DISQUS

Minger · 2 years ago

Nick,

Friendster's attempt at the social graph -- showing the chain of connections between any two people -- was a really cool feature but as you assert, supporting it proved to be a huge competitive disadvantage as that and failure to robustly support basic features like email compelled people to switch when a more nimble, stripped down and exciting competitor emerged. MySpace has done well avoiding the same quagmire of supporting technical social features beyond their means while instead delivering superficial but practical features like blogs and boards to their audience. That Google would pay handsomely to remedy their search deficiency makes MySpace look like geniuses. But however well their strategy proved against the hapless Friendster, it will fail them in this latest round of the social network war. MySpace is too busy monetizing eyeballs while Facebook is increasing their competitive advantage lead through deep social innovation. The deal with Google was a monetization event too -- search is a staid service to be outsourced, not a dynamic distinguishing feature. MySpace is taking a lot of lumps. I'm curious to see if they with their Hollywood dealmaking mindset can do any better than Yahoo at mounting an effective response to focused technocratic challenges.

Todd Vernon · 2 years ago

Nick,

We believe this is very powerful form of search that matches the actions people take in the real world. A great example, I have a friend that recently purchased a mountain property. I don’t believe he is an expert on Mountain properties however the two of us share certain aspects of our personality that would lead me to believe that whatever road he walked down to find the property he ended up with be of huge value to me in my own search.

Lijit ( http://www.lijit.com ) provides the facebook capability outlined in Aditya’s post ( http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2535632130 ), but we do it on the wide open web. In the above example I went to my friends blog and entered “Keystone”, knowing from his previous posts that he had purchased a property there. The results I get back from Lijit include the posts he made about the property, his del.icio.us bookmarks relating to his search including the real-estate agent he used. Also included were photos of his property from his wife uploaded to her flickr account that were brought into the search via the linkage between his blog, hers, and then out to her photos. All automatically.

It’s a powerful concept, and I believe the idea of being able to relocate the search locus is powerful for Facebook in the same way it is powerful to Lijit. People are the ultimate metadata.