Minority Rapport

Open Online, But Guarded Off: New Social Norms Are Being Established Now

My good friend Dan McCarthy posted a good overview of social interaction and how social network analysis has become valuable as mass and easy communication has proliferated. He touches at the end on some interesting issues about privacy: as I discussed before, I suspect that what people consider to be private today will not be so in a few years because that is what has happened as mass communication has increased. For example, before the internet and social networking services like MySpace, you could say that a lot of information was "private." But now that it is in open space, it is no longer considered private. Privacy does not just mean social security and credit card numbers: it has to do with who we are, who we relate to and what we like to do. A social networking service profile reveals as much or as little of this information about ourselves as we wish. While a MySpace user's personal interests might have been considered "private" to 99.99% of the world before MySpace, it is now considered public to 100% of the world with access to the internet. What's fascinating to me is that a MySpace user may readily share this information with the faceless internet by posting it in their profile, but would be offended if a random stranger approached them on the street to ask what their interests are.  The difference is that walking up to a random person and asking personal questions as being inappropriate is something that has been a trained part of human interaction for many years.  But the internet is not so encumbered by long-standing human social norms and a computer screen is not considered as intrusive as a person.  There are many more privacy issues that spring from these questions, such as finding limits or considering location-aware social networks.  If you have some thoughts, please comment on this post or better yet send me an email so we can discuss. 

Taking MySpace: Facebook Launches At High Schools Nationwide

Facebook has rolled out support for high schools. My initial reaction was this: wow, it's brilliant. Not only do they avoid being undercut by any potential competitor that might try to swipe their user base by doing a facebook for high schools and effectively transitioning those high schools students into a college facebook of their own, but they are going in strong for a business currently owned by classmates.com and they find a new way to grab millions for users. But the real reason behind doing it? I asked my friend Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and he said that, simply, "It's also just cool." Very true, it is very cool facebook is entering that market, especially for the many high school students curious about it from hearing about it from college friends. At this point, the flow of new features from Facebook is driven by that idea: what would be fun for the user. High school seniors already clammer for their .edu addresses so they can log in to facebook; this gives students an additional four years to link up their high school friends before venturing off to college. Mark tells me the idea to launch at high schools came about a month ago.

Bottom line is this is absolutely huge news. Facebook was already on track to double its traffic with expanding to the rest of colleges, and thus equal MySpace's traffic, but high schools means the potential to more than double that traffic. If it takes to high schools like facebook for colleges, watch out. Smartly, facebook does not permit high school users to even contact college users, and vice versa; no reason to risk making the golden goose sick. Screenshots are below.

The next step? I am trying to convince them to do (dare I link to my article again? I think yes...) corporate facebooks. I suppose the logical next step before that would be tending to alums. Universities have tried in vain for years, and in the process invested millions of dollars, trying to maintain a vibrant, up-to-date and useful alumni network in order to provide some value to . That is effectively what, year in and year out, facebook will closer come to approximate. Every year, a new class with 95% of the students signed up will leave the hallowed halls of their respective universities and find jobs, lovers and pay taxes. Facebook has that locked up already; the key is making the network work for them as alums. So take all the supposed uses of traditional alumni networks at schools now, and imagine them plugged into facebook: find someone who works in a certain position at an auto company; find someone who is a trial lawyer specializing in real estate litigation; find someone who moved to Alaska; find someone who has once worked for Goldman Sachs and thus may be able to provide insight into the life as an Associate investment banker; and on, and on. The difference between the facebook alumni network and the traditional alumni networks is that the facebook one has the potential to be orders of magnitude more useful: take Wharton's alumni network "WAVE" for example. Sure, it has everyone listed, but I visited with technician responsible for maintaining and updating alumni data, and I was told it is riddled with out of date information. Why? Alums move on, lose touch with their alma mater, and choose not to fill out some form they get in the mail that they in all likelihood confuse as a solicitation for donations to their respective endowments. Instead, facebook has everyone right out of the gate. That is a business in and of itself: permitting universities to use the facebook network to solicit donations from alums. And thus is the irony: some universities resisted or delayed making their own online facebook with editable fields out of fear that students would abuse the system by posting inappropriate or untrue information. Those concerns made way for the real facebook, and it will come full circle when those very same universities have no more cost efficient way than to advertise on facebook to get donations from their alums! :) I wonder how many chancellors have pondered that one.

Facebook For All: Why I Think Corporate Facebooks Are The Way To More Growth

As you may know, facebook has a significantly greater sense of trust than MySpace. Why is simple: the user base you have access to consists of fellow students at your school. Email confirmations discourage untruthful postings. So it is certainly true that by drawing boundaries, trust has been created in facebook. Given facebook's new functionality that lets you specify a geographic area you are in, what about the risk that the trust will be soured when it is open to everyone in a geographic area like a city? At that point, you can see anyone's profile because you can simply change what geography you are in. Of course, the argument for trust being maintained is that all users were at least confirmed at some point by their student email address, so at the least you know they are a student. Presumably they share the same geographic location as you, but they easily could not. Certainly this is a trade-off situation for facebook management: do you trade-off some of the inherent trust in the network for providing increased access to others' profiles? For the sake of encouraging alumni users to keep using the site, I do not think they had much choice. But they have a huge opportunity to leverage email confirmation within companies, as I detail below.

Ideally, if IP address locating was actually accurate, facebook could simply identify where you are located based on your IP, and that would be your geography. Instead, it is relying on the trust of the users to input the correct geography. While I think most people will answer truthfully, "most" is still on risk on the site given now literally all users must be verified through email as being part of a certain school and thus can only see information from people at that school. Certainly there are loopholes already -- for example, people that are not in facebook schools who get alternative email addresses just to sign up for a facebook account -- but the geography setting takes it to a new level. My suggestion is the facebook be very careful going forward by observing habits of users that regularly change their geographic location: for example, limiting the number of times in a month that you can change your geographic location to just 3. That would at least make it more difficult to scan the profiles of masses of people.

Regarding the rumors of new services being built, I have no hints as to what they will ultimately launch, but I have some original ideas of my own. I think facebook has a unique opportunity to leverage the source of its power -- the confirming of .edu email addresses -- to use it as a confirmation that users work at companies. This would of course require a huge database of domain names and the names of the associated companies, but it could be done easily in this way: facebook could become a domain registrar (cost of about $15,000 according to well-placed people in the industry) and thus have access to all the data associated with every domain name record. Every domain of course has a "registrant," so facebook could take the registrant listed for the domain and identify it as the company name. For example, say a user wants to verify they work at Yahoo, then the user would input their "@yahoo-inc.com" email address and click the confirming link. Since the registrant for "yahoo-inc.com" is of course "Yahoo! Inc.," that would be the company name listed in the user's facebook professional profile. The default privacy setting would be to permit Yahoo Inc. users to see the user's professional profile, and to not permit Yahoo Inc. verified users to see the user's personal profile. Enabling verification of companies would open up a whole new area for growth: corporate facebooks. Facebook must be careful to not tread on its current college social network, which is why locking out verified company users (who are not verified with a .edu) from seeing .edu verified users' profiles is critical to maintaining the necessary level of trust.  Bottom line is that the two have to be separate.  In my research, I have found companies are unwilling to create social networks like this for their companies for fear of the legal implications if users posted inappropriate information. Of course, major companies do mostly have company directories, but they are far from having the social component of facebook. Bringing facebook to companies would enable employees to identify other employees in the company working on similar projects or who have whatever needed expertise. The corporate version may not take off immediately, but planting the seed now is important to leverage all the new alum's: they are all potential marketing pieces for facebooks within companies. Facebook usage numbers speak for themselves: users love the site. I think some of that love will be lost as people become alums, but it does not have to be: migrating alums into corporate facebooks would leverage the same powerful ideas that have driven facebook's growth thus far: email/identity confirmation and a community with both cyber and physical boundaries. Companies have that. Plus there is a powerful idea within corporate facebooks that university facebooks do not have: there's no competitive reason why students at one school do not want to share information with students at another school, but that is certainly critical at companies.  By playing to that and making a closed corporate facebooks, trust could be fostered and encourage employees to share the necessary information (past projects worked on, expertise, current projects, colleagues at work, etc) for the betterment of the companies.  Certainly any person could start offering this service, but no company is better positioned than the facebook to roll this out on a national level.  Of all, facebook has the best chance of getting traction by leveraging its millions of users (by the end of the year, the company expects at least 6.8 million users).

Podcast for 8-17-2005

This week, Doug and I spoke with Meetroduction CEO Paul Bragiel about Meetro, an IM and Mobile Social Networking (MoSoSo) platform currently in beta development.  Meetro's garnered a lot of attention in recent weeks, and characterizes itself to newcomers as "radius and proximity-based software...that gets you on the town with old friends or new acquaintances."

Among the topics discussed were Meetro's competitive posture with respect to existing IM and social networking platforms, privacy and security issues and Meetro's roadmap to black ink.  Paul told us that his platform will never charge its users directly, opting to focus instead on partnerships and perhaps on sponsored advertising.

Location-aware social software technologies such as Dodgeball and MIT Media Lab's 'Reality Mining' project have already raised some important issues. They will become even more powerful as applicable technologies improve and technical constraints are loosened.  Meetro has done some exciting development that allows wifi-enabled laptops to locate themselves geographically based on a map of hotspots, but scalability questions lead me to suspect even this is a stopgap measure.  It seems to me, then, that Meetro is smart to build its core user base now, priming the network for even more rapid growth once the relevant technologies mature.

One aspect of Meetro that strikes me is its all-inclusive orientation.  Paul mentioned that he sees the service as complimentary to existing SN and IM platforms, and expects Meetro to grow along a similarly egalitarian path.  I'll be interested to see whether the platform encouters an even distribution of adoption, or whether self-feeding 'islands' of users begin to emerge.

In the meantime, if you've got 5 minutes, 5 megs and a Windows PC, you can test drive Meetro by grabbing the latest build directly from the homepage.  You can catch me online as I'll be experimenting as well -- my Meetro name is 'Jon Turow'.

Hopefully, Paul will join us in a future call and let us know how things are going.  Until then, best of luck to him and his team.

You can grab the podcast by clicking here (WMA, 2.4MB) .

Doostang jobs vs. aSmallWorld exclusivity: my email exchange with Doostang's Co-Founder & CEO Mareza Larizadeh

Mareza was kind enough to join our podcast recently, and one topic was about his commitment to building Doostang on "trust" and how that can be maintained as the user base grows.  The site can be found at http://www.doostang.com.  The site is currently in alpha and is invite only, so if you would like an invitation, Mareza has requested that you email him directly at mareza-AT-doostang.com.

My Email to Mareza:

Mareza,

I discovered aSmallWorld.net recently and have discussed it with a couple friends and we agree that they execute invite-only consistently, meaning invite-only was not just a means to build out the network at the beginning or a marketing ploy as some suggest it is, but is an essential component necessary to enable the network to maintain its purpose.  In fact, they have continued to narrow the requirements for a member to stay a part of the network in order to maintain the site as a truly "trusted" place; for example, you have to be confirmed by 10 members just to gain membership.  If you do some deleterious to the network, then you get booted.

Certainly doostang and sSmallWorld.net are not the same thing -- in fact, I don't know of any other network that operates in a similar manner as aSmallWorld.net -- but I would appreciate your comments as to what you think of their approach and whether you think that would be helpful for a job site like doostang in order to maintain the utmost quality?  Do you believe it is necessary to actively monitor users to ensure they should be allowed to participate in the site?

Some links:

http://www.gawker.com/topic/asmallworld-friendster-for-the-vip-set-022639.php

http://www.gawker.com/topic/sneaking-around-asmallworld -022731.php

http://www.gawker.com/topic/asmallworld-gets-even-smaller-022837.php

http://www.gawker.com/topic/asmallworld-gets-nasty-022924.php

Thanks! :)
Doug

Mareza's Reply:

Hi Doug,

Much thanks for the question and also for having me on MinorityRapport.com again. Really love your website and find it extremely useful.

I am actually a member of aSmallWorld.net. The beauty of social/professional networking is that you can have so many different spins of a similar thing - all of which add value in different areas. I joined aSmallWorld.net when you needed to be invited by just one member, which is the current Doostang model. Would be ten member invite system work for Doostang? Interesting question, and here are my thoughts:

- The higher you raise the bar for membership then the less diversity you get within your network. We need to define "quality." What is "quality?" Is it investment bankers? Is it non-profit people? Quality means different things to different people and by making Doostang so exclusive we would end up having too much quality down one vertical and not enough in many others.

- I think that by still having one person vouch for a new member, then you have a bar to ensure that that person isn't going to be an anonaly to the network. We at Doostang believe in laisser-faire networks, however if someone is consciously and continuously being inappropriate, then yes, we would definitely take action.

- One needs to also look at the personal side of things. If you are looking for a job, the last thing you want to do is have to go and find ten members to give you access to Doostang. Chances are if you are friends with one of our current members then you're suitable to join.

People should realize that you can have the whole network as large as possible, yet have exclusive groups within that network. You can form these groups generically through network growth. We're working on that right now on Doostang and this will become more apparent as Doostang grows.

Hope this helps. If any of your readers would like to try Doostang out, please have them send me an email at mareza-AT-doostang.com . We can hopefully invite them to Doostang Alpha.

Thanks again,

Mareza

Jon's Good Post & Murdoch's MySpace TV Channel

Good post, Jon. (I thought I would post this as a comment, but I wrote longer than expected, and no one reads comments ;)  If those Nielson numbers are accurate, then certainly MySpace's continued growth has not ceased to amaze me.  It seems they are doing a little more to protect privacy of users, and if they keep making strides in that area, they could be a very difficult foe to overtake.  What MySpace may be realizing is that eventually, their user base is going to mature (obviously) -- so what will keep them on the site?  One of the things that may not do that are friend requests from completely random people, or group add requests from bands in genres you do not even like.  What does Murdoch add to the mix?  I am most interested in whether they are serious about making a cable channel to compete with MTV.  At that point, we could see integration of social networks with cable TV, something that could be very interesting: bands that are popular on MySpace participating in a reality show, MySpace bands getting their content aired on the channel, with user comments intertwined.  It would be a morphing of Jon's walled garden theory where the gardener opens the wall, but only into its other media properties.  With a media collection like Murdoch has, there are many options.  Stay tuned.

AdSensibility

While the ad-based revenue model represents just one of the social software paradigms we've seen so far, Doug is right to point out that it's a powerful and important one.  Some numbers may shed light on just how powerful it's set to become.

Remember when I cited Facebook VP of Corporate Development Matt Cohler's estimation that his site served 3 billion monthly page views?  That was from May, 2004.  In an article released yesterday (sorry, no link, but citation at the end of this paragraph), Cohler predicts that once the Fall semester begins that number will have more than doubled to *seven billion* monthly impressions.  They've attracted group sponsors such as MasterCard, Apple, Victoria's Secret and Electronic Arts, not to mention all manner of banner and text ads.  (Shankar Gupta, Online Media Daily, August 15, 2005)

But there's more, folks -- last month, Nielsen/Netratings' AdRelevance system measured its fourth monthly increase in total online ad display impressions.  That's 102.9 billion in July, up from 97.1 billion in June, 93.1 billion in May and 91.4 billion in April.  MySpace emerges from this measurement even more impressively, appearing responsible for 10.8% of July impressions (up from 7.9% in June and 6.3% in May).  (These numbers are from Mediapost)

By my calculation, that works out as follows (sorry, couldn't find MySpace share numbers for April):

                                       

	Total	MySpace Share	MySpace Net
July	102,900,000,000	10.8%	11,113,200,000
June	97,100,000,000	7.9%	7,670,900,000
May	93,100,000,000	6.3%	5,865,300,000
April	91,400,000,000	-	-

...in other words, upwards of 11 billion ad impressions for MySpace last month.  Notably, Mediapost hypothesizes that "MySpace's popularity may have come at the expense of of Yahoo! Mail and MSN Hotmail, which accounted for 7.6% and 6.9% of online impressions, respectively, last month."

I suspect it's a bad idea to speculate blindly about how much individual advertisers are paying in this most wild-western of emerging sectors, but chew on this:  Facebook charges up to $7 CPM (cost per thousand clicks) for banner ads, and as much as $50 for day-long text ads at some schools.  I'm going to keep searching for pricing information with regards to sponsored-group pricing on thefacebook, but here's an interesting (and surprising) note from thefacebook's FAQ about what group-sponsors are not getting:  while it specifies that sponsored-groups are are "paid promotions by an outside company [which] controls the look and feel of the group," it also clarifies that sponsors don't "have access to members' personal information or profiles."

While it's possible for users to distinguish between groups created by sponsors and other users, it's clear that thefacebook is opting to market eyeballs rather than its deeply-valuale profile data.  And that should simultaneously be considered less-creepy from users' perspective and encouraging for companies such as Google and Yahoo that are working to grab the advertising high-ground.

Y! Mail & YPN face-off against Gmail & AdSense; Scroogle.org wants Google gone

For a while after Gmail’s quiet-as-a-mouse rollout in spring 2004, people buzzed about the privacy implications of ads that are based on emails. Surely people expected Yahoo to respond in kind, which they for the most part have, but what has taken much longer has been Yahoo’s rollout of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). It sets up the possibility for Yahoo to place content-targeted ads on Yahoo Mail, which is responsible for 42% of the time users spend on Yahoo, whereas only 2% of their time is spent on search. My question is this: will they actually put the ads up, and will they face any scrutiny? I think they absolutely will put up ads, but it may not come without some noise: after all, current Yahoo Mail users did not sign up with the full-expectation that targeted ads would be shown to them, so it may require a change in their Terms of Service. A convenient time to make the switch may be when they finally rollout their desktop mail client.

Now that YPN is finally rolling out, we get to ponder if Yahoo will do the unthinkable: utilize its toolbar to block out AdSense ads and replace them with YPN ads. For legal reasons, they will most likely not do it, and even if it was legal, such behavior would not only invite the wrath of Google, but also the attention of hawkers of spyware/adware that would love the opportunity to leverage all the ads displayed on every page a user visits. But somtimes spyware purveyors are slammed not because of the nature of their business, but because of the suspect tactics they employ to get downloads. For example, consider ShopAtHomeSelect (SAHS), a spyware program recently reviewed by spyware-guru Ben Edelman: the idea is that you download the program and SAHS gets commissions from the things that you buy. In theory, users are supposed to get the rebates from those purchases, but Ben uncovers this to not be the case: the shady nature of the program means users often do not input their personal address to receive rebate checks. In fact, many do not even realize they had downloaded it. But Ben is absolutely right that this is not an indictment against the model of giving rebates, just the way in which it is done.

Ben told me in an email, “I tend to think web site rebate sites are legitimate. I personally use Ebates' web-based rebates site, which I think is perfectly honorable. Same for the sites operated by some airlines (paying rebates in the form of frequent flier miles). SAHS differs in its sneakiness and its tenacity -- putting unwanted software directly onto users' PCs, such that there's no substantial reason to think users wanted the programs or agreed to run them; whereas a user who goes to ebates.com (or your hypothetical Yahoo shopping site) clearly does have some interest in that rebate program. Key differences from SAHS include the absence of software (with the associated risks to privacy, security, reliability, etc.), as well as the self-evident user consent.”

That establishes a pretty clear bright line, but what I would be interested in examining further ebates’ toolbar that enables users’ to receive rebates without even clicking through on links through their main site. Ben points out that eBates has engaged in some questionable downloading practices and that the rewards systems that have clean records include FatWallet and the airlines’ frequent flyer programs. So surely eBates’ affiliates have been up in arms and say having a toolbar is not satisfactory demonstration of the user wanting to take advantage of offers? But they have not. Why? Ben explains the incentive problem on the page linked above:

“I think the core problem here is skewed incentives. Affiliate networks (CJ and LinkShare) have no financial incentive to limit Ebates' operation. Instead, the more commissions claimed by Ebates, the more money flows through the networks -- letting the networks charge fees of their own. In principle we might expect merchants to refuse to pay commissions not fairly earned -- but merchants' affiliate managers sometimes have secondary motives too. In particular, affiliate managers tend to get bonuses when their affiliate programs grow, which surely makes them particularly hesitant to turn away the large transaction volume brought by MMM's automatic commission system.”

Essentially, the incentive system is damaging the profitability of their employers’ businesses.

Google’s recent decision to make its autolink feature a default once again begs the question: at what point is it ok to modify what appears on a page, and when is that line crossed? For example, what if Google justifies the expense of its WebAccelerator service by inserting ads on the cached pages it returns? I think internet users in general would be very upset, but what if Google then decides to proceed with these hypothetical plans? It certainly is not without precedent: I love Gmail and personally think the ads are not a problem given they are not intrusive, but swords were drawn over privacy questions. Text ads put on WebAccelerator pages would presumably also not be intrusive.

Regarding programs that block ads appearing on a page, here is a Firefox plugin that blocks ads appearing on Google search results.  Because the tool provides no financial reward to the person that uses or the person that created it, does that make it acceptable? So far there have been no lawsuits that I am aware of (but I do not read law journals), and certainly it would be quite an ordeal to have to sue each and every user of the program, especially so considering users already block ads using host files modifications or by simply disallowing any image to appear on a page. Mike Steinbaugh brings up the issue in this blog post, followed by poignant discussion by readers: I do not have the answer, but I am curious what would happen. S

Scroogle.org" appears to be the pioneer in scraping Google Ads from their website and proclaims themselves free of legal violation due to their not profiting from enabling blocking of Google ads.   A quote from this page: "The first prong would be a legal effort by Google to stop us. We welcome this, and believe that we can prevail even though our market cap at PIR is somewhat less than Google's $50 billion." Quite a vindictive bunch... "Even if it cuts into (Google's) ad profits slightly, there's no easier way to give back some of what they stole from us." Ouch!

I encourage reader feedback on these issues. I can see some spyware purveyors cutting back on shady downloads in favor of full disclosure to users what they are downloading, and I ask then what are the bounds to which a user is allowed to do on their machine. Remove ads? Replace those ads with Yahoo ads? Replace them with someone elses’ ads and get paid something for what they click on? Certainly the last example would be quite a perverse incentive structure.

How does this relate to social networks?  It may not directly apply to the social networks that exist now, but I believe social networks will become more integrated across other services than they are now: imagine Yahoo with social networks spread across music, finance, shopping, search (already starting to do that), and other properties?  They are just scratching the surface of what could be done.  Certainly if Yahoo 360 is an indicator of their adoption rate, they will have problems, but it is still early.  They have time to figure it out.

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/claim/9m3qw57" rel="me">Technorati Profile</a>

The future of social networking has already been here: Just look at our past

Want a glimpse at the future?  With history as a guide, I would argue that our relationships online have and will continue to move towards how we organize them in real life.  Simplistically, imagine that sometime in the past the only people living on earth were 50 villagers making up one small community.  If Friedman is right that the world is flat (and he is right) and if the idea is that the internet and technology is meant to shrink the world in the sense that connecting to any one person in the world becomes easier and easier, let’s consider what the end game might look like.  We started as a community of 50, so the end achievement of technology must be that we communicate and interact in a way that mimics the behavior of a community of 50.  Everyone is close, everyone is reachable.  This is our end game or our reference point for considering what technologies will prevail: simply, we ask ourselves what must be true in order for us to be closer to that end point?  The logic is that this community is supposed to be representative of what technology and the internet seeks to accomplish: take the labyrinth of complex, distant relationships and simplify and localize the connectivity to a size as manageable as our 50 person community.

Everyone has a name in this community, so our electronic equivalent at first was email addresses.  In the daily interactions of the community, they tend to value the opinions of some people over others with different levels of priority for each person.  Hence, filters were born to organize what is a natural human process.  Communication has to instant, which is what instant messaging provides.  But you are limited to only knowing the people found on your buddy list.  But in our community, everyone has access to everyone else because it is compact, which is what social networks aim to do.  In a small community, try as you may to keep some information private, it simply does not work in the long run.  The stories are simply bound to come out.  So where does that leave a community like LinkedIn that requires you to get “approval” to speak to different people in the chain?  To some extent, even in a small community, there is a chain of command: say the president of the group, her or his “cabinet,” and down the chain.  That part then is not unnatural.  But in a small community, there are always ways around the chain of command.  After all, the President can be found working in the community just like everybody else.  As information the web makes the world smaller and smaller, companies like LinkedIn will struggle because they are too rigid in upholding the chain of command.

Even a service like MySpace that allows everyone to view everyone elses’ profiles suffers from lack of openness.  My colleague Jon has made this point that inevitably it will move to an open system – whether it likes it or not.  Somehow, someway.  As my colleague Jon has suggested, privacy could simply be something that is a construction of the past 100 years, and not something that has historical been available.  Not until the advent of credit cards did the credit card statements have to be protected.  Not until the advent of telephone records, cell phones, laptops or PDAs did the information they contain be considered private.  The more information we make, the more implied need for privacy exists.  Does privacy exist in a 50 person community?  The more interconnected we become, the more we know about each other, and the more inevitable it seems that in the grand scheme of tens of thousands of years of our evolution, privacy is comparatively ephemeral.  That does not mean that we should have zero expectation of privacy; that simply means that we should be thoughtful in considering what information is benign and therefore safe to share online and what information is truly worth protecting.  This may be a thought change that requires an entire generational shift.

So where does that leave us in terms of opening up of information on walled garden networks?  Yahoo has made a half-hearted attempt at it: letting content flow in, but not permitting content to flow out.  I view there being room exclusivity players like thefacebook.  In a community of 50 people, there are still group meetings where only certain people are invited according to certain qualifications, whether it be seniority or other marker.  In this case, thefacebook’s marker is based on whether or not you are a student.  While in the 50 person community, information about each student in the group will inevitably come out, there is still room for the formality of a meeting.  Since thefacebook has an iron grip on the college market with approximately 80%-90% penetration at every school in enters, it would be a supreme challenge for another service to usurp their authority as a campus directory of students.  Even in a 50 person community, the bonds of self-selected groups can be strong and institutionalized.  Universities are by definition that very thing and certainly are not going anywhere.  But the question is do students on thefacebook also maintain profiles on other social networks as well, and on a basic level, is that not a bit redundant?  Separate buckets for school, professional and dating can exist, but I believe individuals will demand that their information be available to be shared.  This will be a bottom-up revolution where the user wants their LiveJournal blogs posted on their facebook profiles and they want their facebook wall to show up on their MySpace profile.  In this way, it is possible for the social networks to give their users what they demand but not lose the value they have in their network.

Consider Dave Pollard’s conception of the overlapping networks of relationships that people have.  His argument suggests that if buckets of social networks can exist, there will always be overlap, which reinforces the need to have a certain degree of openness of information amongst the networks.

In short, for all of the vast geography that the internet and technology has opened up, it is a race to finding a way back to the behavior of a 50 person community.  This is a thought that is very much in the early development stages and I plan to come back to it in the future.  Your comments are welcome as I try to make sense of it myself.

EXCLUSIVE: MySpace in process of offering free @myspace.com email addresses

EXCLUSIVE: A reliable source tells me MySpace is shopping around for a provider to either co-develop or simply host MySpace's new email system.  It is very much in the early stages involving MySpace soliciting advice, ideas and bids from top firms.  The idea is that MySpace will have something that will get users to return to the website regularly.  From a historical perspective, the move makes complete sense.  In the late 1990's when Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and Altavista were all gunning for the top prize, only one survived because Yahoo had developed a huge free email userbase.  Search engine users may be the most fickle of all, but changing email is a pain that most users find simply too much of a hassle, unless faced with tremendous advantages of a service at another free competitor (e.g. Gmail).  But even with Gmail, many  cling to their Yahoo Mail like a sailboat poll in a seastorm.  This should help MySpace solidify its base and let Fox executives sleep a bit better at night.  Even the most fickle social networker can find it hard to leave if they have their email on the service.  If Yahoo was the sole survivor of the YELA group in a fickle search engine market, will it be MySpace that emerges as the winner in the new one?  It seems MySpace will still do whatever it takes be even stickier because even though it is the largest and fastest growing social network, there is one competitor that could pose serious problems.