Raheel

Gary: “Am I participating in this conference by asking this question”,

The speaker then went onto to say academics have to draw a line in the sand between involvement those who may change the title of a podcast they downloaded for example and those who submit truly original content. Afterwards I said why do you have to draw a line when we are talking about ‘degrees’ of participation? He said academics like defined lines and specificity to be able to hang theories on - yet none showed any kind of digram or quantification of those lines. So here is my ‘line’ in the sand stating that participation in society, politics, online social networks etc: is not either on or off it is a continuum of degrees of influence. It is an analog and not a digital 0 or 1 as the academics represented seem to propose.

Gary: “Then why are those who comment, rate, share, recommend, mash-up not considered participants in online social networks?”

Yet another reminder of the old saying “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.” You couldn’ be further from the truth. Facebook, or more generically any social networking platform, has significant advantages such as the ability to instantly add/configure/customize/network an application. This dramatically lowers the barriers to entry (correct on that point), but it also lowers the cost of switching for users. Yes, creating a standard (massive usage) creates a barrier to switching, but not an insurmountable barrier. Frankly, “social networking” as application is boring to me and it may prove to be a fad. I don’t really care about the minor personal gestures of my 400+ friends. But the social platform is exceptionally compelling to me as a user, developer and visionary. Social discovery and vetting of application is huge. I’ll drop one app and add a competitor in 2 minutes. My friends will do the same if it offers a compelling value. Your application of the old school metrics of the PC platform to a social platform ignores the low switching costs, social discovery of applications, incredibly low marketing costs and all of the other benefits of a social platform that will power future applications. The fact that one person in a dorm room can write a killer app that can spread virally is exceptionally powerful. That simply cannot happen on the PC. It can happen on the web, but having done it a couple of times myself, I can tell you it is costly. Will Facebook become the ultimate platform, will OpenSocial win, will browsers encapsulate social connectivity across all websites/webapps, will the semantic web finally deliver? I don’t know the winner, but social apps are here to stay. Yes there will be a lot of crap apps, but the social fabric will help separate the wheat from the chaff. Sorry, but I give your analysis an F :)

Facebook’s most important strategic asset is not its community of developers but its network of users.

Does Platform build or leverage this strategic asset?

How do you innovate a business model?   You can create new products and services within the current business model to drive growth.  Or you can create a new business model and open up a whole new world of possibilities for the firm.  Either innovate within the current game, or change the game.  But how? 

"To build a breakthrough business model that rivals cannot easily emulate, you'll need to integrate a whole series of complementary, value creating components so the effect is cumulative,"