Slowly Reprogramming The Web For Social Networks

December 1st, 2008 by Nick Gonzalez

The New York Times printed an article today about Facebook’s growing Facebook Connect initiative. For those who don’t know, Facebook Connect is an API third party sites can use to access a users data from Facebook, as well as push data back to Facebook. Techcrunch has an excellent article enumerating the efforts of MySpace and Google along those lines.

The article listed no new information, but instead highlights the massive shift in the way we will interact with the web. Unlike other web applications, social networks are not simply destination for another form of media we consume (i.e. I go to Youtube for video, and the New York Times for news). They are another essential layer bringing context to the web the way hyperlinking has since 1965. Hyperlinking connects content around the context of a document. Social linking connects content around the user. The chief example has been services like Facebook’s news feed or Friendfeed, which deliver content relevant to your social connections.

We still have a ways to go.

Social networks and content networks are still separated. As a hack, we’re using ad hoc social networks, or underpowered networks to connect content through active sharing. These are the “share this” and “mybloglogs” of the world that leverage social connections around a specific task.

But what we really need is to have social linkages “baked in” to the website’s programming. Connect and Friend Connect are part of reprogramming the web for social connections. It will happen because social aspects push engagement and discovery, which will be attractive counterparts to attention driven through active interest on search engines like Google or Yahoo. Publishers understand that they need to reprogram.

Unfortunately, we in the advertising industry are behind. Advertising has been slow to reprogram for the social web. We’re still hung up on hyperlinking in a content connected world. This is the reason marketers don’t understand why just 57 percent of social net users report clicking on an ad over the past year versus 79 percent of all users (according to IDC). Although, clicks can be a misguided success metric for brand advertisers. Optimizing around clicks is a very different goal from optimizing around brand loyalty.

The problem is that we’re not respecting the context of the medium. On social networks, it’s social connections that make content relevant, not hyperlinks. And we’re only in the beginning stages of reprogramming advertising around this concept.

Tags: advertisers, developers

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 11:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.