The future of social media (in context of the Facebook - Friendfeed marriage)

The Facebook and the Friendfeed marriage could have much larger future implications on social networking, content indexing and real time search. In the triangulur contest between Google, Facebook and Twitter, each of these players had one big speciality. Facebook has bad search for the vast quantity of content generated by its users worldwide. Google has good search but is not optimized for breaking news or user generated content. Twitter has adequate search for its content, generated by a small percentage of its users generating to keep the rest of the world up to date on breaking news; however, at 45M users it’s dwarfed by Facebook’s 250M users.FriendFeed has a powerful search engine on status and aggregates from multiple sources, including Twitter and Facebook, but doesn’t have the cache of any of the aforementioned players.

So Facebook + FriendFeed combination becomes interesting because 1) it allows Facebook to tap into the real-time stream of consciousness that Twitter does so well, and 2) it acquires a real-time search engine to further support its efforts to improve search (which has been in beta testing since June), including the recent incorporation of Microsoft’s Bing. This, on the surface, would seem as though the “Face-Feed” combination is taking direct aim at Twitter (#1) and Google (#2). (or is it the other way around?)

It’s clear that social media is becoming a core asset that the big players want to protect and cultivate. Once the dust settles, it will have a fundamental impact on how brands communicate with consumers.

Enter Blue Ray

Having lost the video format war, Toshiba Corp is now getting into manufacturing of Blu-Ray disc products. The Japanese electronics maker had backed the high definition video format, HD DVD against the Blue Ray Disc association. The Blue ray association is backed by Japanese rivals Sony Corp and Panasonic Corp. This move is reminiscent of Sony’s strategy after its Betamax videotape standard lost to Panasonic in the 1980’ss and Sony then ended up making VHS products.

It was speculated that Toshiba may skip making Blue Ray products and instead try and develop an even more sophisticated video technology. This move could also have been because of the fact that Toshiba has registered its biggest loss ever (444 billion yen, around $3.5 billion) in the last financial year. Given the economic sluggishness Toshiba may not be keen on investing into a higher order video format standard and has taken to the Blu Ray instead.

State of Social Networking Sites in India

According to Internet market research firm comScore Inc., the country had 34.6 million Internet users (who access the Web from their homes/offices) in June, of which at least 65%, or 22.61 million, accessed social networking sites. This is a trend that is in line with the global trend,where social networks and blogging sites have dislodged personal email in the hierarchy of the online world (Nielsen 2009).

Social networking sites started gaining traction in India some three years back with the rising popularity of global sites Facebook and Orkut.Soon, Indian sites caught on; Ibibo.com, Indyarocks.com, Bharatstudent.com and Bigadda.com emerged.Today a dozen and more Indian websites exist. The Indian Social Networking scene is suddenly a hot cake and everyone wants a piece of it.There are atleast 12 or more websites in the mrket.

However,the two global first-movers —Orkut and Facebook—account for at least 90% of the market, according Gartner India. That leaves very little headroom for the “others” to partake their audience and advertisers. The Social media story is likely to pan out into a lot more fringe players in the next 1 or 2 years before the ineviatble shake out happens. Everyone is experimenting with different things (to make money from advertising). Some things will work; some things won’t.

“A big percentage (of these networks) will not survive.” says Ashish Kashyap, CEO at Ibibo, a social networking site that has positioned itself as a talent-showcasing platform. “There is no space for ‘me toos’…you have got to differentiate and solve a problem.”

From the first estimate of a user myself, Differentiation and Stickiness would be based on the following factors:

1. Site Followers: Users and Content beget more users and better content. While the threshold for a site business model would vary on many factors, it is important that target volume users are met within a optimum time frame.

2. Rich user experience at the site which would include real time communication, Chat, Applications,Video, Audio, Games,Blogs, User generated contents and reviews and more.

3. Site USP: The age old paradigm of positioning the platform will be crucial in establishing the site audience and stickines.

4. Relevant content and user discussion/interaction on subjects.

5. Accessibility through Mobile Texting / internet mediums: The best exmaple of this is the Facebook mobile which allows users to access a lite version of Facebook for the mobile phones. Better still are user updates through SMS texting on their mobile phones, which is also being used as a key service proposition by a few Telecom operators.

6. Content localization/Vernacularization: While most of the internet users are urban and the medium of communication is thus English, India being India, the importance of vernacular content would be an important volume builder in times to come.

7. Celebrity endorsers: When BigAdda had to launch, all it did was to sign up Amitabh Bachchan as a blogger on its network. Traffic on the site multiplies (though most of the ecelebrity blogs are actually quite unreadable and narcissist in my opinion.

8. Building Communities around the content and the website

9. Content co-creation with the user