This post has been a long time in the coming. I am a little pissed off right now because I am struggling with handling the facebook conundrum. Facebook has unfortunately liquidated the meaning / definition of “friend.” I still view Facebook as a personal domain. While, thankfully,  I have the option to select and adjust privacy settings per user, it still takes a certain level of personal comfort and familiarity for me to be bold enough to request someone’s friendship and for me to accept someone’s friend request.

Everytime I recieve a friend request that I don’t recognize, I message back and ask : Do I know you. Today, perhaps, I just tipped over my threshold and the response I recieved really really pissed me off. I received a notification on Twitter last night about this person following me. I didn’t find their Twitter feed interesting - so I didn’t follow them back. Then this afternoon, I received a friend request from them. I thought that perhaps I might have met the person and was blanking on the name/ face so as I always do, I asked them: Do I know you. And here’s the response I received.

(Redacted) : followed u on twitter
My response: Not to be rude - but following me on Twitter is not the same as being my friend on Facebook. Please be mindful of people’s privacy and if you want to friend someone, at the very least - write a note explaining why or the association.  You can network with me on linkedin or twitter if you like. I don’t know you well enough to friend you here.

WOW. That just annoyed me.

My goal with being on Facebook is not to collect friends, but to strengthen my already existing social relationships. Unfortnately there are no rules to friending people and making new friends - its just that each of us has a different agenda that should be respected, irrespective of what it might be. And the reason why I invest my time asking, ‘Do I know you’ every single time I recieve a friend request from a stranger is because I have been very glad of the times I have accepted a relative stranger into my friend fold simply because they took the time to answer my question sincerely and honestly. Thats the kind of people I want to enrich my life with - not the ones who think sending me a half-assed phrase as a reason to be my friend.

Maybe I have a very high opinion of myself, maybe every sentence here is hypocritical, but I stand by it. I have not yet sent a TOTAL stranger a friend request - and if and when I do - I guarantee you I will make a strong case of why I should be their friend.

I’ve been part of a few discussions the last few weeks that have resulted into me going back home with the ultimate question in mind:  how do you monetize a community? Or rather – can a community even be monetized?
Everyone is trying to do this – from our clients to startups and even Facebook (did you see that Facebook’s internal evaluation went down to $4Billion from the earlier estimation of $12.5 Billion?)

The only successful case-study that I can think of is Threadless.com. They have nailed the revenue model and the community aspect both – a feat very difficult to achieve in today’s web world. Also, they have done so without really relying on “Advertsing” or “subscription” (the most commonly resorted to rev. models for communities)
I have a theory as to why they are so successful:  threadless.com set the expectations from their community from the very beginning.

Threadless was in the business of selling T-Shirts that people will want to buy. That’s it. The way they find out what people will want to buy is by soliciting designs and having others vote on them which has resulted into a strong community around the core proposition. (Which, btw is not revolutionary – this is how traditionally communities have formed around products, movies, stores etc. - The expectation is always set) In these cases, communities may also stand for “fans”

When I look at some of the recent start-ups and existing networks,  – it clearly comes off as these sites were started to 1) build a community first and  2) figure out a rev. model then.
The risk these companies run with such a model is that the expectation for the community is already set: the community already believes that this is a free service and they begin to conform/ expect and fall in love with that frame of reference.
Once you try to change that frame of reference, you risk uspetting or even losing your community or your fans. And rightfully so – because you are trying to change the core product that the community first fell in love with.

Which is why, it only took Threadless 3 years to make profit and neither of the companies stated above are even breaking even yet.

Which is also why, I think Opensource and crowdsoucring and “Free” are the domains of companies that already have money and are not particularly expecting to see a return on investment. I also think Opensource is a fantastic domain, and possibly, should become the only domain for social good/ social design and social causes. When the collective agenda is to ultimately “do good” - concepts like open source and crowdsourcing are not only incredibly useful, but also cost-effective.

However, for a first-time entrepreneur (like majority of cases) I’m not convinced that Opensource or even “community” is a way to go. While having a community of supporters is incredibly instrumental for any new business, I’m not convinced that this community will convert into paying customers unless the expectation is set at the very beginning.

And lastly, for corporations and clients – I think every established company or organization already has a built-in community. The job of social media/ web is to bring together this community under one umbrella (or at the very least, be findable when they come looking for you) and treat them well and continue the relationship.

According to Whois.com listing, the domain diaryland.com was registered March 9, 1999 and expires March 9, 2010. I am actually very surprised that most academic and scholarly texts on social networking make no mention of diaryland. Diaryland was founded in September 1999 by Andrew Smales, a Toronton native. Without any advertising, Diaryland soon amassed over 350,000 users. (a pity number compares to now:)

I was a part of the diaryland community in 1999-2002 and even though you couldn’t network or "chat", you could add URLs of diaries you liked on your blog and become parts of groups and have little labels and stickers on your diaries. I would love to interview the founder someday — the site is still active but I think most of the old-timers have moved on to blogspot or wordpress. Anyways, the reason I bring diaryland.com up again is because the new definition of ’social networks’ is too narrow and does not allow the early pioneers to be categorized the same way. Both ICQ and diaryland - allowed you to search for people, leave comments in their guest books or leave them personal notes AND add their URL’s on your blog in support of your new friendship. You see, making new friends and finding old friends on the internet happened back then too - even before we had blogs. According to Whois.com listing, the domain diaryland.com was registered March 9, 1999 and expires March 9, 2010. So perhaps the idea of diaryland.com was conceived even before Livejournal.

(Oh and look, smartypants.diaryland.com wrote a book too, The World according to Mimi Smartypants!)

Allow me to indulge one more fragment of the early internet memories - the chat rooms! How fascinated I was! My dad had just bought an old black and white computer and I’d enter these chat rooms on excite.com and rediff.com (INDIA) and think not twice about making real friends and giving out my real phone number and real name! Today my ex-boss’s children (8,9 years old?? - not sure) friend-ed me on facebook. I think it is cool and perhaps something young parents should expect as their children grow. (More on this later!)

Irrespective, I am unfamiliar with a lot of these sites mentioned in this diagram. But I love it - maybe I will create one of my own personal journey of the internet. It’s amazing though because around 2003 is when the social network phenomena took off and every kind of network mushroomed upon- even a network that allows you to create other networks! (ning.com)

I’m loving Facebook Chat. Facebook is one place for me where I have all my friends from India, Philadelphia and other corners of the world online. I don’t need to have MSN, Gmail and AIM on at the same time. I’m loving it! Some people say that is the next generation of social networks, to me, that is returning full-circle. After all, AIM, MSN chat and other such chats were the early rudimentary social networks!

I have received some emails expressing interest in wanting to learn more about my passion project. I am not ignoring your emails - I’m merely trying to figure out and define my project before I communicate with you again. Thank you for your patience

Here are some old articles I found about diaryland.com founder, Andrew Smales
Salon.com

Kiva.org is the world’s first peer-to-peer microfinance platform that allows US-based folks to lend money to entrepreneurs and small business owners in developing countries. Advanta, is one of American’s largest credit card issuer in the small businesses market. A marriage between the two was inevitable!

For every loan an Advanta card-holder makes to Kiva, Advanta will match the loan amount dollar-for-dollar. American small businesses will in effect, help out small businesses in developing countries without spending any money at all!

Hats off to the visionary Innovation Group at Advanta  It is little efforts like these that makes a company special. I will be following their success closely.

PS - I love the credit card design too! My friend, the brilliant Israeli film-maker and designer, Michal Levy designed it.

My friend apparently purchased me on Facebook today. So I ignored his request and took a screengrab of it before ignoring it.

And I created a glog of myself today on Glogster.

There are basically two types of information people are sharing online: 1) Organized 2) Chaotic. Here’s how I breakdown both: The kind of information offered on sites like scribd.com and slideshare.net represents an individual’s organized thinking: perhaps about an idea, or a topic of interest to them. Their thoughts are usually clear and they articulate it in the form of a presentation or a document. I classify this kind of free information share as organized information — in which, you may not learn a lot about people, but you learn a lot about what they know.

The other type of information share that is happening online is chaotic - this information share is anecdotal, visual, literal and often metaphorical. It may even border on offensive to unnecessary. This type of information can be found on free photo and video sharing websites, blogs, microblog platforms and other avenues like 43things.com, post-secret and ihate.com. This type of chaotic information share can and is usually done behind a mask of anonymity.

As a strategist, I’m most interested in understanding how this information share can be turned to our advantage and how we can actually make sense and benefit from this share. How can we analyze and derive  conclusive learnings from this information share? I hear that several agencies and companies are already employing and using spiders and other web programs to gather the free information floating out on the web ether - but I’m more interested in discovering patterns and processes that surround this scenario and figuring out, if there is one, a universal and singular method that can successfully make sense of this massive database of information.

This is my passion project and has been on my mind for the last couple of months. I have some ideas around how to realize this and I’m using the help of some smart, enlightened strategists to help me take this to the next level - but I’m asking you as well — can you help me?

My idea hasn’t matured to the next level and a lot of critical thinking that hasn’t happened yet needs to happen before any of this can make sense to you but I’m excited and I return home from work every night to work on this…

And to add one point of clarification - I’m not looking to develop a system that trolls blogs and other media sites and spews out a reports. There are plenty of those out there already. I know what I am proposing does not have a one-size-fit-all solution — I’m not looking to create another aggregator. What I’m looking to do is simply provide a better means to make sense of the free-floating chaotic information to people like me, who want to better understand people/ consumers.

This idea stemmed out of my very recent experience in the agency-life - any new project undergoes (and rightfully so) massive amounts of primary and secondary research. What I’m trying to prove is, because people are already sharing intimate details of their lives on the web, there has got to be a better way to include those insights in our work.

Anyways…

Spring in New York is beautiful - and it feels like it might have finally arrived. This morning when I was getting ready to leave for work, my area was shrouded in mist. I live by the river in Jersey City/ Exchange Place. It’s only 4 minutes from NYC in the PATH trains but it’s an island of it’s own. Very slow -almost fairy tale like with subdued yellow lights and light-rails right out of an Enid Blyton book making up for the city-scape. (Atleast until you reach the umpteen construction sites…) Anyways, it’s a beautiful day today and I wish more days like today

Happy, almost, summer.

People’s nonsense (or their personal PR) on twitter just annoys me now. I’m also being a hypocrite on many levels because I go through phases of total immersion and then total isolation from twitter. But now that I’ve been hearing many top bloggers bullshit so much on twitter, I find myself boycotting their blogs and not being interested in their writings anymore.

The web has become a cacophony of voices - and I don’t want mine to be lost underneath them. I still want what I write to provide value and be meaningful. And my god - it feels so good to make that peace with myself!

Life in New York is fast. I’m working on some fun projects at work and some fun side-projects too. My parents are also visiting from India so the past month has been great. I’m always amazed at how much I learn at work from just observing how other people work and think. But I want to move it a step further now and take my thinking capabilities to the next level.

There’s an idea I’ve been toying around in my head…. but I have to formulate it and think through it. Stay tuned though - I will share soon!

I re-tell this story because it is a great metaphor for what brands should be doing right now. The Web has made connections and communications fluid, abundant and easy. So if you are a brand - chances are, your customers are talking about you online. And the only way you can keep them happy is if you are listening and more importantly acting upon what you listen.

Happy tuesday!