Echologist.com

René was so kind to make me aware of a recent Techcrunch-Article reporting rumours of a law-suit against StudiVZ. To illustrate the similarity between StudiVZ and Facebook, the Techcrunch author used a picture from an earlier article I wrote. No harm done, but a link would have been a nice gesture…

Mario Ruckh is a frequent guest here in Cambridge due to his personal connections into the city. I was fortunate to meet him earlier this year and to learn more about one of his current projects, Kindo.

Kindo is a family social network enabling the joint work on family trees. In a recent press release, additional support from Ambient Sound Investment was announced. ASI was started by the same people who invented Skype.

For Kindo this is a big step forward because the additional investment will allow them to pursue their expansion strategy into other languages and cultures. On the other hand: the big challenge is still stickiness. How to get users to come back once they have finished their family tree? In any case, I wish lots of success with the future development of Kindo!

Jérôme Kerviel, who has alleviated Societé General of about 5 billion pounds, has a Facebook profile and a group searching for him. Difficult to hide these days…

This is the situation for German students: StudiVZ is the biggest player on the market but is going to use penetrating advertising strategies to refinance their expenses.

There are only a few ways to avoid this advertisements. Firstly, StudiVZ allows to exclude yourself from advertising, but the smarties have hidden this functions well.

Signing off completely and switching to another network is also an option. Facebook has more to offer than StudiVZ because the German network there is growing fast, but at the same time their marketing strategies are just as penetrating.

Kaioo says there are an non-commercial alternative because they will donate all revenues to charity. The problem is: when it comes to functionalit, it is even less satisfying than StudiVZ. For instance, it is impossible to administrate jointly a group in Kaioo – so much said about networking.

See Report by Fortinet and blog post by Programmable Web.

Drawing a Family Tree is difficult

Genealogy is a fascinating hobby not only available to the upper classes. Through Internet Archive and Google Search it is fairly easy to contact distant relatives. A few blogs discuss genealogy, such as Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter.

But how to draw a family tree? Bottom-Top starting with me and listing my ancestors? Or Top-Bottom starting with one of my ancestors and listing all his offspring? In the first case, I get a complete lists of all people whose genes I have in my body, in the second case I get a list of people who share some of my genes. In the first case, the siblings of my ancestors are ignored, in the second case the parents and siblings of the partners of offspring.

Family Trees with Web 1.0

Several programs allow creating famility trees (such as Wingeno). With these programs it is possible to visualize family trees from different perspectives. The problem is: somewhere you have to save the file with all connections and only one person can edit the file. With this method, Family Trees develop isolated from each other.

Family Tree are compact social networks: Each relation can be generated via the Parent-Child-Relationship because most peopke have only one biological father and only one biological mother.

Family Trees are ideal for collaborative work Each family member has a set of local knowledge about their relatives. Together we can create a more comprehensive family tree.

One possibility for cooperation is offered by Wikitree, yet the editing of Wikis seems to be a big hurdle for many: even though Wikitree existed since 2005, only 46.262 profiles have been created.

Other platforms are Ancestry.com (Blog, 5 billion entries), OneGreatFamily.com (see comment), Kinjunction, Genesreunited or Myheritage.com (for a comparison see Wallstreet Journal).

Family Tree Social Networks

David Sacks, former Board Member at Paypal and inventor of geni.com wanted to simplify the creation of family trees by using a visual user interface to “create a family tree of the whole world”. The Social Network allows to inviterelatives by email in order to collaborate on the same family tree. More than 10 million profiles have been created on Geni so far.

Geni also receives good reviews in the blogosphere (see Kevin Lim, MaunTech, Jason Unger, Alexis Brion, Web2.0Directory, Stefani Twyford, Whippleworld, TechcoastReview, PeoplesearchDigest, James Seng or Mark Buzinkay).

Can Geni compete with more established firms which can easily copy its functions but have more profiles available? Geni at the moment is estimated to be worth 100 million US-Dollarsgrowing market.

Geni was adapted by Sven Schmidt with the name verwandt.de (related), but it is also available in English at itsourtree.com. Verwandt grows faster then Geni.

Verwandt has received a good press coverage and blog coverage (Robert Basic, Burkhard Schneider, Mike Lima, Volker Hepp, Mark Buzinkay). Verwandt was participant in the competition for the German Start Up of the Year 2007.

A third network follows a similar path: Kindo.com. Kindo is produced by an international team of young software engineers and webdesigners working in London. Even though it started last, it has made quite a wave in the blogosphere (Mutado, Internet-Business, Digital Passports, Mike Stopforth, Josh Lowensohn, Interment, The OpenPress, Xboxservice, Ruben Colomer, Deutsche Startups, Alexander Trust, Silvio Ströver, Comdao, Mark Buzinkay) and in the press.

Advantages and disadvantes of Geni.com, Verwandt.de und Kindo.com

Creating a family tree is very simple: starting with one person you add parents, siblings, kids or partners (see video-tutorial from Kindo).

Since all three networks were created with Flash, the graphics are quite nice. You click on any person in the network and see their ancestors, siblings and offspring. Further branches of the trees are in the background and can be retrieved through clicking on a person.

Additional information can be saved – marriage-, birth- and death-dates which are shown in a calendar. Address data, Photos and much more can be saved for each person. In these general functions, the three social networks barely differ although it is obvious that Verwandt copied directly from Geni while Kindo changed a few things.

Export, Delete, Change

Geni and Verwandt allow export into a gedcom-file, Kindo doesn’t (yet). Neither of them allow to import Gedcom-Files. Geni plans to release a Share-Version for your own website, Facebook or Myspace.

None of the three social networks allow to merge existing familiy treems, but Geni thinks about it.

You cannot delete people which you have invited via email. Also Persons can only be deleted if they are not a knot in the network, in other words if they have only one contact. If you have more than two contacts, first your contacts have to be deleted. The aim is to keep the network intact, but at the same time small mistakes can have a big impact.

Data Security

Everyone working on a family tree can edit and delete profiles – theoretically the whole family tree. The management of editing rights is not satisfactory solved in all three networks.

Another questions remains as well: what happens with the data? Family data is valuable and users should be aware that nothing can prevent the owners of these networks to sell the complete data set – even if they claim that they have no intention to do so.

Circles and Single Parents

Verwandt assigns people to each other without being asked to because it does not consider single parents. At Geni or Kindo Single Parents” are possible.

Complex family relationships are not mapable in Verwandt. Notwithstanding Inbreeding of the Royal Nobility, it is possible to create very simple cases for instance when two sisters marry two brothers. At Geni it is possible to create “Family Cycles”.

Communication and Performance

All three companies have corporate blogs to be in touch with their users. Geni has a forum to discuss errors and bugs. The support of all three companies is quick and effective.

Verwandt and kindo are sometimes a little bit slow – this creates errors. Geni is often faster and has less bugs.

Summary

If you don’t mind English, then use Geni. If you need a German network, then with Verwandt and Kindo you will have platforms which are to some extent sufficient but still have some drawbacks.

A German Version of this Article can be found here

Interesting Business Model: first build up neighbour-network, then “sell” the company to an investor in Dubai, change the terms of business and make all users pay 9 Euros per month, then make it very difficult to retrieve passwords and hide the “Delete Account”-Button somewhere in the FAQ-section.

The fomer owner of this social network, Tobias Heine, propably knows that it is not possible to suddenly change a free membership into a paid membership without explicit consent of the users. The little button of consent which pops up after log-in does not even mention the membership fee. I am not sure what happens if the users suddenly find a bill in their mailbox. Some users might be too scared to deny paying the fee or risking a case in court. A short search via Google should help.

Via Augsblog1, Augsblog2, Augsblog3, Deutsche Startups, Fudder, Computerbetrug1 und Computerbetrug 2 (Forum), Protectus, Förderland, Onlinekosten, Suchmaschinenmarketing-Blog, Abzocknews, Region-München, n-tv, Rechtzwei-Null, DSL-Team.

Optimists:

• Global Social Networks are growing.
• Younger Consumers are more receptive to advertising on user-generated content sites.
• Widgets make Facebook a great platform.
• Recipe for Succesful Facebook Apps

Pessimists:

• Social Networks won’t work for business.
• Social Ads won’t work.
• In order to make money, Facebook-Apps would need more users than currently exist on Facebook.
• Facebook-Apps are for children.

Neutral:

• The biggest and most open network wins.
• Pros and Cons of Opening a Social Network
• Facebook needs to buy content from other user-generated platforms.
• Long-Tail distribution of Facebook-Apps

This is is just a short list of articles that I find very illuminating on the whole Facebook-Controversy. More articles are going to be added to this list.

Steve Rubel points to this graph and seems to say: does this feel like a bubble, all this talk about Web 2.0? Maybe it just reflects the fact that HR departments realize that this is important?

The Judge Business School seems to be a large playground. Today’s “toddlers” came from Silicon Valley, ready to meet start-ups, entrepreneurs, students and an interested crowd.

Amicably, as Americans are, the conference was very entertaining and a good opportunity to learn about what is “Hot” at the Silicon Valley: Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, User-Generated-Media, Facebook, Data Privacy, Consumer-Media-Applications, Facebook. Oh, and did I mention that we talked about Facebook a lot?

The experts were good. Kara Swisher’s dry humour about how much she is annoyed by Facebook or Reid Hoffman (from LinkedIn) witty about the seven deadly sins working in Social Networks stick to my memory.

Facebook deserves the buzz. But discussions only scratched the surface. It seems to me that real hardcore-information is sometimes hard to get and the experts are reluctant to give it away. How to avoid the problems which scaling a social network involves? How to best organize the user-support? Which features are sticky? What are the essential characteristics of succesful Social Networks? Innovative new ideas? A viral user-base? An appealing design? Or is the random factor very important? How important is data-security? Hans-Peter Brondmo made an interesting remark that we need to look at user-data as an asset that is individually owned, which should be protected from theft but which also could be sold if the user consents to it. Would the users care more about their data if they really own it?

The answer to these questions are more likely to help decide whether there is a Web 2.0 bubble. The question is not whether technology stock prices are too high or companies are bought for incredible sums. The question is not whether there are too many start-ups or too much Venture Capitalists running with the herd.

The last bubble burst because everybody had wrong expectations about the behaviour of people on the Internet. The expectation was that by 2005 everything would be done on the Internet. The question is really: has the behaviour changed enough to change the way money is earned on the Internet?

Great Cartoons from Social Signal, via Web Jungle and One Degree.

Despites Microsoft involvement with Facebook, what would happen if Google and Facebook merge? Like in the screenshot of Google in 2084, can you then literally search your brain, your friends’ private life or conversations of your former colleagues?

It is possible to link Google and Facebook. With this Facebook-Application it is possible to search Google directly. Another (malfunct) Widget displays your Facebook profile on IGoogle. Yet another (malfunct) application links Orkut and Facebook.

In reference to my previous discussion of Facebook Advertisment, I think that Facebook-Pages might be a good possiblity to spread information for local public institutions, such as libraries.

Facebook would certainly be a great tool to search for books in my library, renew my loans, share recommendations about books and discuss the class material with my classmates. Some libraries have created a profile on Facebook. Sarah Glassmeyer writes:

A couple of British libraries decided to start into the Facebook Pages. As of 9:30am EST (on November 14th), there are 70 Library Facebook Pages. There are 36 university libraries, 30 public libraries, 2 private libraries, 1 corporate and 1 virtual.

Several discussion groups have emerged around this topic: FacebookAppsforLibraries and LibAds(sm) discuss SocialAd technology to retrieve local library information.

The Library 2.0 Interest Group discusses how Social Networks can help libraries to bridge the Social Space and the Academic Space (see diagram on the left). Gerry McKiernan’s blog reports about the use of online social networking sites for library-related programs or services and is a great resource for developments in this field.

Does Online-Marketing work on Social Networks?

Can Social Networks earn enough money through online marketing to justify their investments? The pessimist answer to this question is given by today’s article in the Financial Time called “Publicis warns of web bubble”. Journalist Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson quotes Maurice Lévy, CEO of the marketing company Publicis:

“Far too many people are building plans based on advertising and they may well be disappointed because there is not enough money for everyone. [...] It’s exactly the same situation as we saw at the end of the 1990s, when everyone thought that because he had a website he’d get the valuation. Now everyone building a Web 2.0 operation believes he will receive the advertising. [...] I’m not sure we’ve found the right way of communicating with that audience.”

The general argument is twofold: the market for online-marketing is too small compared to the evaluations of companies like Facebook and Social Networks are not suited for online-marketing.

Social networks can not be compared to sites like Ebay or Amazon. Social networks are primarily used for exchanging social information and staying touch, not for buying and selling items. Online Marketing is a nuisance to Facebook users, but does not disturb on Ebay or Amazon.

Facebooks Marketing Mechanisms

Companies might use social networks for totally different reasons then marketing. They can use social networks for market research and getting an idea of what their target group is concerned about (trend scouting). They can test new products and establish feedback channels. They can use social networks for recruiting or for their internal social networks.

Facebook has six mechanisms to co-operate with businesses:

• Socialads: These are classical ads placed in the left margin of the site or as horizontal bar in the News Feed for the users. The cost very little – the minimum charge is 5 US-Dollars.
  According to Brad Lindner, big brand names such as Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Sony Pictures, and Verizon Wireless have entered advertising deals with Facebook.
• Pages: Similar to a user-page, advertisers can create a page of their own that allows users to write on the advertiser’s wall and send messages.
• Insights: Like Google-Analytics, Facebook offers a tool for the advertisers to see the impact of their campaign. It is a free service for users of Social Ads and Pages.
• Applications: Applications are small programs that users can install on their profiles. They allow specific interactions between users, such as sharing videos or sending visual messages. Other applications allow to play games with other users, compare users with each other or rank them.
• Polls: Advertisers can create surveys in which users can participate. The results from the surveys can be seen while users are filling them out.

Are Beacons Illegal?

The sixth piece of Facebooks Advertising Strategy are Beacons: Beacons can be used in combinations of pages and ads.

Beacons track what people do on the Internet while being logged in to Facebook. When I read an article in the New York Times, the New York Times will send a short notice to my Facebook profile which then will be displayed to my Facebook friends (or whoever can read my feed according to my privacy settings). I need to be logged into Facebook.

Allfacebook and Techcrunch had released plans of this earlier this week:

From what we hear, third parties supply this data to Facebook without compensation; what they get in return is a link back in the News Feed (which is effectively a free ad). Facebook, of course, gets incredibly valuable data about the user. This data can be used to serve targeted (highly, highly targeted) ads back to them in various other places on Facebook and elsewhere.

Fred Stutzman explains how this works:

Any time you load [a] Beacon-enabled page, Facebook knows exactly what you are looking at. In essence, this setup is sending your clickstream and path data to Facebook, precisely correlated to your Facebook identity.

Adam Ostrows Poll shows that a large majority of people find this intrusion into their privacy very dangerous. William McGeveran argues that this part of Facebook ads might even be illegal:

It may break the law. [...] Privacy law, as it should, treats advertising uses differently from other uses. One of the four common-law privacy torts forbids “appropriation.” Specifically: “One who appropriates to his own use or benefit the name of likeness of another is subject to liability to the other for an invasion of his privacy.” [...] Several states including New York and California have statutory provisions that are similar. New York’s well-known statute creates both a misdemeanor and a civil cause of action for “[a]ny person whose name, portrait, picture, or voice is used within this state for advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade without the written consent first obtained.”

In easier words: it is illegal to use somebody’s name and picture to advertise a product without his consent. But this is exactly what happens with the Beacon feature. As Sachin Balagopalan writes:

So when a member becomes a fan of say Coke all his/her friends will see the announcement in their news feed – something like “Joe is a fan of diet Coke”. Where it gets interesting is Coke can pay to place their logo and a caption underneath every news feed item that references diet Coke. In addition to that Joe’s friends will see his image and text stating his likeness towards diet coke on the banner ads throughout the site.

The general legal discussion is quite fascinating, however it is unclear how users will react. In response to these concerns, William Tildesley created a Facebook group and Om Malik has questioned a representative from Facebook about how users can avoid being tracked, but the answer is far from satisfying. Natt Weiner explains how to block the Beacon mechanism when using Firefox Mozilla.

I think that only experienced users which care about their data privacy issue would take these steps. I agree with Sohaib Thiab:

With more and more sites eventually use Facebook Beacon, our browsing, purchasing and general internet habits will be recorded and distributed in our news feeds. [...] This partially answers the questions everyone has been asking, why is Facebook worth that much (15 billion)? Consumer data that Facebook is gathering is and will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars if not more.

Conclusion

The reason why Facebook is an interesting marketing platform has nothing to do with the sales on its platforms. It is far more valuable as strengthening the link between the target group and the advertisement campaign.

Rana Sobhany reports that a Facebook-Application called “Total Sports Fan” was hacked, causing unwanted posts in a forum on Facebook under the name of users which have installed this application.

The Facebook-applications have been under critique for their possibility of infringing data security. Liam Tung and Harald Weiss from Silicon.de in an article from July 2007, quote Ryan Olson from Verisign saying that the applications can be used to spread damaging code.

Joshua Kamper from Fracebookobserver writes:

Concerns raised by group members in the other discussion topics, that the problem is not with the application and is just a Facebook flaw. As one of the members rightly points out “no virus, someone figured out how to edit posts other people made, nothing wrong with the app, just the discussion board”.

In Marios Blog I found this remark about the Social Network “Iwiw” created by Szabó Márton and Seprenyi Péter:

The page has 2.6 million users, even though only 3.5 million Hungarians have Internet.

This is a market penetration of 75%. [...] In July 2006, the site had 1 million users, it grew by 50% in six months and another 70% in the last ten month. Last year the social network was bought for 5 Million US-$ by Magyar Telekom (subsidiary of the German Telecom).

Neil writes that iWiW stands for International Who is Who:

With 1.6 million members out of a population of 10 million, if you’re a young, social and computer-literate Hungarian, you’re almost certainly a member.

It was perhaps this opportunity to have almost universal access to the country’s most sought-after consumers that prompted T-Online, a part of Deutsche Telekom, to pay almost €4m for iWiW in April 2006.

The deal made the founders, led by Zsolt Várady, pretty well-off overnight – although they must now be wondering if they could have held out for more, given the speed with which T-Online has increased the operation’s revenue from online advertising.

“We started the network in 2002. At that time it had no name; it was just an IP address where friends could connect. We had no cash, we used old computers and we worked from home,” says Márton Szabó, another founder, who is now managing director of iWiW.

Rather than being a scheme aimed at making millions, iWiW owes its existence to a “sociometric survey” of people’s social habits, which revealed that the internet could improve social dynamics. As membership snowballed to 20,000 in the first six months, the founders brought in a local software firm.

[...]

In 2005 iWiW turned over just €20,000 and made no profit. Under T-Online it turned over nearly €900,000 revenue and made a profit, the vastly increased revenue stream owing everything to a strictly commercial approach to web advertising adopted by T-Online.

Thanks to Laberena for the link.

Written by Pete Foggitt and Thomas Hewitt Jones in 2006, who created a group on Facebook to push their record sales. Their ingenious songs features such lines such as:

Poke me night or day whether you are straight or gay.

Turkstudent.net is a social network for Turkish students.

It was created by Fatih Dogan, Law Student, Gazi Keskin Medical Student, and Suat Imamoglu, Law Student, all three from the University of Freiburg in Germany. TurkStudent.net has 125.000 users and 6 millio page impressions per month. 81% of the users are coming from Turkey. Their press release can be found here.

There are four Ehssan Darianis on Facebook, one of them is presumably the StudiVZ-Ehssan. There are two Mark Zuckerbergs on StudiVZ, none of them are the Facebook-Mark. I received a message from “Mark Zuckerberg” on StudiVZ.

I guess this is the right moment to show studivz what the meaning of grass roots movment is!!! tell people to move to facebook!!! Write on their wall and join the group.

The StudiVZ-profile named Mark’s birthday (14.05.1984) and claimed that he was member of these three groups:

• Facebook is viel toller als studiverzeichnis (Facebook is better than StudiVZ)
• facebook rulez!
• Studivz ist ein billiger Abklatsch vom FACEBOOK (StudiVZ is a cheap copy of Facebook)

Since the StudiVZ team had met in the fall of 2006 with the Facebook team in New York, I assume that the real Mark Zuckerberg would have no intention to disrupt StudiVZ. Facebook does not see StudiVZ as a competitor. In the end it does not matter if a large number of StudiVZ users are transfering to Facebook and using both of the networks.

Why would Facebook want to take over StudiVZ, as Jochen suggested recently. Like Robert, Paul and Carsten I am very skeptical.

On the other hand, just a little bit of guesswork: Imagine if StudiVZ and Facebook formed some sort of agreement that StudiVZ can build up its Social Network based on Facebook technology. Holtzbrinck steps in to get it off the ground, StudiVZ runs for two years to have a stable user base and then they offer to the users an easy transfer of their data and connections into Facebook.

Holtzbrinck never invested something as 85 million Euro in StudiVZ, the sum was linked to a large bunch of conditions and the net investment of Holtzbrinck was considerably lower. So Facebook wouldn’t have to give Holtzbrinck this lump sum.

Anyway, after confronting “Mark Zuckerberg” with this opinion and asking him whether he was real or fake, the creator of the profile replied:

of course I am not the real Mark Zuckerberg. I am a fake account. I was created by somebody that doesn’t like StudiVZ very much and that now would be a good time to start a small grass root movement. As an experiment. If you want, use me and make friends with other people. I guess this would have some impact if a virtual Mark Zuckerberg has got a couple of thousands friends on StudiVZ.

When I checked again this afternoon, only few people had become friends of this virtual “Mark”. So far, the “experiment” does not seem to be very successful.

The creator of this profile send me the access-email and the password. I don’t think anybody wants profiles to be created in his name. Therefore I decided to delete the account completely.

If you want StudiVZ-users to switch to Facebook, then just wait.