Earlier this week a friend of mine updated his IM status message asking his friends for thoughts on the future of social networking as he was getting ready to speak at an event on that very topic. I think that what the Xobni guys are working on is the future of where social networking is going. Phase I was simply getting people connected. “Friending up” your network was a necessary evil and I think people will continue to do this. Phase II, which is where I think we are today, is really about adding some context to the nature of relationships. We’re still working through this phase, be it on LinkedIn or Facebook, and I do think that the near-term dominant model will be for users who care about adding context to the nature of their connections doing so in a manual fashion.

So what’s next? Well, I think what’s next (and by far most interesting) is some concept of the “strength” of a connection. Specifically, today I can see a lot of my friends’ social networks, but I have no idea for the relative strength of connections. Sure, if I see Person A knows Person B, I can always make an offline inquiry to see if that connection is strong or weak. But very soon I think we are going to have tools like Xobni that profile communications patterns and surface that information both to end users and to other applications. And it won’t be just social networking and community applications that benefit. Enterprise applications (collaboration tools, CRM tools, HR/recruiting systems, etc) will all benefit from having access to some of this information. We’ll call this contextual “strength” Phase III.

Phase III is really interesting to me because I think it has to be a largely machine-driven approach. Communication patterns are too dynamic for any user to bother continually updating “strength” of connections. Also, as Xobni has shown me, if you are a power emailer you’re likely to be surprised by who shows up as ranking highly. There’s no reason the same can’t be done for IM. I’m not sure that I’m going to turn my phone logs over to some 3rd party analytics company, but IM and email would be a pretty decent picture of what I do and with whom I communicate. Passive profiling of communications patterns is going to be really interesting and I think will expose really interesting information about the nature of communications. I think Xobni is on to something really cool and big as it’s delivering value to me today (even though I have to use it in Outlook) and I can see a path to a lot more value in the future.
As an aside, I think this is the best shot that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have to wedge their way back into social networking relevance. They already own the message stream and have the data they need to get a sense for who knows whom. It will be interesting to see whether they choose to open this information up and let other applications take advantage of it or whether they use it for the bedrock of their own auto-generated social networks.

Related Posts

• November 16, 2007 -- Inbox 2.0 – I Think it’s Too Late to Matter for Social Networking (but fix them anyway) (0)
• October 16, 2007 -- The Challenge in Switching Back to Outlook after Two Years on Gmail (1)
• February 3, 2008 -- Thoughts on the Prospect of a Yahoo + Microsoft Merger (0)
• October 8, 2007 -- A Different Take on “How Portals Will Win the Social Networking Wars” (0)
• August 7, 2007 -- Where Are My Email Analytics? (3)

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VentureBeat is one of my favorite blogs – I read just about every post as soon as it comes out. I spend a lot of time thinking about email and I spend a lot of time reading, writing, and reacting to email. So when I saw this article entitled “Four Startups Ready to Change the Face of Email” I was really intrigued.
For the past week or so I have been trying to switch back to Outlook from Gmail. I’ve been on Gmail for work for about two years and I wanted to see how painful the transition would be. A few quick blurbs on what I like about Gmail:

• The interface is quick – The Gmail interface is really snappy. It loads quickly and refreshes automatically. As is the case with most Google products, speed is clearly a high priority and it works really well.
• I can process/triage messages very quickly – Once you master the key keyboard shortcuts (j,k,x,n, and p are the crucial keyboard shortcuts to master in my opinion), it’s really easy to blast through a bunch of messages in your inbox and quickly triage them or otherwise mark them for future reading/evaluation.
• Search trumps foldering once you make the big leap – I am an active labeler in Gmail, but I’ve gotten lazy/sloppy with some of my labels over timer. The key “ah ha” moment in most Gmail user’s evolution is the moment in which the light bulb goes off and you realize that search is a more powerful navigation paradigm for email than foldering. It’s a leap of faith until you make the change.

One thing worth noting about the three things that I like most about Gmail – they only really matter if you are in a position where you need to manage (read, write, retrieve, and share) large amounts of email. If you don’t get a lot of email, most of these features and benefits don’t buy you much. In fact, you probably would not even bother mastering these things if you are not a power emailer.

The subject of to whom Gmail-like interfaces appeal is a subject for its own post. For the purposes of this post, we’ll just say that things like Gmail are designed for expert power users and have a high bar to adoption. However, once you adopt, it’s hard to switch.
After trying to go back to Outlook as my every day mail client, I’m finding it to be a very difficult adjustment. There are 3 things that stand out after a few days of non-Gmail email existence:

1. I miss keyboard shortcuts – a lot. After being out of the Outlook experience for over two years, I find the keyboard shortcuts to be a bit slow. Also, with the myriad number of formatting and presentation options that Outlook offers, it’s hard for me to actually remember all of the keyboard shortcuts at my disposal. The relatively short list of Gmail shortcuts that I can use really do the trick and allow me to get my work done quickly.

2. The Outlook client feels really slow. The time spent selecting messages, opening them, waiting for them to open, and then closing them and moving on to the next message just feels a lot slower in Outlook. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m less familiar with the interface or if there is something else at work. It just feels like it requires more keystrokes and work to get through my email using Outlook.

3. Working offline is not as big of a bang as I had thought originally. Now that I have a broadband access card for my laptop, there is relatively little time when I cannot be online if need be. Suddenly the ability to use my mail client offline is of less value as I find myself offline with declining frequency.

At the end of the day, I think that has big implications for folks who are building apps that plug into Outlook. Sure, not everyone in the world who uses email will switch from Outlook to Gmail. However, I know a lot of power email users who are moving away from Outlook and adopting Gmail. Given that so many of these interesting email products target power users, I am curious to hear how they will deliver their solutions to the (relatively) closed environments that we find in webmail. Greasemonkey scripts? Biz dev deals to get access to the platform? Lobbying hard for more opennes and APIs? I’m sure they’re all thinking about this stuff and what it means for their businesses.

As always, comments are welcome.

Related Posts

• October 19, 2007 -- Xobni and the Future of Social Networking Data (10)
• November 16, 2007 -- Inbox 2.0 – I Think it’s Too Late to Matter for Social Networking (but fix them anyway) (0)
• March 8, 2008 -- Google Contacts API Might be a Big Deal (2)
• January 9, 2008 -- 5 Xobni Invites (22)
• September 19, 2007 -- Yahoo and Zimbra (2)

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