This past week, the AOL Developer Network was the Platinum sponsor of the WWW2007 Conference in Banff, Canada. The conference focused on W3C initiatives in workshops, sessions, panels and keynotes. The AOL showing was prominent throughout the conference with our booth on the tradeshow floor, sessions by Arun Ranganathan, Mike Jones, Greg Cypes and a brief overview by yours truly of the AOL Developer Network at the Wednesday night reception that was sponsored by AOL.
This is Part 1 of a 2 Part blog on the Social Computing Industry Panel that was held on Saturday, May 12, 2007. Panelists included Andrew Hopkins from Yahoo, Dick Hardt from Sxip Identity, Neel Sandaresen from eBay and Greg Cypes from AOL. Mike Beltzner from Mozilla moderated the panel.
After introductions by each of the panelists, Mike provided information from recent studies related to social computing, and then asked questions of the panel that related to the information. He encouraged each panelist to respond. This worked great, because each panelist brought a different perspective to the information.
The initial area of inquiry was around participation on the web. Mike stated that thirty-one percent of Americans engage on the social web and eight percent of them engage “deeply”. However, another study showed that less than 1% of page views are participatory. He asked each panelist to comment on the findings.
Neel stated that most sites that use “social networking for the sake of social networking” will die, because there needs to be a reason for the social networking. He said that a simple strategy for a social networking site includes the following:
1. Get users to the site,
2. Get users to participate, and
3. Create reasons for them to stay (stickiness).
Greg followed up on Neel’s comments by saying that AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) creates stickiness by having the IM client on the desktop (continuous presence) and by giving users’ choices (e.g., playlink).
Dick said that there are two primary categories of people who interact on the Internet:
1. Technologists who use social networking as part of their job and/or everyday life (e.g., IM), and
2. Internet natives who grew up using the Internet and participating in social networks.
He stated the following about page views:
1. 1% can be attributed to content creation,
2. 9% can be attributed to contend editing, and
3. 90% can be attributed to consumption.
Andrew followed up by saying that from a unifying perspective, there are three things that people do online:
1. Live in an application (e.g., World of Warcraft – this would be my step son),
2. Find what’s new (e.g., via RSS feeds), and
3. Find information (e.g., via search).
Given the above, Andrew said that the use of social networks to find information is doomed to failure. It is easier to use a search engine to find new information than tap into one’s network. He also said that tapping into one’s network to find what’s new is very applicable, because we form / join communities based on interests.
Stay tuned for Part 2 , which will be posted in the next few days.