Re: MySpace Helps News Corp Lose $363 Million

Hi all,

Harry Halpin wrote:
> I'd like to see about a third of our use-cases based on businesses,
> and there are a number of actions to write them up. Let's try to write
> some over the next week.
>   
I just want to make sure that we don't get our signals crossed when we 
speak about the large topic of "the business of social networking."

When I have spoken/written about the need for business cases, I am 
primarily thinking of/referring to the issues facing companies who 
currently provide or plan in the near future to provide their platform, 
special enabling component or services to consumers (for consumers, like 
MySpace, Facebook, etc).

What I'm asking (rhetorically at this point) are questions structured as 
follows:
    what are the financial incentives for companies to invest in 
developing a great open platform and user experience for people (the 
general public) who want to communicate/publish and consume social media?

   what are the incentives for companies currently offering social 
networking to drop what they are currently offering and adopt W3C (or 
anyone's) standards for social networking?

The business cases for *business social networking* (where corporations 
use business social networking platforms for internal secure 
communication or "externally" for communicating with their customers) 
are perhaps interesting topics as well, but these business cases are not 
the topic on which I was focusing when I originally responded to the 
post by Melvin about MySpace.

I really don't have a need to examine or to discuss use cases which 
focus on the corporate applications for social networking. I certainly 
don't think one third of the use cases should be enterprise user 
focused, but a few could raise interesting security/privacy issues 
(someone within the firewall, the other outside the corporate firewall).

It would certainly be valuable for one-third of the use cases to 
describe some way that *revenue* is generated in a social networking 
ecosystem as a result of one or more individuals doing something in an 
Open Social Web environment!

<snip>

if companies in the market want a standard for open social networking and they have business cases for it, these cases
*should* be part of the use-case documentation and worked into the final report.

Has any company currently providing social networking platforms or 
services asked for one or more standards for open social networking?

I think that the statement goes something like this:
 "if companies can find (have, are given) one (or several) business 
case(s) for open social networking, THEN they might think about how to 
use standards for open social networking."

Christine

Received on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 12:52:13 UTC