Social

Chase Garbarino

Value Components of a Social Network

| October 25th, 2009

Let me start by following Sir Sliggity’s lead and introducing myself. My name is Chase Garbarino and I am a one of the Co-founders here at Pinyadda. I will be blogging frequently about a number of topics including news about Pinyadda’s progress, our company culture, the social media industry, and a series of posts focusing on social network analysis (SNA).

As many friends of Pinyadda know – I am really into social network analysis. Some of you have been unfortunate enough to run into me at a bar and get locked into a conversation about measuring edge values of relationships on different social networks (social networking sites actually). Let me apologize right up front to those of you who have found yourself in this conversation at the Beer Garden on a weekend night – I often forget my passion for SNA is not the most exciting drinking fodder for others. As I have so astutely realized that most people who are interested in SNA with regards to online properties such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinyadda are not usually the people I am watching the Pats, Sox, B’s and Celts with, I am going to channel these discussions through our blog here at Pinyadda.
I have recently been reading a lot of blog posts speculating over the valuation of Twitter, most notably Robert Scoble’s post that pegs Twitter’s valuation to be between $5-$10 billion. Scoble certainly generated a lot of buzz, with more of the comments and reactions seeming to suggest that most people think he is over shooting the valuation a bit at this time. While this certainly isn’t the first time someone has taken a stab at valuing a large SNS and stirred strong debate (see TechCrunch’s SNS valuation formula here, and an old post from Om Malik about Facebook here that will make you chuckle), this particular post pushed me to share some of my thoughts on the valuation of SNS’s that I am writing a whitepaper about in the coming weeks. I personally believe that the more exploration, discussion and debate we can stir up around this topic, the better. While social media has reached critical mass with 83% of Internet users now using social media, we are merely at the tip of the iceberg on what we know about social media use and effective social media measurements will evolve an incredible amount in the coming years.
In an effort to help us develop a better understanding of SNS’s and better ways to measure different forms of value on SNS’s I would like to start a conversation about what I call the “Value components” of SNS’s. Value components are simply the different components that every SNS has that combine to make up the overall value of of a SNS. After several months of on and off research, I have come up with four value components – they are:
  1. User Behavior
  2. Content
  3. Microscopic network design – the design and types of relationships of a SNS
  4. Macroscopic network design – the overall design, structural activity and use of a SNS
The focus of my upcoming paper outlines in more detail these value components and the next set of measurements I believe we should start exploring in order to have a better understanding of where and how value is generated within SNS’s. While this will be an ever evolving project, I would greatly encourage and appreciate the contributions of others as I share my thoughts and findings on this blog.
What are your thoughts on the recent valutations of Twitter and the history of valuations of SNS’s to date?

Posted in Social | 394 Comments »

Austin Gardner-Smith

Building a Better Plane: Why RSS and the Social Web Don’t Mix

| August 10th, 2009

TechCrunch released an article today with the headline “Bloglines On Life Support“. And last week, NewsGator made the decision to shelve their web-based reader and allowed users to sync their feeds with Google Reader, which now moves into an uncontested leadership role in the RSS reader market. Can we sound the final bell on the era of RSS?

Probably not just yet. But soon – very soon. The beauty of RSS is its ability to get content from lots of sources in one place. But not a lot of people ever really got it. Many different services, from browsers to email clients to desktop applications, incorporated RSS into their feature sets. But how many Outlook users took the time to customize the RSS section of the app? How many Safari/Firefox users ever touched the built-in RSS feed readers? How many people ever downloaded a desktop reader like NetNewsWire? When compared to the general internet user base, these numbers are small. And not because RSS is nerdy or geeky – in fact, it’s one of the simplest technologies to understand. The failures of RSS hinge on two key problems: infrastructure and time.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure can mean many things. Here I’m referring to it as the pipes through which RSS feeds travel and the pages or applications used to view those feeds. No one quite got it right. Even as Google Reader grows in popularity, it remains a technology of the few and not the many, for one key reason: you have to understand how it works to use it. You have to understand how feeds work, you have to know what you want to add, and you have to have some basic knowledge of how to organize the content your read online. This has been the case with almost all implementations of RSS – the “it’s useful, it’s kind of interesting, but I don’t really get it and it’s hard to set up” argument. It’s a good argument – and even an expert RSS user will readily admit that it’s not great, and there’s probably a better way to do this stuff.

Time

RSS isn’t real time. Probably because what we think of as “real-time” didn’t exist when RSS was created. There was no Twitter, no Facebook, no FriendFeed. The difference between 5 seconds and 5 minutes wasn’t that great. Things have changed, and people demand almost instant information. RSS has responded, and services and protocols like Pubsubhubub are making it faster, indeed getting it much closer to real time. But it’s the equivalent of strapping a jet engine to a glider instead of building a better plane. RSS isn’t meant to handle real time information. It was intended for people who read a relatively static list of sources, looking for relatively specific types of information. It wasn’t designed as a platform for people to run their whole world through, and it’s not equipped to handle the influx of content from 100 sites, track the updates of 5,000 followers, or monitor the stream of 500 friends. It’s simply too much content, too fast, and RSS inherently limits our ability to parse, sort, and rank this content. Services like my6sense are trying to solve this, but it’s unclear if anyone has a good way to do this. I’m not convinced.

At Pinyadda, we have our own thoughts about the future of information. RSS was created to serve a specific information seeking need, before the social web was built. But now it’s built and we want to use it for getting information – not just social updates and birthday reminders but also articles about politics and sports scores and song recommendations and product deals. And we want it all in real time. And RSS can’t do it, even with ten jet engines strapped on. What we need is a better plane – a whole new way of thinking about information that uses the a social infrastructure to connect content across silos in real time. That’s what we’re trying to build for our users, and if we do it right they won’t have to know a thing about how it works, they’ll just know that it does work.

On that note, we’d also like to use this post to announce that we’ve been selected to participate in the AlphaPitch portion of the DEMOfall’09 conference in San Diego, September 21-23. If you’re going to be there, please leave us a note, send us an email, or hit us up on Twitter (@Pinyadda). We can’t wait to show the world what we’ve been building.

Posted in Product, Publishers, Social, Yadda Squad | 755 Comments »

Austin Gardner-Smith

A Better Way to Get Your Information

| May 14th, 2009

Good news – by the end of the week/early next week we hope to have Pinyadda up and running for a select few people to check out.  For those of you who don’t eat, sleep and breathe all things Pinyadda, let me give you a quick update on what it is we’re doing here…


A while back, Kevin and I (along with our pal Greg Rogan, now of Expat Teaching Recruitment, a kick-ass recruitment agency focusing on the placement of qualified teachers and trainers with top international companies) were transitioning from our last startup, CampusWord, when we began speaking about the potential for a smarter, more efficient way to find and consume the information we want and need everyday.  As we discussed the possibilities for our relatively vague “smart system” (enter our other partner Greg Gomer), we came up with a few ideas of what this system should be able to do:

Search for information for us even if we’re not looking. 
As Google announced earlier in the year, they have identified over a trillion unique URLs online and the number is climbing quickly.  With so much valuable information available, we could sit around searching all day and still not find every piece of content or information out there that would be valuable to us… so we need a system to do it for us.

Deliver information without having to be asked.
Brad Feld, Co-founder and Managing Director of the Foundry Group, explained this best in a recent blog post, “In 20 years, I expect we will snicker at the idea of having to go search for information…typing the same stuff into little boxes over and over again.”  Basically, no one can possibly know what to search for all the time and we believe that to receive information, a user shouldn’t have to continually ask the system for it… it should just be there for us whenever we want.

Understands the unique nature of every person’s information needs and adapts as these needs change over time.
Why should you and I see the same search results when we enter the same keyword phrase? Why should any two people see the same results ever? Why should you even see the same search results today for the same term you searched yesterday?  You shouldn’t! Because after all, information is absolutely unique and infinitely dynamic.  Think about it… absolutely unique – meaning no person “computes” any piece of information exactly the same as another person.  Infinitely dynamic - meaning at no point in time will your information needs be exactly the same as they were a moment ago (or at any other time for that matter), nor will you “compute” a piece of information exactly the same as you did at another time, nor will your information needs be exactly the same at any time… follow my drift?  In brief, the system needs to know each unique individual user and grow with them.

I think I have gone deep enough for our first blog post here.  Our team will continue to describe different parts of our vision for Pinyadda here and we look forward to receiving your feedback!  Till next time…

Posted in Product, Publishers, Social, Yadda Squad | 887 Comments »