GigaOM

In a mobile world, the conversation opener is less likely to be, “How are you?” and more likely to be, “Where are you?” Since the goal of social networking technology seems to be to get us to speak less and look at screens more (all hail the mighty text ad), Nokia’s purchase of Plazes makes all the sense in the world. In fact by buying the social mapping service, the handset maker is merely continuing efforts that began with its $8.1 billion NavTeq acquisition, which should close soon.

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Earlier this month, I shared with you my post that called for a big wake-up call for Social Networking sector, thanks to the presence of too many me-too players at a time when recent traffic trends are showing signs of hitting a plateau. Hitwise recently reported that in the US, MySpace and Facebook ranked 1st and 2nd had 95% and 93% repeat visitors for the month.

The May 2008 traffic data from comScore furthers that argument. Another interesting finding of the May 2008 data – Facebook is doing much better than MySpace in the overseas markets.

Nevertheless, of late, I have stopped taking traffic on face value, and instead almost always juxtapose it to how much money you make off those page views. (Dave McClure recently chastised me for thinking too much in the short term.)

Matt Brezina, co-founder of Xobni earlier pointed out that Facebook will take in $265 million and MySpace will bring in $755 million in 2008. So unless the overseas (and overall page view) growth translate into real big dollars, our friends at Facebook (and MySpace) have problems. Experts believe that the answer is in better relevance in display advertising – still the dominant form of advertising on the social networks.

Facebook vs Others

The traffic trends have to be troubling for for geographic hits such as Orkut and Friendster. The overseas growth of Facebook also calls into question the veracity of the decision by AOL to pay $850 million for Bebo. Some data crunching by Andrew Chen (using the newly announced Google Trends) shows that Facebook is making big headway in markets such as UK, France, China, and India.  Orkut is very popular in India, while as the map shows Bebo is big in UK and other European countries.

I think it is these guys who need to worry the most with Facebook’s march & MySpace’s rear guard action. I suspect, if Facebook continues to grow, MySpace could opt for buying market share.

But if you take a larger view,  Chen’s conclusion, that “Social networks have weaker network effects than previously speculated,” is quite prescient. As someone once noted, social networks are like night clubs – there is always a cooler, hipper, funkier joint being planned by someone.

Over past few years, generally described as the golden years of social networking have led to the sector’s giants resting on their laurels. The fundamental nature (and utility) of social networks hasn’t really changed. The platform-ization of social networks has led to the rise of social apps that are best described as time wasters. You can be fascinated by vampire bites and what not but in the end, there is a finite amount of time you can waste.

In other words, Social Networks need to find new purposes for people to come back every day and be loyal. I had argued in my previous post that the world of social networks is going to be divided into two – the big players (MySpace, Facebook) and niche players (Dogster, Dopplr etc.)

In a recent chat, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini pointed out that they are adding 2000 new niche social networks every day and are now upto 315,000 networks. The niche is allowing the company to get even good non-optimized, straight-up average eCPMs from AdSense. She pointed out that they are about 3 to 4 times better than the average for general one-size-fits-all social networks. “This is because the social networks on Ning are organized around well-defined topics and interests – skiing, smart cars, diabetes, etc. As a result, contextual advertising works more effectively for Ning than it does for other general social networks,” she said.

Photo Courtesy of comScore via C/Net News.com’s The Social. 

In an interview published this morning in the Financial Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he wouldn’t be looking to pick up any other Internet companies just because the Yahoo deal failed. One can only imagine how far shares of Facebook would have plummeted on that comment had the social networking site been publicly traded. Ditto for Slide and RockYou, both of whom recently raised money at lofty valuations.

“People don’t understand what they’re talking about,” Ballmer told the FT. “At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications.” And for Microsoft, according to the interview, the primary ad platform is search. That makes sense as search is a billion-dollar, proven business.

Application companies have some ad revenue, but right now they’re kind of like cable channels for the web, while an ad platform is the means to a business model that supports that cable channel. Microsoft wants to own the keys to the business model. So to prove their worth, it’s time for application developers to prove their business model.

YouTube’s decision to allow long-form videos on its platform got a lot of people talking, including some bloggers claiming that it was a change in their strategy. (In case you want to know what changing strategy is all about, I can recommend reading this excellent article from Harvard Business Review.) What I found funny about this brouhaha over the new strategy is that it’s a really an old strategy that’s been dusted off for legal content.

Many seem to have forgotten that YouTube used to allow long-form videos on its platform. Sure, most of it was not-so-legal, and consisted of the latest television shows and other copyrighted content. In early 2006, I wrote about being able to find everything from cricket matches to television shows on YouTube. They eventually pulled them down, but only to appease the content owners they wanted to sign up for the YouTube platform.

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Two non-profit organizations, Free Press and Public Knowledge, have ridden down the data trail of ad insertion technology provided by NebuAd and declared that it violates “several fundamental expectations of Internet privacy, security and standards-based interoperability.” In a report published today, the two compare NebuAd to malware and accuse it of Internet wiretapping.

NebuAd provides a deep-packet inspection appliance that sits on the network of an ISP. The appliance tracks information about the type of sites a user visits and serves up ads against that information. The company got a lot of attention after Charter Communications signed a deal to test the technology. Continue Reading

Three online video startup CEOs stepped down last week. The departures were for different reasons, but when you hear about them in the span of a few hours, as I did on Friday, they glom together. Herb Scannell of Next New Networks said his company would be better served by someone more web-oriented; Mollie Spilman deferred to her co-founder to lead Tidal TV; and Bill Joll of On2 didn’t give a reason, though it’s worth noting that his company recently had to restate earnings due to “falsified” sales accounts (the three are pictured in that order). And they’re not the only ones: Founding CEOs Josh Felser of Sony-owned Grouper (now Crackle) and Tim Tuttle of AOL-owned Truveo are also members of the recently-departed online video start-up CEO club.

Meanwhile, investors are calling for disciplined spending by online video companies (huh? where were you when those checkbooks were opened? VCs spent $461 million on this space in 2007 alone) and video views were down slightly in April (though I don’t doubt that at least that metric will rise overall).

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