Social Networking in Germany
This is actually just about the two players that I recently had talks with but none the less it is interesting to see the moves these two are doing.
First up is OpenBC, or rather Xing, which invited some bloggers to communicate their new brand. The meeting took place the monday after the news of Xing broke. I actually have to confirm that they clearly didn’t want that to happen. First up I got a call from Daniela the day the news broke saying that this wasn’t planned and they actually had a very busy weekend because of it. Inviting bloggers to communicate the new brand the first time actually wouldn’t have made sense if the leak was intentional. It seems that one thing they overlooked is that one organisation where they registered the brand allowed for searching for company name to find the registration and not for the registered name only.
Some nice other things appeared in the talk. First up, the name really came from Bill Lao’s mother and it will allow them, as I said previously, to be a lot more international. Reflecting their international focus, they are now 50 people from 17 nations and have very active users. Their Mission is to cross barriers for a sustainable world, which will be interesting to see how they transfer this to the brand. Their focus will remain on business people though. The thing with the new brand is that they will more easily also connect to professors and the like who do not see themselves as business, though they are in the OpenBC sense. You could actually also say professionals, which was actually their word.
We then got a presentation of the new design and I have to say that I like it. Navigation will get simpler, and it will be more focussed. They are also going all CSS but are still using tables for emm… tables, something we (mostly) stopped doing at Ormigo early on. The the talk followed on some future things which will turn out to be interesting. Microformats like hcard, hresume and hevent or even hlisting are one, an upcoming API is another. I am actually really looking forward to the API as it looks very promising, coming somewhere H1 2007. This also means that there might be somebody that gives me a Sync client for OpenBC, which would be wonderful. For things like the API they are actually recruiting developers internally. I am already looking forward to the new platform and what will develop from them becoming more open.
The other invitation I got was to see the new Neu.de from NU2M. This is actually a dating community but only at the time. It ran or runs .NET and is 100% rewritten after NU2M now owns all of Neu.de, which they bought recently (they only had a share previously). They have some very good Web 2.0ish features in the Platform and I am happy to hear that they are putting an end to release cycles, moving along with continuous releases starting first with the basic platform. They believe in the Me Brand and that I will stop wanting to be anonymous on the internet and you need a place to get a human face. As such, they will become a platform to allow me to do that. That also means that they will as a second step move towards social networking as a second step after or as a first before the dating. Currently people having found their date are actually done but the new idea will try to keep them on the platform to socialize in a secured community.
One big part of what they do is leveraging what they already have with Mabber. Neu.de integrates messaging via the Mabber functionality in that I can message any use that is online now and talk to them via an integrated web based IM tool, a very cool feature. The main problem I see is moving people from Dating in red, to Social Networking in green. The other way around might be easy, but it’s a good idea that needs to be tried. We Germans want to remain in control of our data and that’s why MySpace isn’t our first platform really.
The will also, with the social networking, add more community features that will be free in terms of autocompleted tags for community search. In that sense I can be part of any community that I can word very easily. On top of that they are adding an authentication method in that they will be sure that I am who I say I am, or reasonably sure at least. This is good as it they can have faksters but without the abusive faksters.
A cool bit is that they are currently offering people a 1 EUR service to send them their pictures to scan them in. This shows that you need to cater to the users you have, and they know that, and lots of their users just don’t have digital photos of themselves yet. They can also do lots of integration with other stuff they have like mp3.de or location based services through their experience with mobile mabber.
They also bought in calendar data which they will allow people to comment on and easily meet up at concerts and the like. That shows that they are seeing all those things, like upcoming, as a feature, they right mindset in my mind.
Both face different challenges, OpenBC transfering the brand all in all, and Neu.de to see if they can convert people to social networking without destroying their business model. They both have big goals and at the moment they are not going into the same space but we will see how this one plays out. OpenBC has the mind share, Neu.de the marketing power. But more about that marketing bit later.