Thinkervine

Many social media services launch upon a genuine idea. Something most users will need, use, adopt.

They go for a mock-up and raise the required funds in order to complete the project and head for the go-live, after a mid-long beta period.  Due to the Web 2.0 and social media frenzy, most ventures and business angels are willing to take the risk, even though the business model is not entirely defined, going for a “We will find a way to make money from that”. Here lies the biggest issue, either for the start-up owners and their employees, for the investors and even more for the users.

Most of these services start on a freemium model. Means, you don’t have to pay anything to use them. Some of them will rely on advertizing to get some pennies while others will try a true way to monetize the service (selling a service, selling goods, subscription model).

The second half of start-ups will most probably get away with a great revenue model, provided they have a good product and know how to market it. The first half, on the other hand, has to face wild waters.

We see start-ups going dead everyday. Latest of them, being tr.im, which is shutting down on December 31st. 2009. Since Twitter has promoted Bit.ly as the prefered URL shortener, Nambu could scarcely build a user base big enough to justify the time and effort they put in a service, they could barely if not monetize. Yes, the reality behind is just this.  The service is genuine, useful, you’d adopt it, but you’d never pay for it, and you’d certainly wouldn’t want to have more ads in your pages.

So how much trust can you throw into these services ? Could you just go adopting them, putting them in the center of your daily work and hope they find a way to get a healthy revenue and survive ? Some of them might get lucky and get bought by Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft, but most of them will not.

The odds get higher for services building their model around another free service.

Dozens of services have emerged around Twitter. Twitter is useful, twitter is great, twitter has millions of users, but Twitter doesn’t make money. What would happen to all these dozens of companies if suddenly, for an odd reason, Twitter was to shut down ? They’d just go R.I.P  with no other plan-B to support them ? Of you course, you’ll tell me Twitter cannot go down, there’s no way it does, it is so popular, but I’d say, so were Yahoo!, AOL or Second life only a few years ago, and see where all are headed, fighting for survival, mainly through partnerships or shutting down some of their services.

So are social media services reliable ? I would say, they are, but only for those who have a strong revenue model or that are supported by a company that has enough cash flow to allow them to survive. Any other service might be just hazardeous to use, at least, for centric business purposes.

Facebook has reinvented the social networking, beating in popularity all its predecessors (MySpace and Bebo). It has long lived as the poppy cheery Social Media company and then came Twitter. Micro-blogging. Follwers and not friends. Search. Live stream. Easy access URLs.

Facebook didn’t see the threat coming until it was there. Even since, Facebook has made a huge work trying to catch up with Twitter. It changed its (long controversed) new home page to include live stream, it then included Vanity URLs. Recently, Facebook introduced the universal status, allowing people outside Facebook to see your status.

Now the new feature Facebook has come up with is… Followers. Yeah, highly innovative feature, it’s been there since 3 years on Twitter but anyway.

It is now activated by default and allows people to add you not as a friend and access your complete profile, but as a person to follow including your status updates into their new stream, as an opt-in system.

For privacy reasons, you can either choose to keep it on or de-activate it (Settings -> Notifications).

Let us analyze this new feature introduction and how it has been introduced.

Facebook has made no announcement to the introduction to this feature, hence users are not notified that their streams are public by default and that anyone can subscribe to them (understand by this: your boss, unwanted public). This is a major issue especially when several UE agencies have asked all major social networks to have a better control on default privacy options.

Second, I barely see users subscribe to other people’s feeds. The whole Facebook architecture is not meant for that. Profiles are heavy and full loaded with pictures, applications and other things. People are barely solely interested in incognito’s status updates within the whole flow of information they are already getting. Either be friends or wander away. Hence, I seriously doubt there will be a serious adoption of this feature by Facebook users. This is highly unlike Twitter where the Following/Follower system is as the essence of the service, and where you have applications that allow you to manage your stream, which is not Facebook’s case.

Furtherly, how do you decide wether you want to subscribe to someone or not ? Will you be provided with a history of the statuses ? Can you make a profile search based on criterias just as Twitter does ? Will the friend suggestion engine take into account subscriptions as a fan on the base of people you are following and not just those you are friend with ?

On the contact list level, how do you manage your fans ? Can you see them and search through them ? Can you block them ? Are you notified when someone adds you as a fan ? Ideally if Facebook wanted this thing working right, as soon as you have fans, you’d have a spin-off of your profile into a real fan page to which people subscribe. Your statuses would then be broadcasted to the fan page and hence to your fans.

Facebook is most probably driving a bad strategy right now. Instead of pursuing the innovation quest, just as it successfully did during the last years, it is now plunging into the catch-up competition, which means you’re already second to introduce the feature. These guys should step to the next running field and have lead the competition instead of trying to imitate their fellow entrepreneurs.