With the enormous awareness on social networking, you’d think companies would have embraced the concept much sooner.  A new article on Business Week summarizes the current state of networking in the enterprise, calling attention to a few major tacks companies take:

1. Encouraging employees to get more connected online (LinkedIn, OpenBC)
2. Creating stand-alone networks, such as alumni networks (SelectMinds)
3. Mining employee communications for network analysis purposes (Contact Networks)
4. Marketing networks, user communities and loyalty programs

Having been away from the enterprise services area for about a year now, it is still striking to see how fragmented the field remains.  Our vision for SelectMinds, when we founded it in 1999 was that there would be tremendous value in creating intra-company networks (in the shape of alumni programs) and ultimately linking them up in one unified professional network.
LinkedIn and OpenBC have been tackling the unified network area, but as the article points out, there are reasons for companies to be nervous.  The inside-out approach of starting in the enterprise may be the more successful model.  I think SelectMinds is in a unique position to accomplish that in the US market.

Fred analyzed the advertising-based monetization potential of YouTube, and came up with $150m.  His math looks like this:

Serving up 100m videos daily
80%are monetizable
$15 CPM for 10 sec pre-roll ad
After revenue sharing, $150m to YouTube annually
(There’s a further-detailed spreadsheet screenshot on Fred’s blog)

Jason Calacanis disagrees.  His figure is $20m and the disagreement is on the CPM rate. Jason thinks $2-3 CPM is more likely.

My guess would be between the two figures, probably closer to Fred’s numbers.  I think $2-3 CPM is too low – knowing what ad rates even in Turkey are, I think contextual ads on YouTube should be able to fetch more.  On the other hand, I have doubts about the % of monetizable content.  If I just filmed my daughter and uploaded the video to YouTube, I doubt my mother would be up to watching an ad before she sees footage of her granddaughter.

In a rebuttal to Ryan Carson’s piece on the lack of utility in social software (and Nick Carr’s concurring recent post), Fred Stutzman has a thoughtful post on the topic which ends up distilling the true value of social software – that it allows communities to flourish. He summarizes:

We are enabled to share by social software, and we share for the
communtiy. In doing so, we enter a feedback loop and are complimented
by our sharing. Ultimately, it is all about the affection of the
community – we just have to find the communities appropriate to our
interests.

Sharing and communication are tremendously strong basic urges.  Humans, as social animals, need to interact.  Evolution made us experts at physical interaction. A few hundred years with the printing press has made us semi-adept at distant one-to-many interaction.  In the connected age, we are beginning to learn about distant one-to-one (and many-to-many) interaction.  Experiments in social software are only tools to aid us in this process.

UPDATE: Stowe’s also written a good post on the topic.

Baris has an intelligent post on a problem facing vertical search engines:

The promise of vertical search is a good one.  If the search
engine focused on one sector, such as shopping, blogs, electronics or health,
they don’t have to crawl the entire web, and focus on much fewer sites and hone
their algorithms to deliver more relevant results faster.
…
As long as the cost of doing another search on Google is zero, I see a
difficult time for vertical search engines to keep the relevance edge over
time.

I think the real edge vertical search engines hold in the game is the layers of value they add to basic search.  Improved algorithms and site-filtering are good tricks; however, as Baris mentions, they can be manually replicated at no cost by consumers.  Examples of things a consumer can not add are:

• collaborative filtering (including digg-like aggregators, or last.fm-like intelligent proximity algorithms)
• proactive searches (such as RSS feeds indeed brings to you)
• time-related insight (such as historic home price information on Zillow)

I expect most successful vertical engines to keep innovating on the value layers.

Last week I touched on the major squeeze in the music business, and referred to what Beck thought about this (via Fred Wilson).  I would give the topic a rest for a while, except I just heard on TV, the following quote by Bulent Forta, the head of MUYAP, Turkish Phonographic Industry Society.

"We are looking for a solution where the consumer gets the content for free, but the rights holders get their due compensation."

In effect, he’s calling for music commoditization.  Currently, there’s a campaign in Turkey by Pepsi, where over 1 million are songs are available for free-downloads for Pepsi drinkers.  I think this is bad news for the musician as an artist, and will force a bi-polarization of the music scene.

On one end will be many, fragmented small bands, with their local loyal fans and MySpace page.  On the other, will be the mega bands, which will have to turn into media companies, with multiple offerings – albums, concerts, videos, backstage content, communities, etc.

A critical opportunity emerges here for filtering the crowded end of the spectrum.  That’s why I am very bullish of the filtering models such as Last.fm, Pandora, and even Digg.

Fred Wilson has a new post where you can, once again, see that he understands new media.  I will try to quickly touch on a few of the points he raises:

• Fred points out that MySpace is AOL for blogging. I agree and think MySpace is AOL in the sense that it is about personalization.  Blogging, in the mainstream, will not take the shape of blogging.  It will be about online representation of identity and personalization.
• In the same vein, Fred says, "They want to be the TV station, the radio station, the newspaper".  This is true, however, YouTube, currently, falls short of true personalization in the mini-media channel it allows its user to create.  Cut-n-paste microchunks are not enough, because all users end up with similar "channels".  Next step will be personalization tools that allows for putting one’s personality more emphatically into the channel they create – think of it as a user-friendly web-service where you upload videos and play with it – much like GarageBand on Macs.
• I think the edge will be increasingly about easier sharing and syndication. Grou.ps is an example of moves in this direction.

Today, I was a presenter at a Network Dialogues Think Tank event on corporate alumni networks, organized by First Tuesday Zurich and openBC. It was refreshing to see the maturing attitudes in Europe on the topic.  As I mention in my blog post on the Network Dialogues blog, there’s been a huge improvement since just a couple of years ago.

I enjoyed being a part of a conversation I have been away for over a year.  Having been immersed in corporate alumni issues for six consecutive years, the discussions today brought back many memories.


 

From hakia.com:

We will soon kick-off our operations in Istanbul and are
looking to
hire talented software developers to join our dynamic team. We
are
poised to start our PR and marketing campaign in the U.S. This is
a
great time to join the team as we develop and introduce hakia’s
next
generation technology.

Please forward the attached job posting as
you see fit and direct your
friends/friends’ friends to career@hakia.com to apply for the open
positions. We
will hire 4-5 developers and interview rounds will start
in early
September.

Having the right attitude is as important as the skill set (in
short
form below).

Minimum Requirements:

– Exceptional C#
development experience

– Fluent in English

– Strong communications
skills

– Professionalism and the ability to work under
pressure

Experience with:

– .NET remoting

–
ASP.NET

– MySQL and relational database

– SQL database

–
Visual Studio 2003/2005

– OOP/design pattern

– Windows 2003 server