Most of Facebook seems to be about entertainment - playing on each other’s walls, so to speak. It isn’t really a networking app in the sense that LinkedIn is - this actually attempts to make capital (value) using social connections, not entertainment from them. Facebook is a kind of a glorified messaging tool, passing each other messages in various forms, albeit some fairly elaborate ones. The emphasis is on the constant exchange of low-value stuff, which friends monitor in the sense of “what are my friends up to?” LinkedIn is much more about “adding buddies to the list” and attaching some kind of value to the connection, in the sense of “who can I link up with?” And “what can they do for me?” Which is supposed to be mirrored by “What can I do for them?”

Of course, in the initial rush, users aren’t necessarily interested in these questions at all. Herd mentality is a strong initial motivator - “I have to be in this thing because everyone else is.” And the whole fear of missing out, looking irrelevant and other such social pressures kick in, as talked about by psychologists ad infinitum. This sense of belonging creates a sense of placeness, which attracts users to hang out on the site as a shared social space. This is given significant value by the concept of Facebook applications, which essentially makes Facebook a platform, as positioned by Facebook itself.

A few questions come to mind. Firstly, if we’re really interested in the making connections part and not so much ‘belonging to a space/crowd,’ then why do we need these social networking sites at all? This occurred to me after receiving one too many generically worded invitations to join yet another social networking site that one or more of my friends have jumped to. Having spent time and effort building up a network in one, I’m not motivated to go and do it in another, although professional networkers will probably laugh at such folly.

It seems to me that this problem is easily solved on the Internet. After all, if I can form a network here, then where else? By joining these sites, like Facebook and LinkedIn, all our efforts are essentially adding value to these brands more than our social power. Why should I push traffic and ad revenue to a site when it’s so unnecessary? What’s more, as we are finding out, when you want to leave these sites, it ain’t that easy. The bottom line is that my social network and personal profile should belong to me and I keep it on my own site or server, not on one of these networking sites that don’t essentially add any value other than aggregate social links in a central place. There are plenty of ways to do this in an open and distributed fashion that wouldn’t lock us into one of these sites. I will elaborate in another post.

Another question is what type of social networking works best on the mobile? Is it the adding connections type or the staying up to date type? Clearly, it is both. The mobile is made for social networking - it is a social networking tool. However, as I’ve commented for years now, this isn’t how operators view the mobile, although things are changing. Historically, operators view voice and texting as the business they are in, rather than enabling technologies within the wider business of social networking.

What mobiles lack in terms of social networking is the 2nd, 3rd and nth degree connections. I can use my address book to connect with direct contacts, but not to any of my contacts’ contacts (2nd degree) or further. It seems such an obvious service, and one that I have designed and talked about before (see the first edition of my book Next Generation Wireless Applications). With the right platform and architecture, voice and texting can be taken to a whole new level, which, were it to happen, would be truly worthy of the now grossly de-valued 2.0 moniker. For more on this theme, explore ideas like Alec Saunders voice mash-ups, as discussed by Dan York. I see that the same theme is the topic of a talk by Dean Bubley at the forthcoming eComm 2008. The potential to create new services and applications around voice in all-IP open-API architecture is truly staggering.

Social networking as an underpinning feature of Mobile 2.0 seems to be one of the attributes agreed upon by a good number of commentators. Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish reflect upon ‘collective intelligence‘ in their Mobile Web 2.0 book and John Puterbaugh (NellyMoser) takes this to a whole new level of abstraction with his thoughts about actant networks in his interesting thought piece about Mobile 2.0.

What we need is for an operator - whilst they still own the voice/texting networks of the world - to decide to go the whole hog and re-invent itself as a social-networking business from the ground up. And it is here where I question Ajit and Tony’s first principle of Mobile Web 2.0, which is that the Web is the platform. As I have argued for a while, and regurgitated in a recent post about architectural challenges for Mobile 2.0, the Web is insufficient as the sole platform for Mobile 2.0. As I remarked, we need SIP too and it still isn’t obvious how we combine Web 2.0 with SIP. It has been attempted in various ways already, but not in any scalable and agile fashion. I’m talking from experience of having tried to put ‘Mobile 2.0′ to the test, attempting to create real IMS services and real voice/data mash-ups whilst running the Mashing Room within Motorola. There are still lots of interesting architectural and technical issues to iron out in order to enable a world in which, to quote prolific Internet technologist and SIP guru Jonathon Rosenberg:

‘It should be as easy to create a new telephony service as it is building a Web page’

In an isolated sense, this is already possible in the network using SIP servlets and JSLEE etc. However, such services rapidly come unstuck when figuring out how to make them available on the handset. The plethora of new platforms coming into the market doesn’t make the problem any easier. In fact, it makes it harder. I got fed up with visiting operators to peddle various IMS mash-up concepts, only for them to ask - ‘which handset does this run on?’ Whoops! Perhaps, although I am doubtful, the MWC-announced Rich Communication Suite will change all this. I’m not holding my breath waiting for yet another “IMS client” to rescue us. Combining Web with SIP within a coherent framework (e.g. an extended browser) is much more powerful.

If I were sitting (most likely standing) in a conference room right now, at the planning stage of this new social-operator business, the team would be brain-storming the question ‘what if the social network is the platform?’ What would that platform look like?

Many of the commentators mentioned in this post have essentially already been pondering this question, but in far too abstract a fashion for my liking, except for the very real and excellent work of Rosenberg (et al) in bringing us the SIP/SIMPLE protocols and paradigm, which we can possibly build on (although I like XMPP too). We need to get down to the nitty gritty of architectures, patterns and APIs. This, for me, is the where the likes of Google should be spending all their considerable resources, not creating yet another device platform for the Google groupies. The social network is the platform. What does it take to build it using open standards that allow us to mash-up with voice, texting and data services where I maintain ownership of my data?

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