Mediaboss Marketing

Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes with "a response to some of the objections raised to my last article, about a design for a distributed social networking protocol, which would allow for decentralized (and censorship-resistant) hosting of social networking accounts, while supporting all of the same features as sites like Facebook." Social networking is no longer new; whether you consider it to have started with online communities in the mid-90s or with the beginnings of sites many people still use today. As its popularity has surged, it has grown in limited ways; modern social networks have made communication between users easier, but they've also made users easier to market to advertisers as well. There's no question that the future of social networking holds more changes that can both help and harm users perhaps something like what Bennett suggests could serve to mitigate that harm. Read on for the rest of his thoughts.

In an article last month, I argued that users would be better served by a centralized social networking system where users could store profiles on a server of their choice, rather than a centralized system like Facebook that stores everyone's accounts for them. My main point was that if you could switch your account easily between different hosting providers (preferably if the protocol allowed you to link your account to a domain name that you own, the way that website owners can easily switch from one hosting company to another if they own their own domain name), then it would be much harder to censor content in a distributed system. If a hosting provider removed your content or threatened to kick you off unless you removed it yourself, you could just migrate your profile to a new hosting provider, and all of your existing links to friends/groups/events would continue to work.

Many commenters raised objections, some of which I think can be countered fairly simply, and others that raise more complicated issues. I usually don't do follow-up articles addressing all of the objections to a previous article (unless I'm running a contest asking people to submit the best arguments against an idea of mine), but I think the migration to an open social networking protocol is such an important long-term goal, that I want to give voice to the objections and present what I think is the best counter-argument against each of them.

The skeptics' questions fell into two categories: (1) Why would anybody ever switch away from Facebook to trying out the new system? and (2) Even if people did switch, would the new distributed system be better? ("Better" both in the short term -- would trial users see enough benefit to get them to keep using it regularly? and in the long term would spammers and other attackers be able to undermine it?)

To begin with the question of why anybody would switch: I don't think that most people would switch because they had analyzed the arguments for and against a distributed vs. centralized system. I think the only reason most users would ever try a social networking site other than Facebook, would be because a trendy company like Google launched it and threw their weight behind it. Why else have 400 million people signed up for Google+, almost half as many as are on Facebook? Despite the hype about features like "circles", I think it's safe to say that most of people jumped on board because Google launched it and gave it a big push, and Google is cool. (As one commenter "DragonWriter" pointed out, Google had earlier launched or collaborated on some projects for open social networking -- but none of these were ever given the big push that accompanied the release of Google+. So that's probably why we never heard of those other projects, not because of any intrinsic merits of the ideas themselves. To get people using something, Google would have to launch it and promote it but if Google does do those things, people will sign up.)

So imagine if, at the same time that Google had released Google+, they had also released an open source server package that anybody could use to set up their own Google+ node, completely interoperable with all Google-hosted accounts, and where the user could have complete control over their hosted content. Presumably those 400 million users who signed up with Google+, would have still signed up for this hypothetical "open Google+", since it does everything that the real Google+ does. Some of those users would have taken the option to run their own nodes, if it had been available. And then you'd have additional users who didn't sign up with the real Google+, but who would sign up for an "open Google+" precisely because they would have control over all their own content.

Of course, even if Google+ had been launched as a distributed platform, users would still have the option of signing up for an account hosted on Google's servers, and indeed that would probably be the default choice for most people. (This answers the objection, raised by "0racle", "Havenwar", and others, that it would be "too complicated" for users to sign up for such a service. Certainly most users would not be expected to host and maintain their own nodes in the distributed system. Most of them would just sign up for an account with the largest node, like Google+.)

So that answers the question of how to get people to try it out. The continued relative obscurity of the Diaspora Project the largest existing open social networking system does not mean that the idea itself doesn't have merit, or that users wouldn't sign up for such a system if it were launched and promoted by a big company. The second challenge would be to get people to stay, something that users apparently did not do after trying out Google+.

Which brings us to the next set of objections, most of which asked: Would the new distributed system really be better than a centralized one? A big enough improvement to get people to keep using it, and to withstand attacks by spammers and other abusers? In this category of objections, there are some that I think can be answered easily, and some that are hard. So, the easy ones first.

A few users ("Havenwar", "tonywestonuk", and others) said that a distributed protocol would be inferior without integrated support for games or payments. But there's no reason a distributed protocol couldn't include support for other games or other types of apps to be built on top of it. An app could be installed to your profile and, using an API supported by the networking protocol, could send data over the Internet to your friend's profile on another server, if they had the same app installed, allowing you to make "moves" in a game you were playing against your friend. And you could specify which, if any, of your data you wanted the app to have access to. Similarly, if a developer wanted to charge money to users for installing an application, they could just give users a link to a third-party payment system like Paypal where the users would pay in order to download or activate the app. (Yes, people could download pirated versions of the app from BitTorrent sites and install them to their own server for free, but that's a problem for anyone selling commercial software.)

See the article here:
Decentralized Social Networking — Why It Could Work

Is your brand effectively harnessing the power of emotion to deliver a more powerful experience to consumers and reach more of them?

Emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely to generate greater profits, compared to rational ones. Even a combination of the two strategies doesnt perform as well as a campaign that meets an emotional need for a consumer.

LinkedIn set out to understand how the social network influences the type of emotional campaign that performs best. There is an emotional split, they say, that marketers need to understand and can harness to better target users of professional and personal social networking sites. Mindset impacts user expectations; how can you better meet the needs of your brands social community?

Personal social network users experience emotions around entertainment and memories, according to the report. The drivers that keep them communicating on the site are their desires to socialize, stay in touch, be entertained, kill time or share their own content. Users on these sites are most often in a casual mindset; theyre often just passing the time away.

On professional networks, the consumer mindset is much different. Consumers here experience emotions around achieving their goals, having aspirations, or feelings of ambition. They are driven by their desires to maintain a professional identity, make useful contacts, search for new opportunities, stay in touch, or keep up to the date to benefit their career. Rather than wasting the time away, they are investing time in themselves.

As a result of their different mindsets, users of personal and professional social networks expect content to match their intent on that network.

For example, people using a personal network like Facebook expect to see information from friends, information about their own personal interests, and entertainment updates. Those on a professional network like LinkedIn most expect to see career information, updates on brands, and current affairs information.

Users expect different things from brands, as well. On personal networks, people most often want to be entertained, while on professional networks, they are looking for brand posts that help them improve themselves professionally.

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Marketing to the Mindset: How to Match Social Content to User Intent

Daniel Ionescu, TechHive

Daniel has been writing about smartphones, tablets and apps since 2008, and he enjoys pitting gadgets against each other. More by Daniel Ionescu

Facebook on Thursday announced that it now has more than 1 billion monthly active users, more than any other social network in the world. The social network also said that more than 600 million users are now accessing Facebook from their mobile devices.

In comparison, Twitters latest official update pegs it at 140 million active users (some estimate there are some 500 million total users), while would-be Facebook rival Google+ has 100 million monthly active users and 400 million signups.

Mark Zuckerberg celebrates Facebooks latest milestone.

Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the milestone on his Facebook profile on Thursday morning, saying: This morning, there are more than one billion people using Facebook actively each month. Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life. I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.

In a fact sheet released to mark the occasion, Facebook detailed that it reached 1 billion monthly active users on September 14 at 12:45 p.m. PT. The top five countries where people connected from at the time the milestone was reached were Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico and the United States.

Facebook was launched in 2004, and by 2006, it had 23 million users. That number doubled by 2007, and again in 2008, when it reached 100 million users. By 2010, Facebook hit 500 million users, doubling that number two years later. Currently, Facebook says the average age of its users is around 22 years old, down from 26 in 2008.

Facebook says that more than 219 billion photos were uploaded on the social network, with some 140 billion friend connections. With people putting so much of their personal life on the social network, Facebooks growth has not been without privacy blunders, and legislators in Europe are still investigating Facebooks data mining techniques.

Facebook still has challenges ahead, though. Local social networks in China and Russia have a foothold on their market and Facebook has been slow to make forays in those countries. Then there is the financial aspect: Facebook had a shaky initial public offering earlier this year, and it is still looking at ways to make display advertisements for the mobile users who represent 60 percent of the social networks monthly traffic.

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Facebook rules the social networking world with 1 billion users

I saw Jesse Eisenberg on 114th the other day. I dont bring this up to brag, since as a New Yorker, I obviously dont give special attention to celebrities, but only because I was with my friend, who apparently confused Eisenberg with his Social Network counterpart Mark Zuckerberg (thus making it a far more interesting story to the people she told).

The faux Zuckerberg sighting got me thinking, mostly about how crazy it is that he was in our shoesan undergraduate at an elite universityas recently as 2004, which really doesnt seem like that long ago. The year is still vivid in my memory, mostly because the Sox broke the Curse, and its insane to consider that in that short time, the social world has completely changed.

It wasnt all him, either. Zuckerberg was a kind of Hegelian world-historical individualhe was just an agent of the world (networking) spirit (bam). In fact, one of Facebooks early rivals was created by a SEAS class president who was trying to invigorate Columbias school spiritso I suppose it was doomed from the start. The social revolution was inevitable.

Its hard to gain perspective on a revolution while its still happening, especially since we came of age right at the advent of social networking. Its pretty difficult for me to imagine the social world even pre-Myspace, although admittedly Ive mostly blocked 2003 out of my memory (Aaron fucking Boone).

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, recently deceased but once powerful sites such as Livejournal, Digg, and Flickr, even texting to some extent and smartphones to a large extentthese are all part of the social networking revolution. They control our lives more than we realize, or at least more than we would like to admit. Ive probably checked Facebook 10 times in the course of writing this, and my iPhone has buzzed with just as many notifications (to which I always have an intense Pavlovian reaction).

Facebook & Co. are more than a procrastination tool, though. Social networking has truly changed the way humans interact with each other. It has led to developments which have undoubtedly improved the worlds ability to connect with and organize larger groups of people, and the ability to share information.

Still, I wouldnt necessarily call social networking a net positive. Its no coincidence that Facebook was created by a man described by more reputable sources than Aaron Sorkin as socially awkward, overprogrammed, and robotic. Social networking truly seems like it was created by someone who hates human interaction, who reduced it to an algorithm and completely removed the human aspect. Popularity is measured in likes and followers, our moods are determined from our status updates, and every social action is methodically recorded and made public, to be judged by our friends.

Most of us have a core group of friends and family, and the way we interact with them will (hopefully) never change, but social networking has changed how we interact with everyone else. Its become immensely easier to maintain superficial friendships. In the past, you had to make an effort to maintain a relationship with someone you didnt see regularly. Now, we can decide who to consider a friend by noting who writes on our walls for our birthday or who has a cursory conversation with us on chat every other month.

Dunbars numberwhich says we can handle knowing and keeping contact with at most 150 peopleis seemingly being shattered, but our cognitive ability to maintain stable relationships with larger groups of people isnt necessarily improving. Were just having increasingly superficial and uniform relationships with larger groups of people.

Social networking goes deeper, though, since it appeals to our natural impulse to share. We crave validation, and nothing is more powerful than shared experiences. In the past, when we shared experiences with each other, it was much more personal and meaningfulmostly occurring face-to-face, or at least in the much more meaningful medium of letters or even phone calls.

Link:
The social network

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --ICAP Patent Brokerage announces for auction one granted US patent and four pending applications covering social networking and internet privacy techniques. This lot will be included in the 17th ICAP Ocean Tomo IP Auction on November 29, 2012, at The Ritz Carlton in San Francisco, California.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20100614/CG20517LOGO)

"We are excited to be offering an IP portfolio that combines the popularity of social media with the importance of internet privacy to our global base of buyers," says Dean Becker, CEO of ICAP Patent Brokerage. "This offering is relevant to social networking sites and virtual communities interested in protecting the privacy of their users."

Key Characteristics & BenefitsThe portfolio discloses techniques for protecting the personal information of a user on a website, and for encouraging users to securely share their personal information with a service provider in order to reduce the risk of unwanted offline encounters. Social networking website users want to maintain control over the information in their social profiles, but also want to communicate via instant message, blogs, and forums with other users. The techniques available for sale provide improved protection of a user's personal information to the precise extent desired over social networking websites.

Utilizing this technology, users and service providers can reach a mutually agreeable balance between complete anonymity and full online disclosure of users' offline identities. In some cases, a user's personal information is securely shared with a service provider but not with other users so the service provider can help the user avoid contact with specified groups online and/or offline, such as online advertisers. In other cases, a proposed online identifier, either an avatar or username, of a user is compared with personal information and is accepted only if it does not pose an excessive risk of revealing the offline identity of the user. Therefore, security of a user's personal information is increased, allowing the users to securely and beneficially disclose their offline activities, such as planned travel, interests, pictures, postings, or contact details, to providers of social networking websites.

For a technical description of this IP sales offering, click here.

To learn more about the assets available for sale in this portfolio: Contact Dean Becker of ICAP Patent Brokerage at (561) 309-0011 or via email at Dean.Becker@us.icap.com.

To register for the upcoming event or submit IP for consideration for the auction, click here.

Follow us on Twitter (@ICAP_Auction_IP) and join our LinkedIn group.

About ICAP Patent BrokerageICAP Patent Brokerage is a division of ICAP plc and the world's largest intellectual property brokerage and patent auction firm.

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ICAP Patent Brokerage Announces Social Networking and Internet Privacy Package for Auction