VLab Panel on Social Networks
I have been meaning to write about an event that I had gone
to two weeks back and have not found the time to write down my
thoughts! In most cases, the shelf life of a blog entry is quite short
(a common analogy is a banana!). However, this event heralds the dawn
of a new era - hence this blog entry will remain relevant for many more
months.
On Feb 19th, the MIT-Stanford Venture Lab (VLab)
hosted a panel
at the Stanford Graduate Business School titled, "Shaking
the Money Tree of Multi-Platform Social Networks". The moderator
was
Jeremiah Owyang, a Senior Analyst for Forrester Research. Jeremy
maintains
a blog here.
In the panel were, Kevin Marks from Google,
Steve Cohen from Bebo,
Jia Shen from RockYou,
Sourabh Niyogi from SocialMedia and Ken Gullicksen - a VC from
Morgenthaler Ventures.
Kevin Marks shepherds OpenSocial for Google. He spoke about OpenSocial
from an academic viewpoint - what capabilities it offers and how people
can use it. OpenSocial provides the application access to friends in
the social graph. It manages the persistence of data and also manages
the user's activity. Thus, compelling social networking applications
can be built and these will immediately become available on multiple
platforms.
Jia Shen talked about the value that an Application Platform brings.
Application developers have the ability to add functionality in ways
that the platform creators could not have imagined.
Sourabh Niyogi talked about how developers use the SocialMedia ad
network to monetize social applications. They have 40+ developers
making > $10k with them. 35 applications are generating >
$500/day. "All this points to a social media economy", he said.
The discussion veered towards understanding what people do in social
networks today. The set of responses included, Update
Profile, Browse Profiles,
Stalk / Peep, Connect with Friends, Communicate, Send Friend
Requests, Listen to Music, Read Blog Posts, Write on Walls, etc. It was
pointed out that none
of these have any commerce associated with them. Steve Cohen responded
saying that we are in the early stages of the new era of Social
Computing. It took 3-4 years after we used the first browser in
the nineties before we saw monetization of the internet by way
of
ecommerce. We are now "spoiled" and expect monetization from day 1. We
need to wait for the platform to mature and then the monetization
opportunities will get sorted out. The VC in the panel said that, "the
dollars will follow the eyeballs".
Friday Mar 07, 2008
