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RSSThroughout the '90s, it was all about the pipes. Access was the watchword and the business was all about providing consumers with the "pipe" to access online services. Advertising was not a big part of the picture, though charging "slotting fees" to sponsors was a big business.
By the end of the '90s, with the Web finally displacing proprietary online services, the battle shifted to building and owning the largest portals. Aggregation was the watchword, and the business was all about amassing the most users on gateway pages providing news, information and entertainment. Advertising moved into the foreground, and the value in business shifted from sponsorship and position to a heavy focus on delivering tonnage. Raw scale was the name of the game.
Once again, we're in the middle of another major change, and it's going to be just as significant as the shift from pipes to portals.
The big trends over the past two years have been about networks: the extraordinary explosion of consumer usage of social networks, and the very significant shift in online ad spend to the ad networks. While some may disagree, I think that these two trends are ultimately about the same thing, and it's not just the search-accelerated audience fragmentation away from portals to vertical and niche sites. To me, it's all about the growing role of "people networks."
Ultimately, social networks and ad networks are very similar creatures. Social networks use dynamic pages to orbit users with content, applications and communications that are relevant to their social relationship. Ad networks use the dynamic delivery of ads on many different pages to orbit users with commercial content, applications and communications that are relevant --hopefully -- to their needs or interests. In the end, they are both people-centric networks. Of course, while social networks today are largely destination-based, unlike ad networks that are fully distributed, that is likely to change quite rapidly. Facebook has already announced that they will soon permit users to take Facebook social tools and experiences and elements of their "social graph" to whatever pages they want. Between that announcement and the OpenSocial movement to create interoperable social communication between sites and networks, social networks will soon be as distributed as ad networks.
Thus, it will soon be all about people networks. In that world, we may not see much difference or distinction between widgets and rich media ads, or ad targeting and content targeting, or between a behavioral segment and a social segment. Further, there is no reason to think that this will be limited to online social and advertising applications. Content and commerce and communication as well will shift to people-centric networks. They will become much less portal-like or destination-centric and more network-like, and fully distributed wherever people are.
People networks will create a number of new challenges and opportunities for the providers of content, commerce and communication. Among other things, networks will create incremental value less from adding "sticky" services to their pages to try to make users stay put, than from leveraging the usage and the people-centric data to deliver more value in their core services -- and to seamlessly link those users out to other relevant services when and where they need them, even if they didn't know that they did.
The portal to people network transition will be a very good one for users, just as the pipe to portal one was. It will be all about them, not all about publishing pages. Of course, the portal business won't go away, any more than the pipe business did after the shift ten years ago. These two businesses will continue to survive, but they will have a different and less significant role in value creation in the online marketplace. What do you think?
RSS FEEDS
(Happy Chinese New Year, Dave!!)
I also couldn't agree more and the driving issue which will accelerate the shift if efficency and effectiveness.
What Will Make It Efficient & Effective?
The Department of Defense is using what has commonly come to be known as “Autonomous Agents“. Agents are technological programs or entities that operate with little or no human supervision. They initiate actions, construct plans, migrate to different locations, and communicate with other agents. Most importantly they can independently respond to events and adjust their behavior accordingly to accomplish goals.
Well designed agents will have personality (and like a good waiter will intrude only when necessary) and remember training and tasks even if the user’s computer crashes or is turned off.
There are different classes of agents depending on the agent’s abilities: they may be static or mobile; react to events or not; work alone or with other agents; learn or be hardwired; autonomous or not.
Intelligent agents can solve several classes of problems. They simplify distributed computing, information retrieval, sorting and classification of data, and handle repetitious tasks for users. Agents can take over many tasks people do not wish to do themselves, like scheduling appointments, answering email, sorting news group information, and getting the current news stories that match a person’s interest. As the agent learns more about its user it will become more useful.
Agents’ behavior and ability to solve problems may be either in the individual agent or the agent may serve as a dumb part of a group that can solve a problem. Agents that work as a part of a group form a more stable system and may be able to handle tasks not easily done by computers. Without a central intelligence the group may actually become stronger and smarter. This type of agent setup may scale up better than individual systems. Java and Python are the preferred languages for agents.
Now lets cross over to today’s social web. Imagine having a set of “social agent tools� on your personal social networking portal. Said tools work for you when your on line and when your off line. You set the criteria for which said tools perform work on your behalf.
Unlike common “search engines� these “social agents� work based on a specific set of criteria you set that relates to your individual or corporate objectives and aims at finding the right information or the right relations needed to accomplish a specific objective. An objective could be finding the right resource who has the right solution for your specific problem or the most relevant information you need for anything and everything.
Today you drop notices into forums or questions on Linkedin or Facebook etc. and wait for users to respond. Today you research topics, read news feeds and other blogs then publish your own opinion. Tomorrow, using autonomous agents. you would simply state a problem using a set of criteria and instantaneously you get specific answers and connect to people who are the experts to solving specific problems. Social media will advance to become Smart Social Media with tools that assures us of the validity and relevance of content to whatever knowledge we seek. Subsequently we will then be empowered to “smarter sharing�.
Now add the implications of an open web with reduced barriers and seamless connectivity (online and mobile) that empowers you and saves time (Doc Searls VRM Project) with social agent technology and imagine the potential implications. All this will take is for market leaders, from different market segments, to learn how to be social and subsequently share technological developments that each can use for mutual benefit.
The benefits are in creating new markets rather than trying to control existing ones.
What say you? www.relationship-economy.com
I couldn’t agree more with your observations. Beyond the aggregate metrics and even broad customer segments, each visitor is unique, and although that sounds so obvious, most sites treat all visitors exactly the same. Yet they do have like interests and even common sales cycles that can be detected through each click, and leveraged to deliver better customer service with new testing and targeting technologies that essentially enable web sites to listen and respond intelligently, much like a real-life conversation or visit to a store could result in great service. However, most sites are not here yet, but they are starting to realize that this is where they have to go. I also agree that as social networks and sites in general evolve and the focus is less on create whiz-bang stickiness and more on understanding why customers really visit a site, and more importantly why they come back, purchase, and then purchase again and again. Then understanding which networks they belong to, and also internalizing how to target customers who will develop a deep relationship that lasts for years becomes the marketing focus. That is when the Web channel matures to the point where it truly offers the benefits of the offline service aspect missing in so many sites today. I think then we will see this evolution focused on people become the end all game, and the service level and relevance they will demand online.
Brent Hieggelke VP Strategic Marketing OMNITURE