Social networking doesn’t mean features
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If we push the idea further that technology is the least important aspect of your next startup, then we can extend further to consider that “social networking”, the phenomenon that it is, is misinterpreted to mean a subset of web application features that have become standard and required in your projects.
While it might be obvious to most, we can start by making a distinction between three terms that more or less overlap in every conversation about building a modern web application where there is a entrepreneurial and social spirit behind the scenes.
Web 2.0
The concept of Web 2.0 (October 2004 – October 2008) from a technology viewpoint is the implementation of, and aesthetic, of a way of viewing the web. This means different things to different people, but during this time we witnessed the movement from taxonomy to folksonomy, syndication of content, wholesale adoption of services, user-generated content, and a softer and responsive user experience.
If there are any features that are decidedly Web 2.0, then they are blogs and feeds and tagging; while they are often described alongside social networking and often bundled within any number of startups, these features sit in their own category.
Social networking
The heart of social networking is the social graph, often simplified to a single, symmetric relationship known as “friend”. Through a web application’s ability to define relationships, it is able to implement features which are often referred to as interactions. By querying and predicting on the results of many interactions between users who are related in some way, the value of the social network rises to the surface. Social networking is one way to realize one of the promises of Web 2.0: that the more active the web application, the more valuable it is to its users. Contrast this to many disconnected applications on the desktop. These kinds of applications are meant to serve a different paradigm: they are useful the first time they are used. This is why most business models for web applications rely on “aggregating eyeballs“.
Web applications can be social without being social networking applications, in this case it is literally engaging the network that makes all the difference. Are blogs, feeds, and tagging social networking features? No. What about user account management, profiles, chat, and search? No. Social networking features are anything you devise that leverages the social graph. A social networking site that links coffee aficionados together to make recommendations about the best beans, and the best brewing techniques might use tagging to distinguish bean varieties, but the real feature in this case is the recommendation engine that looks at what people like to drink, and suggests what else they might love. The real feature is the coffee drinking reputation which organizes into a natural, hierarchical relationship between the experts, and the enthusiasts.
Startup
As mentioned previously, a startup is a new venture. In our world, it’s on the web, and because it is on the web it will seek to use features like those mentioned above, to create value and ultimately convert that value into income.
Social networking is a process, not a product
One important take-away from these distinctions is that on top of being a social networking application (if it is), your startup is ultimately just a web application, and that means you need to address all of the same issues that any application would, you just might experience the pain sooner and in larger amounts, because as social software, your application is public-facing, and designed to be used often.
There’s no secret sauce for a social networking site, there is only the sound implementation of features, any features, that support and encourage interactions on a social graph. Building a social platform is exactly like developing any web platform, to the point where it doesn’t really deserve its own name, but you can call it social when you’ve thought about how to bring features together (such as an asynchronous, predictive fetch for ‘mashup’ data) in a way that makes it easier to build social sites. You can call it social when you’ve thought about how it’s going to perform with a million people performing hundreds of actions a day.
Features, ultimately, are not overly complex, though they become challenging when they need to scale. They can be designed with sound principles, with a mind to reusability, and the end result with such a ’social platform’ should be a way to build many social applications with the same code base, and to make the process easy to repeat.
The only aspect that truly matters is how you define and create a valuable service for users by leveraging, through interactions, the social graph, without getting mired in the details of the features. Social software is a much larger animal than social networking.
Socialized