Open protocols for virtual worlds and social networks
I’ve just read an article in the march edition of The Economist in which the author was comparing what happen in late 90 with closed networks like Compuserve and AOL (Infovia was the Spanish equivalent) with what is happening now with social networks and virtual worlds. As now I’m into social networks not only as an user but also as developer I had time to think a lot about the topic and I foreseen a future like the one described in the article.
What happened with AOL, Compuserve and Infovia in middle 90′ is that they created a lot of content in a proprietary and inoperable way. High quality (by that time) message, chat and web publishing applications. In US that kind of systems were the first contact with internet for millions of people. In Spain Infovia was the closed network that provide the infrastructure for the first providers and Internet companies.
But when the magic of the open protocols like http gain a critical mass, everybody wanted to surf on the primitive wild internet instead of surf on a controlled closed bubble. Some years were necessary before the quality of the new and open internet was on par with the previous proprietary versions but it didn’t mattered. At the end, AOL, Compuserve and Infovia accepted the new situation, took to pieces the closed networks, and mutated as normal providers or disappeared.
Now we are in a similar situation. We have a lot of different social networks but all of them are inoperable between them. For example, you can’t write a profile on Facebook and make it automatically appear on Bebo. You update an event on Tuenti and it don’t magically update also Facebook. You tell twitter what are you doing but Facebook didn’t realize that unless you install glue in the middle.
In my opinion there are two big problems here. On one hand the local social networks with local content are always going to be stronger if they are big enough to be interesting for their users. That means that it’s impossible for a single company to have all the social network users in the world, because the people will always prefer a localized version. Facebook don’t have anything to do in Korea and Japan if they don’t place cute hello kitties all over the website. In the case of my country, I think that if there is a well designed Spanish social network (Tuenti anyone?) is going to be very difficult for Facebook to gain a important market share because the people is lazy to update more than one service. And the more popular service will be always used because it just works.
On the other hand, the social networks believe that all their value is on the information of their user’s profiles. The bigger the network the bigger the business. In my opinion that is completely flawed because is not entirely true. The more people, the more interesting content the site has so it attract more visits, which means more advertisement so you get more money. But only *having* that information on itself *has not value*, you need to offer something interesting before.
Two things can happen. The companies can buy each others in a movement resemblance of the internet bubble or simply glue their databases and create bigger networks. That means interconnect their networks. It won’t matter because the history tell us that it’s inevitable for an open protocol to appear.
So what will happen if a well designed open social network protocol appear in the next months? New companies will start to work together to make reality a decentralized global social network. And new business models will appear, with the objective of creating applications for a common global social network. And new buzzwords. Web 4.0 at least. Who knows!.
And meanwhile, Facebook, bebo and the bigger social networks will need to adopt the common global network, the global resource or die. Like AOL did.
The virtual worlds are another interesting case. The biggest contender is Second Life, but it may appear another competitors using open protocols in the future. If you have the option of creating an island with your own content hosted in your computer or creating it on the closed servers of Second Life using and paying for the official content what will you choose? Did this sound similar to creating a website for AOL/Compuserve/Infovia or creating it on the web?
Social networks like we know now are doomed.
Now we only need to decide what open protocol we’ll use.