social software roundup

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on May 13, 2004

Much has happened to the social software field in the last months. The explosive growth in this area fueled by the enourmous valuation of Friendster and many investment rounds has been coming to a relative calm.

So far Germany hasn't seen any VC-backed social software startup. I was surprised most VCs I talked to hadn't even heard about the Friendster hype and if so they had serious doubt about the business model. As far as I know there are no social software in due diligence either. Scoutster by Robert Basic has developed a unique approach to the business - it uses the platform to bundle purchasing power, another approach to monetize the value of contacts. OpenBC meanwhile develops much steadier but has been somewhat hijacked by professional contact makers such as head hunters, which reduces the value.

As reported earlier Friendity has gone out of business in light speed. I still don't understand why this wonderful, better than original, Friendster copy had to go bust so soon. Meanwhile the Samwer brothers are happy about less competition with Myfriends. Overall it seems the social software idea hasn't really catched on with Germans so far. Well Germans never had the image of being too open to new social contacts anyways. :-)

The market leader for professional networking in US - LinkedIn has adopted another interesting strategy - the company is coming for your desktop. Linked released an Outlook and Internet Explorer toolbar. The Outlook toolbar is less a toolbar but more an information harvester. The good thing it let's you decide which data you send to their network (unlike what horrible Spoke is doing). The toolbar crawls all your old emails and matches them (if you agree) to the LinkedIn network. For me this was very helpful as I'm pretty lazy with setting up Contacts in Outlook, which could be matched only before with LinkedIn. Most surprisingly for me was that so many people I emailed with have already signed up. Out of my 2000 contacts 100 were already LinkedIn users (or at least have a profile there).

The IE Toolbar is a different story as it helps you to instantly look for people. As Robert earlier said the story behind social software is now more and more the Google for people. The network that succeeds - and LinkedIn pretty much looks like the market leader - will become a public utility much like Google.

LinkedIn also finally adopted an invitation blocking policy that protects the social nodes from invitation spam. This is what I like about LinkedIn it consistently tries to protect privacy a it tries to appeal to many people no just to professional networkers and these guys also understand that a connection means something - as it is a commitment to refer somebody to your network, not just a set of address data. I guess it will take some time until this messages crosses the already large database of members....