Social nets coming of age
When we started seeing social network sites spring up (Friendster being the first to make waves) it was obvious this was a phenomenon that would grow in impact. It was also obvious that it was case of the tail wagging the dog, in that the applications weren’t there. It was like viral marketing before Hotmail: cool concept in general, but what’s a killer app for it?
I knew one of the founders of one of the first wave of app companies that tried to harness social nets. Their app, which they sell into companies, leverages the network of contacts that sales organizations have, and enables salespeople to easily share those contacts amongst each other as they try to make quota. LinkedIn does something similar on a public basis. Both are cool ideas, but the problem is that they rely too much on the willingness of others to put self-interest aside to help associates.
As Darwin would’ve pointed out, the communities that are built on self-interest are more likely to be successful. The Last.FM community is a good example of a social network with a killer app, one that creates collective benefit through individual self-interest. Essentially it’s a streaming radio network that personalizes playlists based on your individual tastes. They have two modes, “personal radio” and “profile radio”. Personal radio streams songs that map to the tracks a user plays on his/her PC media player. I can stream my own station or those of others; it’s like eavesdropping on their playlist. Profile radio uses the profiles and playlists of your contacts and musical “neighbors” (those with similar tastes) to create a constantly changing music stream–unpredictable and wonderful. Users can mark a song “Love”, “Skip”, or “Ban,” and their profile is so changed. A ban ensures that song/artist is not played again.
The point is that, while I’m glad my actions on the site help others to discover music, what I really want is to listen to music that I like. And the more I do that, the more my social network benefits. This is not a new observation, but it seems too easily forgotten in these heady days of “new” ideas.
Last.FM - Your personal music network - Personalised online radio station