Social value the new gold rush.
Seems to me there’s a strategic battle of epic proportions playing out right now around who owns the true value on the web. Regular readers will know I’ve written a lot about how value is social – value is in the relationships of things and people to one another, more than it is in the things or people themselves.
I think it’s this insight that is now driving many of the latest developments in technology. In the past week I have been reading with some amusement and some awe about the recent jockeying between Marc Andreesen and Google around Friend-Connect.
Essentially as I understand it the difference is this: Ning allows you to build a social network by building your site on Ning. Friend-Connect allows you to build a social network by adding social features to your existing site. As in any saga there are layers upon layers of intrigue and strategy at play. I’ve tried to think about some of the ones I can see:
- Preservation of the status quo versus disruption: At its core, a lot of this comes down to an ad revenue play. Ning, Facebook and almost everyone else apart from Google are trying to create “walled gardens” where masses of traffic can be siphoned off and owned 100% rather than being licensed from Google. As the 800lb gorilla in the ad revenue world, Google is much more interested in preserving the status quo where traffic remains on (Google adsense) regular websites.
- Philosophical differences around sociability: In the Ning and even more so in the Facebook model, socialising is its own end. We gather and come together to connect – all else is incidental. In the Google world, we socialise over things, objects, pieces of content or information. This is also around preservation of the status quo because Google’s communication products like Gmail have a lot of traction. Therefore it’s in Google’s best interests to keep socialising to email and IM rather than creating another channel.
- Philosophical differences around technology: This is where my head starts to spin a bit because I realise that some very smart people are thinking on a much larger scale than I am. However, I think that the two approaches also define differences in opinion between what’s a platform, what’s a service and so on. In the Ning model, the platform is the social network. The function of the platform is to connect like-minded people and to allow content and applications to be delivered to these people. In Google’s model the Internet is the platform. It already performs the function of connecting like-minded people and allowing content and applications to be delivered. In Google’s model, Ning (or Facebook) is simply another service that can be delivered. Yet again using technology, Google has turned the tables on its competition.
- Differences in strategic thinking: As the last point starts to show, I think that Google’s biggest strength and biggest vulnerability is its strategic brilliance. It is quite clear that Google isn’t outclassing its competition on technical ability as much as it is dressing everyone else down through its strategic ability. Moves like Friend-Connect, which were clearly started a while ago, speak of a company that thinks on a galactic scale about its remit. This is why I think it is also their greatest vulnerability, because that’s scary to people like you and me. I think it’s even scarier to people in the industry like Andreesen but it feels like they’re all playing in a lower division right now.
- Differences in thinking around value: If you buy my thesis that value is social, then I think one approach has far more promise than the other (can you guess who I’m backing?). The relationships of things and people change over time. This is a key factor in why relationships are so valuable. In the Ning model (and I think this is a problem that Facebook will have to deal with) the relationships that are captured are static. They feel like points in time rather than ongoing, living, mutable things. Because the Google model is more flexible, it has the promise of being able to encompass the shifts and changes in relationships over time. Also, because the Google model is more expansive, it has the ability to capture the full picture of all our relationships not just the ones we conduct over Vampires.