The Song of Socialism II: Penetration

Social is the new buzzword, and what a loud buzz that is nowadays.

In the last post I described my theory of levels of social media - Presence, Participation, Penetration and Platform. Presence was passive, Participation was active entry into the world of social media. Penetration and Platform are quite a bit more complex. This part two of the series gets into the next P – Penetration. I’ll need another post for Platform.

To understand where I’m going with this, lets see what a social network really is.

The web started off as a way to connect content together. Any piece of content could easily and simply refer to another piece of content, even if it was on a different server in a different country. A browser allowed people to move from content item to content item, thus making the universe of the world wide web a wonderful store of content. People soon realized that this could be extended to all kinds of transactions – one could pass not just content but messages and information, and not just between humans but between humans and computers or even between two computers. The simple text foundations of the world wide web were thus abstracted into a complete transaction system – a multilocation multiserver computing universe we call the Internet. Facebook, like any other web application, sits on these foundations but it’s more. Facebook is a platform, a whole layer of paradigm on top of the foundations of the web that provides an abstraction for your real life friendships and social connections – a big chunk of the people on your Facebook friend list are people you knows in real life. People are still getting used to the web itself, so they often miss this fact. Its not just about content, its about content and transactions in the context of your own friends.

Presence and Participation is still at the level of the web paradigm – that of content and message sharing.  Facebook improves the distribution and sharing, but in this context its just a better mousetrap. Presence is an improved version of the “Rate This” button, while participation, though an improvement over emailing an interesting link to your friends, is not that different.

Facebook, however, offers an extra layer - that of a model of interactions between actual people. The web has no concept of persons– only content - and websites have therefore to work hard at creating this extra overlay through sessions, registrations, logins etc.  If you live inside Facebook rather than on the raw Internet, you have a readymade environment where every participant has an identity and you need not worry either about registration or about login.

Presence and Participation are useful tools, of course, and depending on the business needs you have can yield wonderful results when exploited properly. Facebook is like an airport – a business setting up there needs to exploit more than just walls and a roof that could be anywhere – they need to exploit the fact that they are in a space that people congregate and interact in a particular fashion. A duty-free store, for instance, knows the nature of travellers flowing through their space much more precisely and in addition the exact identity of every shopper from the scan of the ticket; this allows them to exploit some very precise optimizations. The product mixes and offers in these stores reflect this knowledge, eliminate clearance sales and make these  stores some of the most profitable in the world

That’s where the next step comes in – penetrating the social network, injecting yourself into other people’s networks using the reach that Facebook offers you

Penetration

The first step to penetrate into the world of social is a Facebook App.

Technologically, this Facebook App is a web application that sits inside Facebook. Doesn’t sound like much, and plenty of Facebook Apps indeed don’t do much more that a web app. What is possible, however, is much more and the first people to take advantage of this were game developers.

Video games, the kind you played on PCs (and increasingly on mobiles and tablets) has been multiplayer since the days of dialup, but to do so you had to explicitly join a multiplayer gaming network – either local ones or big boys such as XBox Live, PlayStation Online or Battle.Net. These networks weren’t trivial – game publishers went through considerable effort and expense to create and maintain these networks. Then came Farmville.

Farmville was a game for the Facebook world. Nominally playable in standalone more, in practice playing Farmville needed lots of help from friends. And those friends came not from some custom or generic game player network, but from Facebook. Zynga’s genius was realizing that Facebook is more than a simple hosting platform with a lot of users – it’s a readymade network that is similar to gaming netoworks, but better. Why better? because all kinds people are already on it. The game playing networks only had game players – indeed each game had a different network and you had to build friends and allies from scratch for every game. Farmville, on the other hand, is for playing with your real life friends. This is how games work in real life; you play golf or bridge or poker with your existing friends, not with strangers at a golf or bridge club.The secret to Farmville’s success was in enabling interaction with existing friends. You can visit their farms, see how their crops are progressing, help them out with feed or fertilizer if they need it – this kind of interaction is hardly exciting with strangers.

The challenge with using networks has, till the advent of Facebook, been that you had to first create a network before you could make use of networking effects. Anyone who joined had to encourage enough friends to join, and there was no way for the network to know proactively who to invite. Facebook provides companies an easy and powerful way to bypass this problem; a network friends is ready for your consumption and only some inviting and asking for permission is needed.

Zynga became an overnight sensation on the back of Farmville, and Farmville became this viral phenomenon by using Facebook to encourage all the friends of players to play and to help. Earlier, if you had 10,000 fans, you could get your message out to 10,000 people. Now, if each player had 100 friends, your message was suddenly reaching not 10,000 but 1,000,000 people! Farmville had no existence outside the Facebook network – you logged in to Facebook to play it, and Farmville used this login to connect to your friends, send them a stead stream of messages on your farming progress, encourage them to play and help you along while at it. This helped it reach 10 million players within six weeks of its July 2009 launch. Its interesting to compare it with Farm Town, a very similar game launched months before Farmville – its also very successful, but never achieved Farmville’s levels of glory, primarily because it was focused on interactions with strangers while Farmville was resolutely about interacting with your own friends.

Scrabble, Words with Friends and Draw Something are more games that rode to success on the backs of the social features of Facebook. Scrabble needs at least two players, and computer Scrabble isn’t much fun; two Kolkata engineers caught on early, and created Scrabulous on Facebook in 2007 for playing with – you guessed it – your friends; it quickly became the top game on Facebook. When Scrabble owners Hasbro eventually shut them down, they replaced it with a game that still ran on Facebook but used a different network – a game network called Origin – for multiplayer gaming; Hasbro believed in the traditional, not the new fangled Facebook way. Of course, this wasn’t a resounding success – it still supports Origin but Facebook is by far its key channel (for copyright reasons, there are two versions totaling 1.7million users monthly). Words with Friends launched in 2009, and is still hugely popular – 8 million users monthly– while social drawing app Draw Something is chugging along at 2 million.

Here’s a couple of key things they all do, that only Facebook allows them to do:

1. They don’t build separate networks of their own; they gather details from your Facebook friend lists, like names and pictures, and give a very real verisimilitude of interacting with friends. They all allow you to see which of your friends are playing, play with them and invite people not already playing.
2. They all post on your behalf to your Facebook feed, telling even your friends with no interest in those games how you’re doing on them. Even Scrabble-haters applauded when I hit 101 points on a single word (and Scrabble helpfully posted it on my wall).
3. They analyze and report how you’re doing within your peer group, how far ahead or behind your friends on various criteria.

And these features, easily accessed through the Facebook API, are available to any App. Game developers are not the only ones making use of it; birthday reminders, activity planners, social shoppers – many apps take advantage of this. The trick is not so much the technology as figuring out the use case that makes sense. For instance, paying your bills is usually a solo activity; clicking photos or planning a party are not.

I must point out here that the other mega phenomenon, WhatsApp, solves the network problem in a different way. It uses your mobile phone book as your social network (which, if you think about it, is perfectly true). It does not ask you to give a bunch of information during registration, nor does it ask you to invite anyone or “select your friends” like, say, Yahoo Messenger had to do. Your address book already tells WhatsApp who you’re connected with.

That’s Penetration, but we’re not done yet – really good companies use Facebook as a full-fledged platform, an engine of business rather than just an enabler. That’s for the next post.