Social Web Cartographie

I found a curious cartogram of social network usage across the globe on the French newspaper Le Monde this morning. Check it out:

A few thoughts on what this means and the limitations of the map:

- The world is fragmented along the lines of old mercantilist relationships in some cases (France and Cote d’Ivore) and not in others (UK and India).

- Primary correlation between countries on a social network is language (Myspace/Facebook is all over the English speaking world), but the inverse isn’t true (Brazil and India are hot on Orkut). Also note Myspace is player in all continents. The punchline is that first mover advantage seems to apply in droves here.

- The Western Hemisphere seems to have entrenched players

- Combine the above two points plus an untapped China, and you reach the incontrovertible result that everyone in this space in 2008 will be focusing their efforts Asia for growth in new users.

- I’d be curious to see what European adoption looks like if you take out Ireland, where Bebo is ubiquitous. Seems as though users are dispersed evenly.

- Noticably absent are quasi-socialnets like Twitter and Flickr. Pete Kaminski tells me Flickr is huge in Saudi Arabia, and may make that the default social network there.

- The color scheme is a bit deceiving. Let’s do a little quick math here to see how. Assuming 75% of Canada’s 33 million population is on facebook, and none are on Myspace (unlikely), that means that there are about 150 million Facebook users in the U.S. compared to 223 million myspace users. That means at most, the ratio of Myspace users to Facebook user is 3 to 2. Yet the U.S. is firmly colored with “myspace”. I’m sure similar dynamics apply elsewhere.

“Make a Dot Com” Science Project

Courtesy of “41 hilarious science fair experiments“, I’d like to introduce you to the next Bob Parsons.

FAIL.

The High Cost of Free Parking

If you’ve never passed by upstate New York, you should - it’s literally a living museum of late 19th century America. It’s a mix of old towns left for dead by career climbers fleeing to NYC or snowbirds moving to southeastern US suburbs who left behind beautiful architecture and dwindling small communities. Mayors of these old towns are trying to revive the small businesses in their city centers and need to build consumer traffic to do that. Free downtown parking is something most mayors don’t blink at - drive traffic without incurring any additional cost.

Enter the Tragedy of the Commons

Of course, there’s no such thing as free (even if you’re talking about GPL). As soon as they turned off the meters, the towns began to accumulate a collection of antique cars. Not the kind of cars you’d find at an antique show, but another kind of artifact altogether. Try visualizing streetfuls of “vintage” automobiles which look like this:

Eventually the city had to incur the cost of pulling these heaps off the road, which were making the city sidewalks unattractive to would be customers they tried to draw in. The additional tax revenues vaporized, leaving the city in the red on the whole move. It’s a typical tragedy of the commons story, but it doesn’t end there.

Opportunity (Cost) Knocks

To accommodate the sudden increase in demand for downtown parking, some cities predictably responded by opening up parking lots. Many of them displaced farmers markets from city owned lots to spaces further outside the city, dropping the return on investment of the land now used as car storage. The city could instead have leased that land to a local business, those revenues representing the opportunity cost of that land.

The High Cost of Free Parking

Most of us have learned about the tragedy of the commons, and anyone who’s done a stint of high school economics has heard of opportunity cost. The two come in tandem almost by definition, and I call the combined effect “the high cost of free parking”.

This phenomenon works the same with enterprise software. I’ve spoken to a number of I.T. shops who figure a low cost or “free” consumer wiki works just fine for their needs. In practice, CIOs I’ve spoken to who have sanctioned “free” or “low cost” wikis have found them multiplying like rabbits. Once that happens, I.T has three possible choices: support the morass of wikis, ignore user appeals for support, or convince them to standardize on something I.T. establishes. All three in some way combine the tragedy of the commons (the commons being I.T. time and resources) with opportunity cost (the amount of time spent on departmental tech projects instead of core competencies).

The end result is far from ideal, despite all of the resources spent. What’s strange is the very tools designed to foster collaboration become handcuffs when departments contain collaboration to their own departments. When there’s no strategic drive behind collaboration software, you end up with knowledge fiefdoms contained within departments, but which do not cross-pollinate. The cost of these knowledge fiefdoms of course is “free”, as in the high cost of parking.

How high is the cost of free parking in your organization?

Profit!!

Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorite southpark episodes. Strangely enough, some business models out there seems to make about as much sense.

Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year! As many around the globe welcome the year of the rat, I thought it would be fun to share what year I was born in: the year of the tiger. According to fables passed down the ages around the tiger lunar year, the following attributes apply:

“Tigers are also incorrigibly competitive - they simply cannot pass up a challenge, especially when honor is at stake, or they are protecting those they love. Tigers are unpredictable and it would be unwise to underestimate their reactions. They may appear cool, but they have the Big Cat’s instincts to pounce at a moment’s warning. Natural leaders, they have a strong sense of their own dignity, and if they find themselves in the ranks, they can be stubborn and obstinate. In positions of power they can be difficult though stimulating bosses. Tigers are intelligent, alert, and farsighted. They have their fingers on the pulse. Good strategists and tacticians, they often have a hidden agenda. As long as they do not risk their luck too often, and keep their restless nature under control, their tactics usually pay off in life.”

While I don’t believe in astrology, the above is pretty accurate aside from the hidden agenda. I highly value honesty and try to be genuine with others.

Which are you? Do you believe the archtype represents you? Tagging Javier, Mukund, Scott, Damien, and Ling ling (spoiler: she’s a dog).

Social Superbowl, Social Elections

Something strange happened to me last Sunday; something I believe CIOs (and knowledge workers in general) will be talking about for years to come. Not the specifics of Eric’s life mind you - I’m talking about the social-mediaization of our society’s venerable activities in general such as the Superbowl, and the elections process.

I had a wonderful time this Sunday with Brian, Jeremiah, Ben, and a number of other terrific folks watching the Superbowl. Like everyone else, we cheered, we ate wings, we laughed at commercials, and we cheered some more. But the superbowl itself and the commercials took a bit of a backseat to the rumble of communication through Twitter throughout the country we were also watching. It was funny watching a NY player make an amazing catch, and watching the reactions roll in. It was even funnier watching some of the reactions from the disappointed New Englanders. Forget the networks’ vision of interactive television - interactivity is here, right now.

Fast forward two days to an American election primary, and sprinkle on a bit of Google magic on top. What you get is a mashup where each time someone sends out an “I voted” missive, you see where they are on the map. I’ve been watching about 10 - 15 messages a minute roll across the Google map on my screen. Here’s one example.

Some of them are pretty entertaining:

I realize this is hardly the pulse of America, but this better. This is the pulse of early adopter Americans, which are Americans likely to vote.

So back to why knowledge workers will be talking about this: insight. Take a look at the work of Jeremiah and Josh at Forrester have compiled. Their summary of tweets sent during the superbowl is a “poll” of viewers instanly reacting to content. Now ask yourself the following:

If you’re a sales and marketing pro, would you like to access the wisdom of the crowds for free?

If you’re CEO spending 2.5 million on a 30 second superbowl spot, wouldn’t you like instant feedback?

If you’re a political candidate on a tight budget, wouldn’t you want an aggregate mood ring of the electorate for free?

If you’re a grassroots campaign worker, wouldn’t you want an easy way to find and connect with local voters?

New Blog Look for Chinese New Year

Whaddaya Think?

Gong Hay Fat Choy.

Wacky Wacky Web

It’s always fun to see the mainstream websites adopt tools like Ajax, RESTful Web Services, widely in use by Web 2.0, especially since I contribute my bit to spreading the gospel in the enterprise. But sometimes things can get a little wacky unless you plan your work and then work to the plan. I coach prospects and clients to envision the end goal in terms of metrics (20% increase in customers, 30% less time wasted, etc.), then work backwards from there to develop a workable plan. In other words, Ajax for the sake of ajax makes no sense.

The folks at Hema (Holland’s Target) are either brilliant, or have been hitting the cannabis a bit much. They’ve put up a pretty wild website, which is viral on one hand because people are blogging about it, but also annoying because you can’t skip the circus and head straight to the buying.

The screenie below is what the default website looks like - click below, load the website, and give it a few seconds before all hell breaks loose on your screen.

By the way, notice their word for portable radio is “ghettoblaster”. Hysterical.

Twitterpitch?

The subject line here could also be titled “What I, a sales/biz dev guy, think about Twitter’s market position”, but I’m going with a punchier title. I’m totally addicted to twitter, but I feel like there’s something missing here - what’s missing goes beyond the obvious scale issue everyone else is talking about.

Twitter has been a bit of a whipping boy lately on the social software circuit. Some choice samples:

Mike Arrington: “Twitter downtime on the upswing”

DA Howlett: “.. while Twitter has great utility, it could be so much more”

Jeremiah Owyang: “The cracks are starting to show”

Allen Stern: “Is Twiter F’ed?”

There’s even an open letter out there to twitter from Shel Israel. With all due respect to him, claims that tweeters are mostly talking about twitter and the chatter is not positive is quite overstated. That said, the trend is decidedly from twitterpraise to twittergripe.

But let’s put this in context - Twitter hasn’t had much competition since the Goog bought out Jaiku and basically put them in cryostasis. That’s changing, and fast. SAP is on the move. The Automattic team will likely capitalize off the wordpress community to build adoption of their Twitter-like tool. Other vendors are likely to follow as well.

Michael Porter’s five forces model is an instructive if aging benchmark to identify areas where any organization is competitively vulnerable. I would submit the following “back-of-the-envelope” analysis is instructive despite being MBA-ish:

Threat of Supplier Influence - Low. Twitter is on an OSS/RoR stack.

Intra-industry Rivals - Low. Rivals are fairly marginalized right now.

Threat of New Competitors -High. There’s quite a bit of interest in casual awareness of activity, which seems to be a key pillar of the social graph. I expect a whole lot of activity jumping in during 2008.

Threat of Substitutes - High. We’re already seeing a number of social graph players flirt with casual presence applications mixed with other core competencies. I expect more to follow with features like conversation threading.

Buyer Propensity to Switch - Medium. My take from geeks leaving Facebook in droves is that social graph users are fickle lot (I know I am). However it’s easier to port yourself than to port everyone you speak with, so I’ll call this an orange level threat.

What falls out of this analysis is that Twitter’s challenge ahead will be differentiating itself using something other than “We were first”. There’s more than just a business model or monetization model to consider. I’d be interested what your own napkin-analysis of Twitter is based on Porter’s Five Forces, and your takeaways from it.