.1. Development of niche social networks
The level of development of social networks has almost reached its peak, and at the moment we almost every day can observe the birth of new social networks. Recently, it has become precisely niche social networks: for millionaires and top managers, for dog lovers, for disabled people, or for the memory of loved ones who left this world. This is a normal trend, which was caused by the saturation of the market with common “for all” networks. Quite often you can meet interesting topics, sometimes simply absurd, some of the projects will survive, and some will go away with time.
Among the most interesting ones, such projects as MyChurch.com (http://mychurch.com/) - a social network for creating your own churches, Moxie Moms (http://www.moxie-moms.com/) - a social network of moms , Geni - Genealogy - Free Family Tree (http://www.geni.com/) - a network of relatives, or our Runet examples: We remember ... (http://mipomnim.ru/) - a social network for the memory of the dead, DrugMe. ru (http://www.drugme.ru/) - a social network for the sick and recovering.
There are also closed social networks, for example, PRO2 (http://pro2.ru/) or social networks of millionaires. By the way, we can expect a surge in popularity of closed social networks in the near future.
Interesting fact: recently you can meet parodies of social networks, for example - Odokokamerniki.su
(http://www.odnokamerniki.su/) - parody of Odnoklassniki.ru with a prison theme, which then tried to sell for $ 20,000 thousand on searchengines.ru
By the way, some experts believe that 2008 will be the year of business social networks . In addition to new ones that should appear, active development of old ones is expected, including the integration of the professional social network LinkedIn with the service for storing the to-do list, contacts and other business information - Plaxo.
Most of the niche social networks are unique in their own way; they will find loyal users and occupy their niche.
2.2. Technologization of existing and the emergence of new
The social networking market is becoming saturated, and as a result, competition between them is increasing. As in any business, innovation is one of the key methods of competition . In our case, these innovations are manifested in the birth of new social networking functions, and more and more often these functions are implemented by the users themselves due to the fact that social networks open an API (Application Programming Interface - Application Programming Interface, which makes it possible to develop applications that work with these networks) for developers. The API is quite popular with FaceBook and, more recently, the API has appeared with our clone, VKontakte. Technologization will only grow over time, especially in RuNet, we can expect a surge in this trend in the near future, when quantitative saturation ends.
A separate item is to highlight the personalization of social networks for a specific user, when people go to social networks and see only what they want, information is offered on their interests that were defined earlier, their friends are just a click away from them, etc.
Communication technologies are being actively built into social networks, for example, in the largest social network MySpace you can already make calls via Skype; as well as this social network has a large number of applications.
In addition to technologization, the emergence of social networks of a new type can be distinguished. One of such networks is e-mail networks developed by Internet giants such as Google and Yahoo! In the past 2007, information leaked to the Internet that Yahoo! is already working on a service that will determine which letters are important to the visitor, and, accordingly, they will appear above the others. Personal profile pages will be added to this system, in which personal information will be stored and used. The source of the information was Saul Hansell from the New York Times. Modern email services have huge archives of personal information, and its use is only a matter of time. As usual, the runet is not far in this direction, for example, the social network MoiMir from Mail.Ru is partially integrated into the mail service and actively uses it. Although on the other hand, social networks of this type are well forgotten old ones: from the history of development and the very concept of a social network, it is clear that the e-mail itself is a social network, and these functions only improve the interaction of people.
The trend of the emergence of new social networks can be viewed from the other side. Now the social networks themselves are becoming substitutes for various sites. This is especially noticeable for professional media: according to one of the versions, social networks pose a danger to such companies. And in all likelihood, the media have already understood this and are preparing to defend themselves: according to rumors, the largest Western media are now preparing social functionality for their projects and will soon make an attempt to cross professional online edition and social network.
Some experts conditionally divide the development of social networks into 3 parts : the first is the social networks of the mid-90s, the pioneers with the simplest functionality, the second is the creation of social networks with broader functionality for basic interaction (from 2000 to our days), and the last third part is social networks that solve specific problems: search for employees (business networks), games (game networks), information search (content networks), etc. According to this theory, we are now gradually moving from the second stage to the third.
2.3. Social networks in business
Social networks have long captured the minds of ordinary Internet users, and now it's the turn of business. Talk about the use of this tool in business has been going on for a long time, but they were not in a hurry to introduce such innovations. Technologies improved, conversations increased, and this inevitably led to the emergence of the first successful examples.
One of the first serious and interesting techniques was the introduction of social networks into the business strategy of the American company Cisco Systems, Inc. , the leader of networking technologies for the Internet.
Specialists of this company work in different countries of the world, which inevitably caused communication problems. To transfer very important information to the employees of this company had to convene a two-day conference with the necessary specialists from different countries, which naturally was very inconvenient and, most importantly, it required significant funds. As a result, within the framework of the cisco 3.0 initiative, a solution to this problem appeared - an internal corporate social network, which contained all the necessary information and various methods of communication within the company, which was especially convenient for employees from different countries. This social network has internal corporate blogs, educational materials, video links, encyclopedias, and other elements of social networks. In the same 2007, cisco opened the “Communications Center of Excellence (CCoE)” to help its employees in using this social network and all its benefits.
In addition to solving the communication problem, the social network solves many other problems, for example, with its help, employees actively communicate with each other, learn about each other's successes, and the team building and team building process goes well.
This company has proved by its example the effectiveness of such tools as social networks in different business processes. I am sure that this is only one of the first steps towards introducing such tools into the business of this particular company and many others.
We should not forget about the other use of social networks in business - it is getting information: about consumers, about competitors, about employees, about applicants and much more.
2.4. Mobile social networks
One of the steps of technologization of social networks was their development using mobile technologies.
There are two directions for the development of these technologies:
1. Mobile social networks
2. Mobile tools for interacting with Internet networks
Mobile networks , which are quite popular in the West, are also known as MoSoSo , an acronym for mobile social software, they almost always work with the help of special software (hence the word software). One of the first examples was the Dodgeball social network (http://www.dodgeball.com/), which was created by two graduates of New York University, Denis Crowley and Alex Reinert back in 2000 and was later bought by Google. The principle of operation of this social network is quite simple: a person comes to an entertainment institution, sends a message from a Dodgeball mobile phone with a location, which in turn gets to his friends and friends of his friends; as a result: he can meet with large numbers of people who were nearby and who are somehow connected with him. Over time, an analogue appeared in runet - CatchUp (“KetchAp”, from the English word “catch up” or “catch”, catchup.ru ).
From mobile technologies you can also distinguish social networks that use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi technology (http://plazes.com/).
Currently, mobile tools for interaction with Internet networks are actively developing. So, at the end of 2007, mobile versions were immediately opened by two giants of the Runet: Odnoklassniki.ru (http://wap.odnoklassniki.ru/) and MoiMir (http://wap.my.mail.ru) from Mail.ru. The mobile version of the social network VKontakte (http://wap.vkontakte.ru/) also has a mobile version, and in February 2008, the professional community E-xecutive also appeared (http://www.e-xe.mobi ). Next up are smaller social networks.
Western counterparts have had mobile versions for quite some time. Currently one of the latest ones is being tested - the mobile version of the professional social network LinkedIn, which is understandable, because professional networks have much less mobile service users.
2.5. Social networking
In the current abundance of social networks in the world there is a need to collect everything in one place, from which the tendency to unite social networks and exchange information between them is reluctant. The question arises: “Why is it reluctant?” - the answer is simple: in fact, social networks are competitors, and with this step one competitor helps another. Especially difficult it happens in runet. If in the west, combining competitors to capture a larger market share and gain a synergy effect is quite normal, then with our “divide and conquer” mentality everything happens more complicated.
The first step to merging was the project OpenSocial - from Google . OpenSocial is a set of APIs that allow developers to access information on social networks that have joined this project, which makes it possible to create applications that work with many popular networks at the same time. Developers can get information from user profiles, information about friends, actions, and many other equally useful information. Thanks to Google, applications that work in several social networks began to appear. Such huge social networks as MySpace, LinkedIn, Hi5, Bebo, Ning, Plaxo, Six Apart, Friendster and many others have already joined this project, and the total number of users exceeds 250 million.
In runet, the first step towards unification was the Best Persons project with their motto: “The best people. We unite social networks ". The essence of the project is reduced to the banal collection of links to profiles of a person in all social networks in one place, as well as indicating your interests, adding friends and some other functions, although the project is developing quite quickly, and perhaps more interesting functions will appear in it.
Separately, it is worth remembering the rumors that the special services have long had software that collects information from all popular social networks. Although this information has not yet been confirmed and remains only rumors.
There is no analogue of OpenSocial in RuNet yet, and the website Best Persons does not use other social networks, it only tries to combine them. In general, the API is just starting to appear in Runet: for example, a clone of the FaceBook - the social network VKontakte is just beginning to test its API, hoping to repeat the success. March 19 API VKontakte was open to third-party integrated Flash-applications.
2.6. A little imagination
Recently, an interesting tendency can be observed: “ socialization of everything ”, when a huge number of sites already appear with a minimal set of social functions, and the old ones are being developed with such functions. Under the pressure of success of social networks, selling them for huge sums, which in turn causes a lot of information in the press, affects the loyalty of users and the result is a snowball effect, which as it moves gains popularity by itself. As a result, the overall situation forces many startups of internet projects to incorporate social functionality into any project. Of course, such decisions are far from always correct, but, nevertheless, we already observe such a tendency.
If this trend continues, very soon we will be able to observe social functionality in almost any more or less serious Internet project, whether it is a news site, an online store or a search engine. And what is most interesting in many cases is effective, but not in all. Therefore, it is worthwhile to think carefully when creating a new website: is there a need for social functionality, what will it give, and not to do it just for a tick.
Some experts believe that the future of the Internet lies in 3D interfaces. Therefore, it is logical to assume what social networks will be in 3D . In fact, there are already similar social networks - these are online worlds. In them, people can communicate, add each other as friends, visit certain places together and interact in every possible way. If we take the concept of modern social networks and wrap it in the idea of ​​a 3D world, we will get something like the following: a photo or a questionnaire creates a 3D image of a person, after certain information there are his friends. The most popular educational institutions will be created in the form of 3D objects, which will allow for classmates to meet in a virtual school building. The user’s profile can be his real or fictional home, which will contain information about the user: a diploma of graduation from a higher educational institution hangs on the wall, next to his children's photos, a favorite movie or TV show is on TV ...
And for professional networks, there will always be meetings and negotiations in the largest business centers of the world in virtual space for a nominal fee, you can see an approximate human response to certain actions, you can draw charts on a flipchart and show presentations using a projector. But this is still only a fantasy: 3D web is still for the most part a future, perhaps not far away (for example, IBM already develops something close to it and Linden Lab).
Even from the world of fantastic social networks can distinguish a social network, crossed with artificial intelligence. One can only imagine what opportunities such a network will open: the system itself will know what the user needs, what advertising to show him, who he knows, and who he doesn’t, whom he would like to meet. Artificial intelligence will learn and improve itself, and in general it will be a goldmine for those who first create such a network, although, of course, at the moment it is not possible to do it, but no one bothers to develop such a miracle.
Copyright 2008, Nikita Andreevich Semenov
SECL GROUP , CEO
This part is finished, the most delicious is left - monetization ...
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/23233/
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