Data Portability: Facebook, Google and MySpace

By now we’ve all read the recent data portability announcements by Google (Friend Connect), MySpace (Data Availability) and Facebook (Facebook Connect) to extend social functionality outside of their walls to any website.

Since these announcements were made I’ve been asked for my opinion about what it means to web publishers, the market and KickApps. I believe all three will be useful but the key point if you’re a publisher is to what degree do YOU want and need to own YOUR site’s audience’s’profile data and activities data. This will dictate how you use or don’t use any of the three.

At the highest level, core to every publisher is its brand, editorial content/voice and relationship with its audience. As the web becomes more social, access by the publisher to their audience’s Profile and Social Graph (audience data and activities) becomes extremely important. Having this information becomes a powerful tool that delivers deep insight into their audience, which informs editorial programming and marketing. Crucially, it plays a huge role in delivering truly targeted advertising.

While Google, MySpace and Facebook’s initiatives allow publishers to import more data from the big social networks into their own users’ experiences which will help to seed a new niche community, the CORE piece that is missing is that they don’t empower publishers to aggregate their own membership and fully access their member’s Social Graph.

To achieve this, publishers will want control of their own community profile management, reporting and social graph engine—the heart of what KickApps provides. It’s also important to publishers that core applications (UGC, social networking, widgets, programmable video players, media management, member management), along with 3rd party apps (OpenSocial and Facebook), are also fully integrated with their members’ social graph and member data out of the box.

Net-net, I believe the data portability initiatives are a good thing for the industry. KickApps will integrate with MySpace Data Availability, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect such that our publishers can quickly accelerate growth of their own audience by tapping into the “friends” their members already have on the big social networks. In that respect KickApps is not only the foundation of your social graph engine but is a serious accelerator for publishers looking to get the benefits of any “openness” provided by the big social networks while retaining ownership and control of their own audience and social graph data.

As always, the devil is in the details and we’ll all have a front row seat as it develops.

I’m sure the discussion around this will continue in the weeks and months to come. So far, Mike Gunderloy of Web Worker Daily’s post, “Google Friend Connect: What’s the Point?” resonates most with me as he examines this from a web publisher’s point of view. Charlene Li’s blogs about Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect are also a good read, as is Stacey Higginbotham’s post on GigaOM, “Prying Open the Social Graph.”

UPDATE: Eric, KickApps’ founder’s take on this can be found here. Also, Marshall Kirkpatrick has great analysis of this as usual.

KickApps Spring Update

Spring can mean different things to different people. At KickApps it means a number of things, including lots of conferences and trade shows. Before we get to that though, here’s something that you might find interesting. Rachel Happe, Research Manager, Digital Business Economy, at IDC, released a report on the state and potential of the enterprise social networking market. In her report, U.S. Social Networking Application 2008–2012 Forecast: Enterprise Social Networking Takes Hold, Happe notes a number of things that really stand out.

Last year, she projected growth in our market to come in at around 120 percent. In her research she found that actual growth in 2007 came to approximately 191 percent. For obvious reasons this isn’t a surprise to us. We’ve seen a huge lift in market traction not only for KickApps but for social media applications of all sorts. What’s remarkable is how much the industry is evolving in a very short period of time. Some of what we’re seeing from our publishing partners and agencies is showing that many really ‘get it’ and are pushing the envelope around social media, the KickApps Platform, design, programming and execution.

While 2007 exceeded Rachel’s projections, my guess is that 2008 is going see an even steeper curve in adoption. At the end of last year, KickApps was powering just under 10,000 sites. At the end of April this year, that number is just over 21,000 sites. That’s about 110% growth in 4 months! In addition, activity levels are very impressive. For example, this forum on Bonnaroo has over 740 discussions and over 4,600 replies. More than just numbers though, we’re extremely proud of the brands that have chosen to partner with us (check out a partial list here). Not bad for a site that’s just a few months old.

We get very excited about all this but what really drives us is continuing to make the KickApps Platform even more robust. As usual, stay tuned to this blog for updates on the product front and highlights of cool client deployments that are in the pipeline (WINK, WINK).

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve been busy at various conferences and trade shows over the last few weeks. These are great opportunities to meet many of you in person and also to show others what’s possible with KickApps. Here’s a quick recap:

Digital Hollywood Spring: Joining me in Hollywood were Jeff Zaretsky, Matt Bijur and Stan Shaul. Matt was on a panel about the Social Media and User Generated Media Economy with executives from Metacafe, AOL, YouTube and Redpoint Ventures, and I was on a panel about the Technology Challenges of Social Networks and User Generated Media with executives from Turner Broadcasting, Cisco, imeem and MOG. In addition, check out Matt on Pixel Head Network’s EXPOzed from the show floor.

Clickability User Conference 2008: Our partner Clickability invited us to participate in their annual user conference. An extremely successful event by all accounts, David George spoke on the panel entitled, Everything You Want to Know about Social Media, but are Afraid to Ask.

Sports Marketing 2.0 Summit: The 2nd event put on by Pat Coyle of the Indianapolis Colts was held in San Francisco. David George spoke on a panel about social networking and spent the day hanging out at SF’s beautiful AT&T Park with attendees from teams and leagues (tough job…). Social media is doing great things for sports teams and leagues, check these sites out: Phoenix Suns’ Planet Orange, Seattle Seahawks’ Spirit of 12, and New York Rangers’ I Am a Ranger.

Finally, Eric was invited to present at Needham & Co’s Third Annual Internet & Digital Media Conference yesterday.

Check out Events page for information about where we’ll be in the coming months and make sure to drop by to say hello to the team.

People Want Message Boards

In February, Kerry Bodine of Forrester published a research report entitled, “What Consumers Want On Media Web Sites.” In her research, Bodine and her team interviewed 5,000 online consumers about what they’d like to see on websites. Interestingly, one out of five reported that they’d like “discussion boards and forums on media sites.” That number jumps to one out of four in the Gen X (28-41 year old) category.

You’ll recall that back in July 2007, Alex blogged about how message boards are “The Original Micro-Communities.” We see this and Bodine’s findings reflected on many of our clients’ sites today. A great example is the Stone Temple Pilots’ KickApps site. The site recently went live and as picking up a lot of steam. With almost a thousand members already, the site’s message board is hopping with activity.

Another thing that the developers of the STP site did was to use their KickApps widget as a deployment component. We talk about widgets in terms of both a vehicle for hyper-syndication and also as a means of deploying media and content and creating a gateway from the ‘editorial’ portion of the site onto the community section. In this case, STP embedded a forum widget on the homepage of the STP site. The widget lists most recent discussions and updates the content of the widget via a KickApps powered feed. By doing this, they’ve not only integrated the site’s community content but also now have fresh and dynamic content that keeps fans of the STP coming back for more. This results in greater engagement on the website itself.

Another great example of this is on Planet Orange, the Phoenix Suns’ fan community.

A Word About Innovation

I attended Brett Petersel’s NY Web 2.0 Meetup last night in NYC where one of the presenters spent a few minutes lambasting the notion of innovation. He claimed that it’s a BS marketing concept and that the company he works for doesn’t innovate, they simply build products that people want (I’m paraphrasing based on what I heard). I suppose it’s a controversial statement to make. Yes, doing anything for the sake of doing it is silly. I think I understand why he said it. I think.

Coincidentally, I had been thinking about innovation a lot recently. In fact, over the last few days I’ve been listening to a series of podcasts by Peter Day during my daily subway commute. Mr Day does several shows on BBC Radio where he interviews business leaders around the world from various industries. In his three most recent episodes of ‘Peter Day’s Global Business,’ he talks to people from Xerox PARC, GE and Philips, three brands that have been responsible for many of the world’s most innovative technologies and products. [The podcasts are available for free on iTunes as well, really worth the listen.]

Unlike last night’s presenter, I’m proud to say that innovation plays a HUGE role at KickApps. Innovation drives and fuels our business. Innovation surfaces in our technology: the way we designed v3.0 of the KickApps Platform, our self service platform that delivers the broadest range of social media applications, a tightly integrated media and member management and reporting system, powerful tools like the feeds and widget builder, our APIs, our view on utilitarian widgets…I could go on. Innovation also rears its beautiful face in our business model: free under the KickApps Ad Inventory Network and usage based fee under the Ad Inventory Buyout.

We also see it each day from clients and KickApp’rs around the world. Case in point, Stan Shaul, our VP of Software Engineering, put together the following tutorial for creating a Tag Cloud Widget using KickApps. As Stan-the-Man puts it on KickDeveloper:

In KickApps 3.0 we introduced a tag cloud feed containing the 50 most frequently used tags in your community. With a little server-side coding, you can parse this feed and generate your own tag cloud widget. Don’t want to mess with code? No sweat. We’ve created a handy-dandy Tag Cloud Widget Tool that will do it all for you. Just input a few parameters and out pops an HTML tag cloud widget. You can customize the look of this widget by entering the URL of a custom stylesheet into this form as well. Then just paste the widget code into any webpage to add a tag cloud widget to it.

I think it’s imperative for any company or person in our industry to ask themselves how they’re delivering more than just ‘what people want.’ Innovation afterall is in part about creating things that people don’t know they want yet. [I didn't know I wanted an iPhone until Apple made it!]

How are you innovating?

The Real Value of Widgets

The hype that currently surrounds the widget industry is not completely surprising when you consider how some widgets have seen extraordinary viral adoption. The problem with this though is that many of the most popular widgets are gimmicky hit based experiences that people grow tired of quickly. It seems apparent that those who have fueled the insane valuations have seemingly ignored this obvious risk (read Fortune’s and the NY Times’ take). Real value comes from widgets that are fun, entertaining, viral but at their core provide a utility that fosters longevity. This type of utility based widget in our view forms the basis of a new rich media programmable ad unit and a more meaningful proposition for advertisers.

1) “Hit Based Gimmicky Widgets” (Super Poke, etc.)
- Low utility/value and short longevity; characterized by gimmicks and games
- General appeal, currently over-hyped
- Viral, low quality users that are fickle and not loyal—constantly chasing the next fad
- Attempted behavioral targeting here will deliver spotty results at best

Companies like Slide are now attempting to add ad networks to monetize the massive user base they’ve created. The assumption is that their widget network will be valuable to advertisers because of the behavioral information they’re able to garner. This represents a new twist on an old behavioral approach utilized by Tacoda, Revenue Science and others. I’m dubious that this will be as effective as the existing approaches and even the existing approaches require more development to realize the promise they initially presented. The other issue with the approach is it only speaks to call to action and does nothing for brand advertisers.

Vs..

2) “Utilitarian Widget” as an extension of a more robust Social Media experience that delivers quality profile data to be used to deliver relevance for both call to action and brand advertising
- High utility/value with longevity and user loyalty; niche and focused appeal
- Characterized by relevant, useful and compelling content, media and activity, (and yes, still fun)
- Viral with a high quality, loyal audience—loyalty based on utility and relevance
- Business model based on a programmed, viral ad unit and an individualized brand engagement

In this scenario, the widget is a viral ad unit. Online advertising changes dramatically and becomes a tremendous vehicle for brand marketing. Unlike the banner ad, the “WidgeAD(TM)” (as we call it) is defined by its programmability. It has utility in a person’s life by providing compelling, useful and relevant content—this takes the form of content (videos, photos, text, music, etc.) and/or interactive components (fun games, communication, commerce, etc.).This is where the game changes for Madison Ave and publishers - brand messaging takes a completely different form, moving away from poor quality banner ad messaging and the hit-and-miss approach of tracking, to actual brand engagement. The end result is a loyal audience that views the widget and its application as adding value to their lives (usually based on an interest and/or utility that they care about). This engagement then gives brands and publishers the opportunity to establish highly individualized relationships with their audiences.