Chemistry of Social Networks

Over the weekend I was reading an interview with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock ventures. He made some interesting observations that social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins.

Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed. Twitter is wrath or lust (as in the case of congressman Anthony Weiner)? With Facebook it is about vanity, and how people choose to present themselves to their friends. It is the feeling of being connected. The trick is to exploit the importance of deep universal, psychological structure in people’s minds.  Zynga is about fun. Fun is important and to have the ability to do something fun for 10 to 15 minutes that is right at your fingertips and involves your friends is better than Television (in terms of social connectivity). With LinkedIn, it is taking control of your economic destiny and improving how you operate as a professional to develop a competitive advantage. As per Reid Hoffman, these are fundamentals for having a fulfilling quality of life.He thinks it is always about scale – whether it is online gaming as  in Zynga or at Groupon, a functioning marketplace for local goods and services that works on discounts and daily-deal kind of basis.

Well, Reid Hoffman matters these days as he is one of the most connected entrepreneurs in the valley. He led the Series A financing of Friendster in 1997; he founded LinkedIn which recently had the IPO at $8B valuation; he was part of the first round of financing in Facebook; plus he has investments in more than 100 other startups (both personal and via Greylock).

I also liked his characterization of “data” in social networking. If we call this social networking world as Web 3.0, then data is the “oxygen” or driving force. There are three kinds of data: explicit data, implicit data, and analytic data. Explicit data is where you contribute your profile. Implicit data is created by how you act online. And analytic data is information companies generate through an analysis of explicit and implicit data. For example, LinkedIn creates a picture that shows your skills and what skills most apply to you. This was compiled from explicit data you entered and the people you are connected to, but it is actually not a function of your activities, like answering questions on LinkedIn which was gathered through analytics.

Data is always the oxygen of any system. It’s importance is even more pronounced in social networking world of today and tomorrow.

 

The Semantic Web

This term Semantic Web has been in the vocabulary for a few years now. It simply means “adding more meaning” to the Web. Today’s web started with a document-centric view. The HTTP URI structure links various documents, but it stops there. It does not go deeper into the meaning. From a document-centric world, the semantic web wants to go to a data-centric world, where data and its relevance are linked.

Here is the definition from Wikipedia – The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.^[1][2] It derives from World Wide Web Consortium director Sir Tim Berners-Lee‘s vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange.

Watch this latest video of how Tim Berners-Lee talks about the importance of collaboration for the Web where he also explains briefly the Semantic Web.

Oracle Open World 2009

Interesting times. Although I did not attend the Oracle Open World 2009 in San Francisco, I watched some of the keynotes in the web. With 37000 attendees and the rain storm, it was a challenge in terms of logistics.

The main highlights are hard to pinpoint, as there were so many sessions, news items, announcements. With $40B worth of acquisitions during last 6 years, one has a hard time keeping up with various products. But one that makes the most noise is “Fusion Applications”. Some people have dubbed it as “ConFusion” before. The main focal point was of course the Oracle, Sun merger that is currently held up by the European Council. But Sun was there in full force – Scott McNealy, James Gosling(father of Java) and many others. There were discussions on NetBeans which was anathema before. Marc Benioff gave a session on SalesForce.com – he is supposed to be competition to Oracle On-Demand and Larry’s other investment NetSuite. But SFDC uses Oracle database for its own operations, so they are partners too. Michael Dell was there extolling the virtue of Oracle technology at its data center. Oracle claimed it runs 20 thousand Dell servers. Again with Sun servers, there is co-opetition (competition + co-operation). Infosys CEO Kris Gopalkrishnan gave a keynote which people twitted as dry and dragging.

The usual buzzwords were there – SOA, Web 2.0, Cloud, SaaS, PaaS, Web Services, BPEL, CEP, etc. Fusion apps are almost ready and will be GA next year, which means much work is yet to be done. The new Data Warehouse appliance Exadata on Sun with fast performance was much bragged about with challenges to IBM to match the run-time performance. Such bravado is good fodder for the media to write about. IBM should be clever to ignore such noise. The image of a barking dog at a calm elephant walking comes to mind.

During my days at Oracle this event used to draw 10 to 15 thousand users. Of course those were the pre-acquisition days at Oracle. Now with all the new users from Peoplesoft, Siebel, BEA, and others, the number gets close to 40 thousand. People come for networking and party. It’s a good escape from the workplace. Oracle does a great job putting this event and this year was no exception. Even the governator Arnold Schwarzenegger made an appearance to add pizzazz.

Web 3.0

At the “D conference” (All things Digital) hosted by the Walls Street Journal last week, there was sudden use of the term Web 3.0. The hosts said, “So what’s the seminal development that’s ushering in the era of Web 3.0? It’s the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple software, against cloud-based data and services”.

I like the tone of this description. It’s everything opposite to what we have been doing for years in the computing business. It’s not fat client, not complex, bug-prone, attack-prone software like Windows (origin from QDOS, Quick and Dirty Operating System), not power-hungry and lowly battery-life, not redundancy in data, not closed proprietary systems, and not labor-intensive maintenance.  Just look at Apple iPhone. It has the attributes of a Web 3.0. – elegant touch screen user interface, myriads of applications developed by others, just feels simple and hassle free.

I like this quote from The Wall Street Journal of today,

“…the complete integration of computing into every part of our lives in a way that is seamless, ubiquitous and ideally, dead simple. From using easy gestures to grab any piece of information from the Web to having powerful computers in the palm of your hand to being able to quickly dip into complex social networks to getting real-time information from across the globe as it happens, this is an era when  computing could become as integrated and invisible as electricity and just as important.”

This reminds me of the late Mark Weiser (of Xerox PARC) who predicted back in 1991 (18 years ago!) – The most fundamental technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Some of us never thought we will see that prediction in our life times. But we are there now.

A long march over 50 years – from “big computers”, to “small computers”, to “connected computers”, to finally “invisible computers embedded in every day objects”.

—

–