Social Networking : Learnings & Opportunities

That's the title of a talk I gave at Web Innovation 2007 on December 19,'07 at Bangalore. Some key themes from the talk :

1. Don't think the story is over with (the likes of) Facebook and Orkut. Facebook will not end up ruling the social networking world, nor will any one site.There is potential yet in this technology.Many specialized networks with varying applications will emerge.

2. Each one of us can profitably be a member of 7 different specialized social networks.

3. The key value addition that online social networks bring to the Internet landscape is the creation of trust capital. While connecting people around the world is now easy because of the Internet, the problem that had hitherto not been solved was getting people - who are online but who haver not seen or met each other - to actually trust one another enough. Trust is the #1 issue in scaling up on the Net i.e. getting people who are online to actually use and embrace the Net.

Innovation by the likes of Friendster and Facebook have together shown the way. Friendster showed how to use connect and add people who were separated by more than one degree of separation. Facebook has shown how to well use sophisticated & personalized privacy controls to create virtual walled gardens. Social networks are now a tool to accumulate trust online.

Here is the ppt of my talk. Read on !

Here (and here) is some news coverage of the event and my talk.

And here is my blog post on the proceedings at Web Innovation 2007. There were several other interesting talks, here is the complete agenda / list of speakers

If you have difficulty accessing the ppt of my talk, let me know and I will zip you a copy.

And, Happy New Year to you all!