Online Social Networks: Everywhere, Yet Nowhere

Wednesday, 26th March 2008 in Social Media, Strategy, Technology by Simon | 1 comment

In the late 1990s, a large multi-national technology corporation, hoping to become a major force in online advertising, bought a small start-up in a sector that was believed to be the next big thing. That corporation was Microsoft and the start-up was Hotmail. Hotmail and Microsoft established web-based email as a must-have application for personal use. The addition of Hotmail to the Microsoft inventory promised to increase the companies online revenues that were being dominated by Yahoo!, Google and AOL amongst a host of others.

A decade later it was the turn of a much-evolved AOL to speculate with the purchase of a small and upcoming social networking website, Bebo, for $850m (£425m). This has raised a number of eyebrows since AOL has been a struggling web-portal after its merger with Time Warner, added to the fact that the real value of social networking has yet to be realised or understood.

Social Networking Websites

Both deals in their respective decades offer to the casual observer a paradox of the Internet revolution. Whilst both email and social networking have the premise of being the next big thing which aides revenue generation, it is dangerous to assume that each service can standalone and generate revenue in its own right. Webmail, now over a decade old illustrates this perfectly. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google and AOL all have their respective webmail services with advertisements stratefically placed to entice the user to click through, but these are a small part of the bigger networks. The offer of email, free archiving, address book and calendar is cheap to deliver, but its primary purpose is to keep the user engaged with the brand and its associated websites, making users more likely to visit the affiliated pages where advertising is more effective.

For instance, I am a fully signed up member of Google and access their email, chat, documents, analytics, webmasters, adsense, adwords, calendar and checkout applications, etc, some of which have advertising and all of which support the core Google search pages through branding. A similar example can also be said of Yahoo!. I again frequently use Yahoo!s MyBlogLog, Flickr and Upcoming services, which serve to re-inforce the Yahoo! brand and web portal.

Social networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life, but that does not mean it is a business.

From whence came webmail now comes social networking. The implicit values of social networking services such as MySpace, Facebook and Bebo have been increased by the big internet and media companies such as News Corporation, with their purchase of MySpace for $580m (£290m) in 2005 and Microsoft’s $260m (£130m) investment for a 1.6% share in Facebook, in late 2007 (valuing it at an enormous $15bn/£7.5bn). But valuing these online services so highly does not mean that there is a valuable revenue model; Facebook’s revenue for 2007 was a mere $150m (£75m). Sergey Brin of Google also admitted that the monetisation of their Orkut service and social networking in general was proving to be problematic (they also have a contractual agreement with News Corporation to offer advertising on their MySpace service).

Facebook has also been met with criticism and difficulty when trying to monetise its service with a project called Beacon. Facebook’s idea was to inform users’ networks whenever an item was purchased therefore creating what is in effect a recommendation system, or algorithmic word-of-mouth. Users rebelled and privacy advocates shouted loudly, the service was axed and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, was left to apologise for an innovative idea badly implemented.

Whilst social networking does have oportunities to make money, it is unlikely that it will be pots and pots of money. The value of the service, however, is not monetary, but as its genre suggests, it is social. We have already seen how people can connect to past and present friends, but a social networkings strength is in its ability to forge new relationships, business or personal. Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, which has lead to a whole ecosystem of applications built on their APIs which allow users to interact.

But should users really have to visit a specific website to be social?

I often comment that there is something profoundly wrong when people are forced to spend their lives updating their profile to keep in touch with their so-called friends. What happened to the good-old-fashioned telephone? Why don’t people simply arrange to meet up and go for a drink to keep in touch? Of course, with everyone’s increasingly busy lives, it is possible to argue that posting a tweet via twitter, posting an article on a blog or updating your Facebook profile, allows you to continue a real relationship with your friends, whilst not actually needing to see them every Friday or Saturday night. This is a good thing, right?

Another problem presented by today’s social networks is that they are an enclosed ecosystem, at least to users. Whilst Facebook and LinkedIn, in addition to a whole host of others, have provided APIs for developers to encourage them to interact with their services (this has been particularly successful with Facebook) the same cannot be applied to users. The various social networks, until recently, have been reluctant to allow users to pass data between competing services, afterall, this data is core to the success, or indeed failure, of a site. This is understandable since the networks’ huge valuations depend on the sites maximising revenues and page views, so they need to maintain a tight control. As a result, keen Internet users maintain a plethora of online accounts.

2008 will see a change in how people access social networks.

Google Open SocialThe opening up of social networks, lead by Google with their Open Social API, is set to bring about an evolution in this medium. This change is following the historical standardisation of popular services. First it was email with webmail, which in the early days was restricted to individual ecosystems, for example AOL and CompuServe, then it was instant messaging, with individual services provided by Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, AOL and Skype.

Further developments include the Data Portability Working Group, whose mission is to put all existing technologies and initiatives in context to create a reference design for end-to-end data portability. In short, allow users to move their data around competing services. Others are pushing OpenID; a plan to create a single, federated online sign-on system that people can use to access many websites.

Data Portability

The opening of social networks is likely to accelerate thanks to the first tentative, yet bold, steps made by webmail; the first social network. As a technology, webmail has become old fashioned, but its younger sybling, the social network will revitalise not only webmail, but online communication and advertising. Through social intelligence, marketers and advertisers will be able to target adverts for items that we are more likely to want. This will not only boost the users online experience, but provide a more targeted revenue stream.

The fight for social networking dominance has been running for several years now, but it shows no sign of letting up.

BBC Appealing to the Facebook Generation

Thursday, 13th March 2008 in Design, Strategy, UX by Simon | No comments

BBC Homepage LogoI’m not a big fan of the BBC’s recent website redesign! While I believe that a few structural and hierarchical elements could have been addressed better, the overall result of this redesign is too “Facebook” and Web 2.0 for my liking; exactly what an online news site does not need. Who are the BBC trying to appeal to? They have gone from being content centric to design and technology centric. This in itself isn’t a bad thing, but I don’t understand the BBCs motivation for doing so.

Richard Titus, the Acting Head of User Experience at the BBC was a key driver of the project.

From a conceptual point of view, the widgetisation adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking.

Titus identifies the key features of the new homepage as being:

  • Simple, clean and beautiful, the final design, … visually striking yet unpretentious.
  • Personalization: you can choose the content that interests you by adding and removing the content boxes via the “Customise Your Homepage” tab.
  • Localization: Users can now set their own location, enabling them to access local sites, weather, news, radio and TV schedules without the hassle often associated with user journeys to local content.
  • Simplicity: the customization is intuitive and includes an interactive demo and tips to guide users through the process. It is also unobtrusive if the user has no desire to customize their page their experience won’t be compromised.
  • Search: The site is much easier to read and scan at a glance. At the top of the page there’s a search function (now reduced from two search boxes to one), and at the bottom a full directory of all BBC sites and a link to the A-Z, allowing users to quickly find what they’re looking for.
  • Nostalgia: the new homepage also manages to incorporate eccentricity alongside innovation.

Aesthetically bold and bright.

Aesthetically, the new homepage looks nice. It’s big, bold and bright – a far cry from the old days when BBC sites had text almost too small to read and a fixed-width design optimised for tiny monitors. But at the same time it appears far too clunky! I’d prefer something that would look a little more elegant and understated. Something that doesn’t appeal to The Facebook Generation, who are less likely to read the BBC pages at lunchtime, than update their Facebook, Bebo or Twitter profile during that ‘valuable’ hour. This begs the question, does the BBC know who their core audience is?

Confusing interactions.

The homepage makes great use of AJAX, but at the same time, there are a number of confusing interactions going on. For instance, the ‘Edit’ button next to each area of customisable content seems like the wrong label text. I’m not editing the news, the weather or blogs – I’m selecting which news categories I want to see, where I am and which blogs I want to read. These types of button ought to be contextual rather than generic. Edit is simply too vague.

Also, what’s the idea behind those plus and minus buttons for news? Strange idea. Add or remove articles from the displayed list? Why would you want to remove them from view sequentially? If the idea was to allow the user to asynchronously update a short list of available headlines, then why not move back/forwards in blocks of five? Plus and minus are often used as metaphors for creation/deletion in software, so the usage doesn’t seem right.

Personalisation vs Simplicity … an uneasy relationship

BBC Customise Homepage

The ability to personalise a website is, in general, a good thing. Google has done it with their iGoogle, Yahoo! with My Yahoo and Microsoft with Windows Live. But I think the balance here is gone too far towards design and borrowing from succesful Web 2.0 sites. The BBC website has always been an impressive destination for (relatively) impartial news and current affairs throughout the world, not a Web Portal. Or is this the point? Does the BBC want to become a destination for all your information needs and compete with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo?

The BBC should consider that 14-25 year old users, what I term The Facebook Generation, will require far greater scope for adding their individuality than is currently available. The social networking generation are page-savvy. They want control of their interface to information, their screen is their window on the world and I don’t think that you have gone far enough in divesting control of the display of that information to the user.

But for those who aren’t part of The Facebook Generation, the people who care about getting to the content fast and with little fuss, is the ability to personalise the homepage worthwhile or even simple? I’m not so sure.

Who needs a clock?

BBC Homepage Clocks Finally, the clock and date. What an important waste of webpage ‘real estate’, even though in the BBC’s case I understand it was a throwback to the old clock that preceded individual TV programmes. If you’ve got a modern computer capable of displaying the clock with the Flash plugin, then you’ll almost certainly have the date and time visible to you anyway. It’s needlessly superfluous on a website.

British Standards and Web Compliance

Saturday, 5th January 2008 in Development by Simon | No comments

Following on from the RNIB’s web accessibility initiatives, web compliance experts Magus Ltd and The British Standards Institute are working together to create a new publically accessible standard (PAS 124) for websites. Web standards govern the effectiveness, function and appearance of a website, and include: brand, legal, accessibility, search engine optimisation (SEO), usability and technical standards.

Websites are increasingly the key communication vehicle for a company, its brand and products. Despite this, research from Magus shows that many of the world’s leading organisations don’t have formal brand and technical standards defined to govern their websites. Even those that do are failing to effectively implement or enforce them, achieving full compliance with less than 20% of their own web standards. The websites of these organisations significantly under-perform or damage the brand as a result.

PAS 124 will help to protect the significant investment organisations are making in their web presence and online brands, by establishing best practice for “defining, implementing and managing organisational web standards”. It will provide a clear framework to help organisations apply standards effectively to significantly improve online performance and protect the integrity of their brands.

More detail can be found on the BSI’s press release.

Leader or Manager?

Monday, 8th January 2007 in Strategy by Simon | No comments

A while ago a colleague of mine asked me the question “Do you consider your self to be a leader or a manager?”. Initially I responded that I thought myself to be a manager as an important aspect of my role is managing expectations, ideas and developments of an internal CRM system. However, a debate ensued as my colleague believed me to be more a leader than a manager and now I am not so sure which one I am!

So what is the distinction between a leader and a manager? Will the definitions help?

Leader noun

  • someone or something that leads or guides others.
  • someone who organises or is in charge of a group.

Manager noun (abbreviation Mgr)

  • someone who manages, especially someone in overall charge or control of a commercial enterprise, organisation, project, etc.

Does this help me…not yet!


Both a manager and a leader may know the business reasonably well, but the leader must know the business to a finer degree and from a different view point. They must grasp the underlying market forces that determine the past and present trends in the businesses niche, so that they can generate a vision and strategy to bring about its future development and growth. A crucial sign of a good leader is an honest attitude towards the facts and objective truth. Conversely, a subjective leader obscures the facts for the sake of narrow self-interest, partisan interest or prejudice.

Effective leaders continually probe all levels of the organisation for information, challenging their own perceptions and validating the facts. They talk to their constituents and employees to find out what is working and what is not. They keep an open mind to the knowledge they gain. An important source of information for a leader is the knowledge of the mistakes and failures that have been and are being made within their organisation.

Leaders conquer the context, the turbulent and ambiguous events that conspire to blur the facts, while managers surrender to the events in a reactionary manner.

Leaders investigate reality, taking the pertinent factors and analysing them carefully. On the basis they produce visions, concepts, plans and programs of change. Managers adopt the truth from others and implement it without regard to the facts.

There is a profound difference between leaders and managers. A good manager does things right whilst a good leader does the right thing. Doing the right thing implies a goal, a direction, an objective, a vision, a dream, a strategy, a path, a reach.

Many people spend their lives engrossed in the ‘rat-race’, attempting to climb the corporate management ladder in a vein attempt to beat mediocrity and make a difference. Unfortunately, many find themselves climbing the wrong ladder. Most companies and organisations become over-managed through this constant, unending, highly competitive race and under-led by those who lack vision. The managers accomplish nothing or the wrong things beautifully and efficiently. They climb the wrong ladder.

Managing is as much about efficiency as leadership is about effectiveness. Managing is about how things need to be done, leadership is about what things need to be done and why these things should be carried out. Management is about systems, controls, procedures, policies and structures whereas leadership is about, trust, vision and hum capital, people.


Leadership is about innovating concepts, inspiring others and initiating projects. Management is about carrying out these visions and managing the status quo. Leadership is creative, adaptive and agile. Leadership looks to the future whilst also being mindful of the bottom line.

Leaders base their vision, appeal and integrity on a careful estimation of the facts, trends and contradictions. They develop the means to re-define the status quo so that their vision can be realised, hopefully, successfully, whilst also enrolling others into the vision of the future. Without, other peoples buy in, a vision will stall and a period of transition will ensue. Leaders, therefore, have to empower others to accomplish the over-arching goal whilst also rewarding their achievements.

There is a profound difference between management and leadership, but both are important. To manage means “to bring about or succeed in accomplishing, sometimes despite difficulty or hardship“. To Lead means “to guide in direction, course, action, opinion, etc.” The distinction is important.

The most dramatic differences between leaders and managers are found at the extremes. Poor leaders are despots while poor managers are bureaucrats. Leadership is a human process and management is a resource allocation process. Both are important and in many instances managers need to also perform as leaders. Indeed first-class managers have significant leadership ability.

So where does this leave me? My opening gambit included the words “…an important aspect of my role is managing expectations, ideas and developments…” this must naturally lead me to a combination of both a leader and manager. Indeed, in my new role as a web development consultant, I have to set directions for developing concepts and applications whilst also planning, organising and promoting effective action of the task at hand. So I could say I am in a period of transition. In the past few years I have learnt much from those I consider mentors, whether they were aware or not. I have seen how things are managed and lead and from these experiences have built upon my own skill-set. I can neither categorically say I am a leader or a manager, or say what I would rather be; this is something that can only come with time.