Re: MySpace Helps News Corp Lose $363 Million

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Christine Perey<cperey@perey.com> wrote:
> 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?

+1

>  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?

I would assume if you answer the above question, you answer this
latter question.

> 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).

Well, most of our use-cases are currently are about end-user
functionality. Of course, this is great as more people are users than
say, CTOs of enterprises or developers of apps, but these are
important areas of outreach too. We can develop use-cases for
end-users, but without good convincing stories for CTOs and
developers, there may be little chance of great tech being adopted.

> 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!
>

+1

> <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?

Seems like the Oslo Alliance and the OpenSocial Alliance are moving in
that direction.

> 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."


Agreed. Over the next few days before our next meeting I'll go through
the use-case document with a fine-tooth comb ala the actions from the
last meeting.

> Christine
>

Received on Wednesday, 12 August 2009 13:53:53 UTC