It's pretty obvious that Facebook has lost its charm of novelty by now. Superwalls, vampires and comparison tools aren't as interesting as they were for a few weeks back in 2007.
So what is the next step in social networking? Just as before, most people will continue to use Social networks based on the social site's niche. If you're interested in music, you'll go to a niche music site and communicate with your likes there, if you need to communicate to your real life friends, you'll be using a messenger service, and if you want to stay in touch with school friends you'll use a site as classmates.com.
What people don't want is to communicate to all contacts and friends in the same way. I don't want my professional contacts to see me in a picture drunk and I want to be able to create a online persona in my own niche not influenced on my status in say, High School. I also want to feel special and interesting, which I do on a niche network, but not on a very general network (lets face it, Facebook is as niched and interesting to be part of as the telephone directory). So the online behaviour of people will shift back to the one prior to Facebook.
At the same time Facebook and others has made us very spoiled - networks should be as easy to use as Facebook, people should be as easy to find as on facebook, and third party applications are great, even greater for a niched market.
OpenSocial and other related ventures are the answer - you'll get the best parts of the facebook / myspace phenomena, but you are the one in control. Simplicity with single login, single messaging tools, but different content, third party applications and active friends for each of your network. And even more important, not a single, powerful owner of all aspects of your social life!
Monday, January 14, 2008
The next big thing - Not a single social network...
Saturday, December 15, 2007
T-mobile turns off Twitter
You've probably read this on Techchrunch, but apparently the American mobile operator T-mobile is blocking Twitter (Twitter is an opt-in text message). At first this might seem like a small issue, but it is not.
Imagine if Internet operators blocked individual sites without any apparent reason, what would that mean to capitalists willingness to invest in startups? "Well, it's a great service, but what if you're blocked by AOL?
Where would we be if our ISP's had blocked ICQ, Facebook, Amazon or Google in their early days.
I understand that operators somehow want to have control over the revenue from our cellphone and Internet usage, but if their own services aren't good enough then they have to live with it. It's (on a different scale) a bit like with MySpace. There is an API for third party developers, but MySpace's history of blocking services without good reason, has made third party developers cautious about creating MySpace applications. The great risk of having revenue streams turned off prevents startups from getting into that development race.
It's all the same with this case. If more operators were to follow, investing time, sweat and money into mobile applications would be discouraging and the whole sector would suffer. The cornerstone of the great, fast development of the Internet rests on the fact that a great site or application is available for billions of customers around the world from day one. If the same doesn't go for cellphones, we wont see the same development of this industry and in the end operators themselves will suffer.
I urge all T-mobile customers to leave T-mobile for another operator, and that you'll leave other operators cutting off good third party services as well.
Leave T-mobile! Spread the word on your own blog, on Facebook and other social networks. Let T-mobile know that they are a bad guy.
Techcrunch original post
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Monday, December 10, 2007
IPhone, IPhone, IPhone - I haven't been this excited since I got my Amiga...
...and that was 20 years ago. Well, that would be not this excited over technology. Anyway, today I finally tested the IPhone. I can hear you say "so what, the buzz is over now", but since I live in the country of ericsson, Sweden, and not in the US, I haven't seen one until now. So what is my verdict?
I already knew that the IPhone had a great screen, terrific interface and was good looking, but what I couldn't dream of was that the IPhone deserves the Nobel Price in Interface creation! I tried it for half an hour and I loved every minute of it.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Julpaket.com - The beginning of a new shopping experience...
As I just wrote I've been working on a couple of great project for a while, and now another hit the market. This time it's Julpaket.com, a social shopping site. Our aim is to give the visitor a more inspirational experience than you usually get on the internet.
In time, this site will evolve into an even more complete social shopping site named shoppinggatan.com, but for now it's in Swedish and all about christmas gifts.
