I'm at another Web Guild event: Next Generation of Social Networking

• Sundeep Ahuja, Founder, Appfuels
• Jonathan Abrams, Founder & CEO, Socializr - He also helped found friendster
• Jia Shen, CTO, Rock You - great speaker - saw him at the API conference on Monday. Rock You is on 50% of the Facebook profiles. Damn! The business is an advertising model that other companies can use to reach the Facebook audience.

I'll try and capture the gist of the discussion. What follows will not be exact quotes. Blame me... not the speakers.

What are the next generation of Social Networks and what will they look like?

1. Sundeep - trend is that it is going to be implicit as opposed to explicit. You won't have to say who is my friend. The network is already there in your behavior. Who you are emailing. And... randomly... "It will be mobile." That last bit seems buzz word like to me.
2. Jonathan - They did it all before in friendster... sort of. He likes the idea of implicit vs explicit. People have tried to make this happen. However, people have not been able to successfully mine implicit data. Instead, it will be a combination of the two ideas. On Socializer, they are going to look at the implicit data of who you are inviting to event. He still would like to see what his real friends are reading, where they are eating... etc. Maybe Plaxo has this now?
3. Jia - Don't look at "theories" - look at what the kids are doing. The generations seem to be 1995, 2000, 2005. All my friends used friendster.... and then they got married. Jonathan said "When they get divorced, that's when they come back". The interesting thing will be to create a network that can transition. For example, can the network transition from dating to businesses.

When will this open up, so I can have different views of people

1. Jia - there are no current market forces that cause the social networks to open up. Facebook and MySpace will never want to share users. Facebook is a walled garden. No email addresses. Maybe, instead, the transition out - how do you open the graph.
2. Sundeep - how do you open the graph? Maybe that is what Google is going to do.
3. Jonathan - at Friendster, they were not inundated with requests to move. He admits that he is getting slammed with requests to "be my friend". Ironic given he invented the question when at Friendster. The truth is that users don't care to move their friends between networks - because people use different networks in different ways.
4. Sundeep - The users will go where people have built stuff for them.
5. Jia - The critical thing is where are all the users. What works is critical mass. If all your friends are on a network, you are going to be on it too. A - what is the killer app. B - where are your friends are? Same goes with video games.
6. Jonathan - Facebook might have killed one value from the network. The Facebook wall is now some interesting stuff + tons of crap... what camera someone bought, who attacked who with a zombie.

Monetization - are they becoming the new portal

1. Sundeep - Ad spend on social networks is small. Brands are worrying about poor logo juxtaposition. But... what is working is engagement. Nike is doing this. As in Red Bull. What they have discovered is that putting up an ad for a concert doesn't work. Clicks off the Facebook platform today ... don't work.
2. Jonathan - On google, you go to google, and you leave. And then you come back. The problem is that the audience isn't there to leave Facebook. The audience to stay. The new business model is not going to be based on physcographic information, because you still have the problem of intent. So, people are playing with other models - sponsored profiles, groups, etc. None have really work. But, when you have a huge amount of traffic, you can get something. If you have 1M users, you can, with today's bad rev streams, you can generate $500K per month.
3. Jia - The thing that is working for them now is advertising stuff inside Facebook. They have 100M page views per 2 days. They are getting $1 to $20 CPMs. Rock You is thus, getting you an order of magnitude jump in revenue for a developer over Google Ad Words. That is a quote from Jia, I have nothing prove it correct or incorrect - just want to say. The cool part is that it isn't that different from an ordinary web site. Thus, the Rock You ad network is trying to deliver something that isn't much different from what the ad industry is used to today.
4. Jonathan - so, when apps advertise other apps, that feels a bit MLM.
5. Jia - there have been other ad networks that have been successful. $10 CPMs. BUT, they have not been able to fill their inventory. Maybe the future is single sign-on check out for virtual goods. And the virtual goods can be bought with effort, time and/or money.

So... seems to me, the big $ will go to the company that figures out how to get people to go "off facebook" and still enjoy the Facebook work-flow / experience.

Is Facebook really open?

1. Jia - Facebook really is open. When Rock You built on MySpace, they took a big risk. Facebook is a much better platform for entrepreneurs. See my post from earlier this week.
2. Sundeep - "I was at MySpace and fielded the Rock You call...and I said they couldn't make money".
3. Jia - An infinite session - if someone has installed the app, you can continue to leverage the personal information.
4. Jonathan - They are also changing stuff every week. - But he wants to say that what Facebook has done is brilliant. - But, they can build something internally that kills a 3rd party app. Or they build something as a feature. The risks from the Web 1.0 world are still there. And you have added the risk of being depended on Facebook. From a business perspective, it is risky to depend on one distribution partner.
5. Jia - look the distribution is valuable.  Rock You has calculated that the spread of apps on Facebook is 7X what they got on MySpace.
6. Jonathan - most of the popular Facebook apps have not translated to traffic outside Facebook.
7. Jia - yeah - that may be true.