If you look at the top of our corporate web site - you’ll see the phrase ‘bringing social to software’. Its our positioning saying “sure we can buid you a stand alone social network - but we can also add social features to the web site you have already”.

We do this with a widgetization process developed by Phil Pearson for PeopleAgrgregator.  We connect into platforms (like xxxx and yyyyy - sorry I can’t tell you yet or else I’ll have to kill you) and plop entire social media features (in HTML form)  into their ASP .Net and Java pages.

We’re a php5 shop and…… it works.

The HTML renders through the page’s CSS and no one can tell that particular modules on the page - like comments, ratings or “I’m a fan of” - are actually coming from an entirely different server.

This technique can apply to any and all software - legacy and even recently created.

This trend to build social networking web services is an extension of our efforts to have APIs and web services calls available for any PeopleAgrgegator developer.  Source code here.   Our widgetization is a technique that anyone can use - as well.  In fact we’ve taught it to one of our clients for them to hand us THEIR web service and plop it into the pages of PeopleAggregator (that’s a cool gig - too.)

Google and Yahoo’s approach is to solve the problem with one fail swoop - and provide a kind of social computing strata - a layer of the system software - athat has individual profiles and copeis of ALL your data - accessible from one profile account.  I love this idea.  Or maybe they’re not doing this and I’m making the whole thing up.

So it warms my heart to read Larry Dignan’s post:

Google ponders adding social networking features to Google Reader. Yahoo is weighing its social networking stance as CEO Jerry Yang cooks up the company’s strategy. And every big Web player is trying to figure out what to do about social media.

It’s not an easy question to answer. On the surface, perhaps Yahoo should just buy Facebook. But as Philipp Lenssen’s post on a leaked Google video shows perhaps it makes more sense to build social features into products.

Is social networking a business or a feature? If you’re Facebook and MySpace social networking is clearly a business that generates a ton of ad inventory. But there are only so many of those success stories. For giants like Yahoo and Google it may make a lot more sense to build social features into existing products. You can still generate the excess ad inventory and target better.

Another argument for building social networking features into an existing portfolio: What happens when social profiles are portable from sites like MySpace to Facebook to LinkedIn or any other site?

I honestly don’t know if social networking is much more than a feature over the long run. My own behavior indicates that a) I’m either not social; or b) there’s not enough on Facebook to keep me interested in the long run. It may be some combination of both, but I’m not joining any other social networking sites–despite dozens of invites to join new sites like Quechup.com.

Bottom line: Social networking fatigue exists. And I don’t think the answer is building more social networking sites.

Welcome Google, Welcome Yahoo - actually what they’re doing is really smart and I could have SWORN I told Jerry Yang to do that - 3 years ago.

Well let’s hope he’s listening.  Amar Gandhi and Google have figured it out.  Amar built ‘Users & Groups’ for Microsoft’s Longhorn, before it was thrown out.  Now he’s at Google doing the same thing.

This is not to say that Ning won’t copy this approach with their $44M - but at least we get to say we did it first - again.   Now it’s time to monetize.

Dare Obasanjo has some coolio stuff at Microsoft. I wonder if this whole Google leak thingie can get his bosses to let him GO WILD?  Any dude who digs Justin Timberlake, can be the mellow son of the ex-President of Nigeria AND get change to happen at Microsoft - is OK by me!

And as for Broadband Mechanics - I hate to say I told you so - but bringing social to software is gonna be allot BIGGER than white labeling social networking.  Just don’t let Fred Wilson know that.  Or Saul Klein.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 9:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.