(2003-09-18) Social Networking Summit

Lots of coverage for the Social Networking confab at Stanford.

• Stewart Butterfield noted Andrew Anker began, "I talked to Reid Hoffman yesterday and said that I was going to be the skeptic on the panel. And then I got here and saw all the other VCs in the crowd. And I decided not to be." (Others more attuned to the visages of Valley VCs assured this reporter that the room was indeed full of them, and even your naive Canadian interloper couldn't help but notice that the nametags ending with "Capital" outnumbered those ending with "Software" or "Technologies" .) And Finally CynthiaTypaldos got her turn and offered her perspective from the Software Product Marketing Egroup, a member-controlled guild-like (The Craft) association: "We evaluated all these tools and found nothing that that really works. This is a Free Agent nation and our career information can't be owned by some company. What we found in the end was that Blogger, some blogging tools like blogtalk, blogrolling, and Yahoo Groups we had all we needed. It's amazing what you can do with all that stuff."

• Ross Mayfield sounds more positive, and also clarifies SocialText's fit in the space (hmm, did he really belong in a Social Networking event?). What makes these plays great is the ability to have a low capital investment grow virally to achieve scaled value... Marc Canter asked his usual open question (FOAF), Reid Hoffman responded sensibly that as the graphs mature its certainly an option... What Social Networking and Social Software have in common is people trying to connect. Someone please tell me what is more fundamentally valuable than that. Hmm, that doesn't mean there will be profits.

• Yong Su Kim said Although the event was entertaining, I didn't feel that the panelists provided much insight on business models for social networks. Any attempt by Tony Perkins to really dig into the details was met with a flip response (mostly from JonathanAbrams, Founder and CEO Friendster), or a generic response about how creating value will lead to paying subscribers. Either the panelists weren't sure about a business model for social networks, or they had all the answers but didn't feel like sharing their thoughts with potential competitors in the room... There was a general consensus that the social networking space would be very different a year from now and that it would come down to the size and branding of the networks determining the value and success of these companies, rather than barriers to entry and competitive differentiation by product features and intellectual property. There was also many references to Match.com as a success story and how you need just a small percentage of your audience to convert to paying customers to grow and sustain a healthy business with high margins. Hmmm, will Match.com be the new equivalent to WSJ.com in "proving" that "you'll be able to charge for content/networking"?

• Danah Boyd said Everyone is riding on theories; there are no success stories to say how this is going to work, how this is going to make money. Since everyone's bank rides on their theories, suddenly there are experts because when you lack data, you need to back your ideas with confidence so as to encourage others to do so as well, thereby increasing your likelihood of succeeding (business is a strange world to me)... Unfortunately, very little of the panel got into the content of the topic. Instead, it was a pure dance that would've made Goffman proud. And went on to a bit of meaty thought: People maintain a coherent social network. The multiple contexts in which we interact create facets in our social network that we know how to maintain quite meaningfully... We don't want to maintain multiple networks; we want to maintain one network that we can facet as we see fit. This is a trick that no one in this "space" has figured out yet. This means that we don't always want a public network, because we're not always willing to collapse those facets.