Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Now that is a good one! 2 hours ago Robert Scoble drove with Elon Musk in the first product Tesla and Jason Calacanis was trying to keep up in his Corvette. They streamed the entire fun on the Nokia N95 streaming live in Qik. Looking forward to chatting about stuff like that with Nokia mid next month, when I am in London to talk about the future mobile phone (3-5 years) that Nokia should bring out. Thanks for the invite Nokia. Looking forward to it.

Here is Robert’s Video:

Here is Jason’s Video:

That’s a question now running around the net. The entire story started with Steve Ballmer saying the following: I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people,” Mr Ballmer told Times Online yesterday.

And then there is also this part: “There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure,” he said.

One thing is for sure. It polarizes people. One good post on the matter comes from Scoble called Steve Ballmer still doesn’t understand social networking. The other one you should read is Techcrunch’s Fadnation: Why Steve Ballmer could be right.

As you have now read those two posts, I will shoot over a few of my own comments. First of all, I am pretty sure that Steve Ballmer does understand social networking. He probably even understands that my own biggest social network is currently my address book in gmail, which is what I use to sync in my friends in new social networks within minutes. He also understands that Microsoft possibly needs a strategy to allow for swift investment in small startups (which they already have, sadly only pushing their own software at the same time, but that’s ok too) and investments in stuff like flickr, wordpress, skype or youtube, isn’t currently a high priority for Microsoft. Which of those services will in 5-10 years, add a few billions of free cash flow to Microsofts belt? Probably none of them. The same with social networking. That’s a feature, and the networks will be freed up eventually. Microsoft is looking for the next billion dollar thing, or for something that allows them to get closer to the billion dollar thing, and at the moment that is advertising, which includes networks, better management of advertisements, apis and so forth, because they will never have all the sites they need to run ads on anyway.

Next up, is Facebook a fad? Nope, I don’t think so. I really do like it and it’s a nice service. If the money idea behind social networks is all about using social networks as a basis to better target ads, then all the big players will be desperate to create an open social network protocol they can tab into, because better targeting all the time is the only way this will really work.

What the fad part is really about is that have my contacts in Xing exported, I have them imported into my GMail address book and whenever something opens up that I like, I can just sync that in and have many of my friends back. Especially the younger generation is a group of people that will very swiftly move to a new service, importing in their old friends. Facebook obviously will not die, but it is not certain that it will not be replaced by another “fad”, another hyped system that is the one to end them all.

So with the right set of features, with the right people to start with, you will probably be able to build the community that Facebook has, or rather a similar one that you might be able to monetize. That is something that MS might invest in, somebody that has the key drivers right and Ning might be more interesting down the line, at least from a business perspective, and from a Microsoft Platform view.

Techcrunch posted a few videos from Scoble on the future of search, where he argues that Facebook, Mahalo and Techmeme will throw down Google from its mighty mountain. The full list of the videos is here. The idea is Social Graph based search. It will overtake Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!.
His first point is that you didn’t find the post through search, because the search engines do not know what is inside the video. First error there. Currently this might be true, but not in the long term. You might want to read Surviving Immortality by Cringely. Computers will become more and more powerful.

One of his big point is that Mahalo, Techmeme, Facebook are SEO resistant, meaning resistant from spammers. The thing is though that everything normal people can do based on logic, a computer will be able to do eventually. Sure it is not easy, but it is something that will happen eventually. They will be getting better.

Techmeme, built a fabric by hand through linking behavior between the top blogs. This is good, but it is nothing that cannot be done automatically. It’s pretty similar to pagerank really, just that there is a person filter behind it. This is the people rank that Google has already talked about. Of course having access to a social graph, is something that helps to build this kind of trust graph. Did you know Google just hired Brad Fitz, LiveJournal fame, who is working on opening up the Social Graph, similar to what our own Dirk Olbertz does with Noserub. I shortly posted about it when I cleared my backlog. The push is going on to open the social graph up just because it really helps in creating your own search engine. Lijit is another search engine that is working on this. We are working on monetizing it at Ormigo through building a quasi-lead market that banks heavily on getting to know people and connect them with the best local merchant for their current needs.

As you notice, I really believe in the social graph bit. If I have a financial consultant, or a lawyer, a friend or even his friend, that lives in my town, might want the same one when needed. This is something that is already happening offline, but we are monetizing it online. First through allowing advertising of services through aggregation, but learning along the way how people interconnect. It’s again automated though.

One point Scoble has is that Facebook has been able to keep the seo spammers out, which seems to not be the case for e.g. Plaxo. I am not sure yet why an open social graph cannot keep SEOs out of the system. My friends are my friends and the graph increases the value of those friends for linkage.

All in all very good ideas, but I am not buying that it will replace Google.

Update: Now read this.