Social Networking: The Web Game Changer
This is the first session in the Applications and Standards Track at HighEdWeb. Presented by Lance Merker, CEO of OmniUpdate, Inc.
Social networking has been around since people gathered around the campfire. Social networking moved on to transportation, and later communications technologies. Now, digital communications are the big thing. There have been only 3 killer internet apps: Email, the web, social networks.
Today’s prospective freshmen: big on the internet based social networking. 49% of students use social networks to make new friends. What about email? Reports of the death of email are greatly exaggerated.
Social networks are the new killer app, and they’re not just web-based. They’re also both private and public — have to think about both; not just Facebook. What do social networks replace? Email. Chat. Blogs. Photo, video sharing. Although all of these are essentially rolled into many social network applications.
Public vs. Private. Facebook is public — personal pages and institutional pages. Institutional pages have fans events. Private social networks: Ning. Example of Ning sites: highedweb2008, uwebd. But some universities also ahve their own Ning sites (e.g., Texas Southern University, SUNY Oswego alumni). Why not just use Facebook? Some members might not be on those networks and/or want to share information, but they would want to be in touch with certain groups.
How can we use these technologies: Assign responsibility for site, participate, connect everything. RSS feeds: saturate everything. Social networks, portals, blogs, homepage, SMS text messaging. For example, add an RSS feed on your institution’s Facebook page. Add a Facebook/Ning badge to your website.
Interesting note Christina.
In the telecom arena most cell phone carriers have seen that voice based revenue have been stagnating (the market in the US is saturated, but it is exploding in Asia and thew Middle East), and are doing everything they can do increase their packet-based data revenue. So, if you were wondering what my point was going to be, this is where social networking comes in. For cell phone infrastructure providers, carriers and handset manufacturers – the challenge is to be able to make social networking and Web 2.0/3.0 applications available at all times to users!
We work on things such as Fixed-Mobile onvergence and Mobile-Web 2.0/3.0 convergence. The idea being that a user can be on a mobile network or a fixed network (ADSL, WiFi connection etc), and yet be able to seamlessly transition between them and continue to twitter or blog etc. Not to mention, the security platforms that have to be implemented underneath all these communication channels to make sure the data is still safe! And, lest I forget, cost efficient billing/charging schemes.
On another note, I’m going out on a limb here, I have yet to see organizations/institutions that have developed effective and scalable buiness models for using social networking for profit. If you know of any, let me know! Universities/educational institutions may lead the pack to new frontiers here. Hopefully mobile handset manufacturers and cell phone carriers will be able to: 1) continue to make the underlying technology cheap, reliable and scalable and 2) develop new apps and platforms that enable users to be wired ubiquitously.
Comment by Ajith Prabhakar — October 6, 2008 @ 10:59 am