#doingtonight

When I  arrived on campus at the Univ. of Michigan in 2001, a group called Komposit dominated the party scene in Ann Arbor. Komposit was causing waves on campus, down from the Blind Pig, up to the Church on Church.  

The proliferation of “feature” apps has caused a huge signal-noise imbalance. Check-ins, deals, status updates, photos and others offer an incomplete picture of siloed activities. But organizing feature activity around time, makes activity streams more useful and easier to consume. Take the new Facebook Timeline for example. I may post a status that reads “Just passed my exam!”. I also have a Spotify integration that broadcasts that I am listening to Celebrate Good Times by Kool and Gang. Lastly, I post a picture of me popping some bubbly via Instagram. As individual snippets of information, my friends may either be moderately entertained or generally annoyed at my frequent broadcasts. But when viewed in aggregate, each activity centers around a single, and much more palatable “event” plotted on an axis of time. The timeline amplifies the utility of feature activity because of the added context. It's not unlike a conversation about analog vs digital.

I define innovation as the creative repurposing of things that already exist. I came up with social neutrality after reading about net neutrality. It stems from the fact that there are a certain number of websites that people visit on a daily basis. When it comes to social, there is pretty much only one. In other words, consumers are not social neutral. Yet.

Facebook continues to expand horizontally in order to keep audiences captive. From photos, to deals, to check-in's, it seems like Facebook wants to have everything to do with everything.

This causes a few issues. For one, investors become hesitant to invest in anything that “Facebook might do”. Secondly, entrepreneurs, influenced by investors, end up thinking small with the outlandish expectation that some day they may be acquired. But when consumers are social neutral, the tide will turn. Let's discuss...

Social Neutrality via Net Neutrality

Net neutrality, penned by Tim Wu, is a digital democracy. The basic concept suggests that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access. (Wikipedia)

Great. So we all have uninhibited access to the Internet, now what? Enforcing the Internet’s ubiquity was the first critical step in moving social online. Fast forward to the present where Facebook now dominates our digital social lives. So if the concept of net neutrality extended from how we consume digital media to what digital media we consume, are consumers truly neutral? Not yet. This is especially the case with social media ala Facebook. Therein lies the definition of social neutrality.

Facebook isn’t just a book of faces.

Facebook’s current trajectory is sustainable. But there are indications that they have bigger things in mind. It starts with privacy, or lack thereof. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friends list, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook.

As people see the walls begin to fall, Facebook will shift to becoming a social operating system of sorts. A social infrastructure that provides the primary pillars of social interaction including connections, gaming, location and payments among other things but becomes less enamored with small features. This is important to entrepreneurs for a few reasons: (1) Facebook will stay horizontal with a vanilla system that blankets all of social and (2) as they open up their social graph, users will become more net social neutral.

There is already evidence that this is happening and it’s still early. In July (2010) at least 280m people logged on to social sites other than Facebook and Twitter, according to audience tracker comScore (SCOR). Moreover, earlier this year Facebook mentioned that over 80,000 sites had integrated Facebook Connect.

People go to Vegas because what happens there, stays there.

The proliferation of Facebook Connect, and the success of sites using it, is slightly curbed by the hesitancy users have to share their information with an unfamiliar website in order to gain access. But this will change over time as people realize sites using Facebook Connect may be better stewards of their information. This is because the connection with Facebook is two-way. A user can allow Facebook to share certain information about them with the application, while the application can choose what information to share with Facebook. This means that certain behaviors, like announcing that you want to booze, may be better served originating on a different system that leverages your existing social graph on Facebook, but keeps those behaviors separate from that graph.

Social neutrality

Facebook’s continued openness will democratize the social web, creating opportunities for the growth of coexisting social empires that focus on specific niches (re: big). The 500m, and growing, Facebook users suffering from tunnel vision will be back in play. Niche empires will gain notice because they penetrate a single market with functionality that provides a utility that vanilla applications like Facebook will not provide. I am not talking about sites that feature profiles, pictures, and statuses with the intent to arbitrage advertising. I am talking about real markets with interest-based social exchange coupled with relevant commerce. These types of ecosystems will commence a shift in online behavior.