In a back-to-the-future meme reminiscent of a social version of Sun’s “the network is the computer” strategy, Fred and Steve et al have been discussing Everything Everywhere. As I understand it, their basic point is that the future of the web is about service layers and distributing your service as widely as possible to as many audiences in various containers as possible.
IOW, for digital media businesses, the network is the audience (as well as your monetization platform and, if you are UGC, your content crowdsource)
The upshot of this idea is that to be successful, you have to figure out how to add value to the network overall. Occasionally, that might mean forcing people off the network to your particular homesite but usually it means finding ways to provide ubiquitous and useful services to users wherever they are.
Developments like OpenSocial are expediting this service-users-anywhere trend by knocking down walls between companies so that truly best of breed services can thrive across multiple containers/platforms. It is the social media equivalent of Tom Friedman’s flat world in many ways.
Personally, I think this is great news. We started ThisNext w/the assumption that social web users want best-of-breed services that can help build out their digital identities. Flickr, youtube, photobucket, slide, etc are all examples of ways that people are taking 3rd party services into their online homes on MySpace, Facebook, blogs, etc and making those services part of their personal digital identities. Another of our core assumptions was that social web users would want a best-of-breed service layer focused on helping them find the best products for them. Hence ThisNext whose mission is to empower tastemakers to connect w/their audience.
To that end, we built ThisNext w/an API* “layer” strategy in mind that enables us to distribute our functionality and monetization across multiple web modalities: search, our homesite, and our network which is composed of blog widgets and apps for facebook & OpenSocial. We are building some of those network apps ourselves and are exposing our api’s to select 3rd parties who want to leverage our social shopping infrastructure. In this way, we hope our API’s will help ThisNext add value to the overall network by helping 3rd parties who will spread their own TN-powered apps and thereby increase ThisNext’s ubiquity/reach.
Below is a slide from a recent TN Board presentation I did that makes this point in pretty colors.
* API documentation updates forthcoming
4 responses so far ↓
1 James // Apr 1, 2008 at 11:30 pm
Gordon your blog is off to a great start with nice insights. I would, however, suggest “figure out how to add value to the network overall” is not the answer completely - rather go figure how to become part of, or add another useful layer to, the network - IOW become the network - I think that is easier to follow. If your alexa trends don’t match the steady trend of companies like twitter, or dare I say youtube, then something is wrong and if you can’t figure it there will be problems ahead. Genuine UGC drive over networks is, at this early stage of the UGC game, relentless. It’s what everyone wants as the information age adds value (but does not begin to replace) the industrial age. I think with social change in media consumption, which is the big buzz around UGC, call it W2.0 if you must, everyone should recognise the really well established networks are derived from the agrarian and industrial ages; the current network is merely a new layer which adds value.
Looking forward to more of your excellent post!
J
2 nicolas leroy » StyleFeeder and ThisNext are launching public APIs // Apr 2, 2008 at 7:34 am
[…] Gould, ThisNext’s CEO, has written a really interesting article on his blog entitled “The Network is the Audience” where he explains: […] we built ThisNext w/an API* “layer” strategy in mind that […]
3 Gordon // Apr 2, 2008 at 11:02 am
Thanks for your comment, James. I agree that all these networks are in fact additive though I don’t agree that all scale the same way as youtube or twitter. Those are very much many;many networks and while they are super-important, they are only one type of network. Others, which more closely match ThisNext are few:many in that we have a few tastemakers who supply insights for a much larger audience of shoppers.
4 Remi // Apr 15, 2008 at 12:18 am
The API is only in the beginning stages and is being developed to meet specific needs. Further data and functionality will generally be provided only in response to ThisNext developer and user requests.
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