Social Networking: Where The Internet Comes Down From The Clouds

I think social networking the internet way is even younger than the internet, and has more places to go, many more. The metaphor that comes to my mind is that of a tornedo touchdown. The internet is the tornedo. When you use it for social networking purposes, it is a touchdown. The results can be positively "devastating."



Look at MeetUp.com. I have some history with this site. My early enthuse for Dean got me to the site. And I got hooked. Dean moved on, I stayed on. So imagine my utter surprise when I bumped into the CEO of MeetUp, mid-westerner Scott, close to my age, who has since invited me to his office, not long after I moved into the city. I met this guy at a MeetUp. To me it was like I ended up at some party where I met a Hollywood star, something akin to it. And he is so self-effacing in presence. I guess he is one of those never-lose-your-cool, big-picture visionaries. I mean, what did I expect him or someone like him to be? Obnoxious? Look, I got the big idea! The guy is MIT Innovator Of The Year. He hosts the Tech meetup in the city.

I have told him, eBay is people meet stuff, MeetUp is people meet people. MeetUp could potentially end up the Yahoo of social networking. It is like you grow big, early, fast, then you go public. And you grow bigger. Then you conduct a lot of smart buys, like a frog eats up dragonflies.

The quicksilver market that the internet is, it is not guaranteed MeetUp or any other one site will get there. But MeetUp has the broadness that few other social networking sites have. For one, it has this definite offline component. Social networking sites that are all screen time and no face time have something fundamental lacking. But then there are some that are doing quite well. Look at these three that took up a lot of my time today: Flickr | 43Things | Delicious.

Flickr is a good example. Curiously Scott had something that was earlier than Flickr, and quite like it, but I guess Flickr is smoother in operation, sexier, and so it got bought up by Yahoo and made two people very rich very quick.

There is this another, 8minutedating.com. Speed dating, I think it is such a cool concept. I went to one, if I did not get a second date does not mean my enthusiasm for the concept is any lesser! But my point is it is another of those tornedo touchdown concepts.

I think MeetUp's future lies in attempting to become the Yahoo of social networking.

And then there are a whole bunch of Friendster type companies.

In short, there are all these great ideas that started out as great companies that still have a lot of people, especially investors, people who count a little more than the rest of us, believing in them, but the breakthrough has yet to happen. One obvious criterion therefore is those who will patiently stick it out will stand a chance.

But more important than that might be the quality of a rabid hunger for rapid expansion. It is a race in time. If you do it almost as good, but are about a year late, that might be a little too late.

Since I made my trip to Scott's office, I have played with the idea of getting involved in some way. I couldn't afford to do it full time, not to get a job, because I have these ideas that I am cultivating. There is the IC idea, there is the online marketing idea, and there is the political involvement to do with Nepal. Maybe I can consult for them.

I do not pretend to be an engineer, although I have a pretty good intuitive feel for concepts in physics. But my strength is group dynamics. I think the winner social networking site will tackle the challenge from the High Touch end rather than the High Tech end, although tech is very important, after all what you are offering is a site. A web service.

I think, for MeetUp, the key is to further decentralize. To make localization more possible. Used to be there was this one golden day someone had chosen when people on one topic met all over the country. Now local Organizers can monkey with the meeting dates. That is good. What would further localization look like? It goes from the city to the group. From the group to the individual.

Broadly speaking.

Internet based social networking is a young market. It will likely see many upheavals. There will be pendulum swings from common sense to sophistication and penetration and back.

What can I say, all the best Scott.

Social network - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wait a minute. Guess what I found out this very minute: Scott has been profiled by my former rival Rediff! Now I know why we Chaitime people lost: we never discovered Scott!

Wi-Mesh

I just bumped into the word. A search for the term on Google News brought forth only seven results.

Wi-Mesh extends the reach of Wi-Fi. So the expansion is coming from both ends.

In The News

• Wi-Mesh Moves Toward IEEE Standard TechNewsWorld, CA "You have to take the right steps in the right order, and a standard for WiMax should come first."
• Wi-Mesh to compete with WiMax TechWhack
• Wi-Mesh standardisation process begins VNUNet.com the Wi-Mesh Alliance made up of Nortel, Philips and others, and SEEMesh (Simple, Efficient and Extensible Mesh) backed by Intel, Nokia and Motorola.
  
• Nortel Pushes Wi-Mesh Standard NewsFactor Network
• Wi-Mesh Alliance Presents Proposal for IEEE 802.11s Converge Network Digest
• Intel expects WiMax to become a broadband standard by 2006
  
• http://www.wi-mesh.org

Superfast Cable Broadband And The Rest Of The Daily Soup

• A jump from the current 2 MB to 100 MB as early as next year is highly desirable. There is no way to go but up. Personally I would like to follow World Cup Soccer games online. For one, I don't own a television set. Two, I don't want to own a television set. There is this double whammy of speeds going up and the prices going down. Connectivity prices need to go the hardware and the software route: down, down, down. The competition sizzles up. There is DSL (1.5-3), cable (4-16) and fiber (30). When you cut prices, you gain market share, like DSL companies have shown; when you raise speeds, there is a similar effect. Municipalities geting into the fiber network business is another pop up. Why wait for the market to seep it in! This Louisiana victory goes against the current of other defeats where the big companies bullied the small and not so small towns.
  

• A 10 year old Pakistani is in news for getting Microsoft certified. She got to meet Bill Gates, an experience she describes as "second only to visiting Disneyland." Gates' got company and competition, both. Another curiosity: bike powered internet in Uganda. Wow.
  

• Like WiMax has been moving towards standardization and mainstreaming, so has broadband over powerlines.
  

• Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken are both podcasting. Looks like both have arrived. Podcasting needs to go video. So media pyramids come down like in tetris games. I personally am waiting for Evan Williams of the Blogger.com fame to release his Odeo. I am into audio but not podcasting yet. To tell you the truth, I prefer text, but audio and video components embellish the offering. Here are some more interesting talkers than Lim or Frank. And this Mark Cuban foray into blogosphere search.
  

• iPod for movies anyone? The need is sure there. That darling of a company Skype is off into video phones.
  

• With all this talk of text, audio and video, I keep thinking, why are not more of these people working harder on MathML?
  

• Looks like Amazon is already searching inside hundreds of thousands of books before Google.
  

• HTML to microformats. From computers talk to humans to computers talk to computers. This is on a Wharton site, by the way. XML, XHTML, RDF, iCalendar, vCard.

• Microsoft feels the jitters. Used to be Sun sued Microsoft. Now it is Microsoft is suing Google. Looks like Google has managed to create a more exciting work environment. It is an innovation at the corporate level, it is a group dynamics thing. In another industry, Citi also shed some.
  

• There is this news about China's 9% economic growth, apparently a slowdown. That reminds me. The Chinese leadership has been buying hundreds of billions of dollars in American debt, money that goes to pay for tax cuts for America's richest. Such a distortion. That money should be going to China's poor, into human capital and infrastructure and small business investments. Good reason why the Chinese should ditch their communist party monopoly on political power. These bigwigs there are on this big ego trip at the expense of doing good by their own people.
  

• That brings me to FDI, China and Taiwan. Apparently China gets most of its Foreign Direct Investment from Taiwan, but look at its saber rattling on Taiwan. Such a disjunk between economics and politics there too.
  

• China's insisting it will not float its currency. That is a high mark to currency stability. And a pointer to monetary unions. Currency fluctuations: what economic good are they?

• This article on the global economy paints a somber picture. Productivity growth might not lead to higher wages if there is not a total emphasis on continual education and training.
  

Into the Nitty Gritty Of WiMax

The whole point of the internet has been to open things up but, paradoxically, the way people have so far accessed that same internet has been a closed system. WiMax promises to bring openness to the access point itself.

The whole idea of old companies getting washed away, and new companies coming to occupy center stage, old industries disappearing and new ones emerging, old markets evaporating off and new markets getting created, old jobs getting lost and new ones created, that whole churn is an essential vitality of the market mechanism. Change is inevitable, change is desirable. As to what change, and how much, it is ultimately for the customer to decide in a marketplace that is not otherwise distorted. Daring entrepreneurs and dedicated public servants in political offices have the option to forge new partnerships to make sure the consumer is made supreme and stays supreme. There is that futuristic, visionary crown that every cutting edge company wears, and in that zone it is more about ideas and less about the heat of the immediate market, but ultimately that heat has to be faced.

WiMax, in essence, is a challenge to the market mechanism and democracy itself. Will the public servants be there for the public? That question is going to loom large in a very basic way. Because WiMax turns internet access into "roads." At that point it is no longer Cable TV, but more like public television. There will still be alternative ways to access the internet, and niche markets where the private sector runs the show and makes money, but the mainstream way of people coming online is surefootedly headed into the public domain.



Once that achievement is made, it will be a fundamental departure, not only in a major collective boost in productivity, but in many other ways. Society speeds up. Social progress speeds up. It truly is one global village at that point.

Intel has said WiMax is the biggest thing to happen to the internet since the internet itself. I buy into that assertion.

Ubiquitous broadband redefines home, work and school, three of the fundamental social institutions. The ramifications are many. Lifelong education, for one, like an uncut umbilical chord, at that point can be taken for granted.

If the impact on the American scene is to be astounding, that at the global scale is to be mind-blowing. The vision of connecting every human mind to the web stands to be realized. That internet access will be like having invented money for the first time and introduced into the social domain: then it takes a life of its own, and becomes a permanent fixture of the mental landscape, like a mountain, or an island, or a cockroach. We no longer think of it as our creation, but very much a gem of the natural landscape.

At that point, internet acces is like plumbing. The interest is in the water: the plumbing should stay out of sight.

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References (WiMax)

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12. The Mobile Memex
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