Social Media Now: The Social Edge, Debating Viacom’s Value to YouTube

It hardly signals the end of the line for social networking hubs like Facebook and MySpace, but it may be the beginning of the end. I’m talking about the potential impact of a Mozilla skunk works project to embed social networking functionality directly in the Web browser.

There’s a lot of buzz among the meme-makers. At Techcrunch Michael Arrington calls it bad news for start ups like Flock with ambitions to build social browsers. That would certainly appear to be the case, particularly since Flock is built on top of Mozilla, although for the moment the window is wide open for socially enabled browsers. Speaking of windows, Microsoft must also be developing similar functionality for Internet Explorer.

At ZDNet Larry Dignan raises an interesting question about the potential impact of social browsers on the economics of social networking hubs:

Another interesting thread will be how this works for big social networking sites that depend on page view growth like MySpace. If I can track all my social contacts in my browser will I visit MySpace?

Technology, functionality and ease of use will ultimately tell the tale of which implementation wins the day. For now the Mozilla effort, called The Coop, is an experiment, existing publicly only as a prototype which I intend to begin playing with today. But as a general matter the more social enabling included in a piece of software, the more valuable and sticky that software becomes to users.

Embedding social networking directly into Web browsers reflects the typical evolutionary path of Internet functionality away from hubs and central servers towards the edge where individuals have greater control over their user experiences. And it’s hardly the only sign of  the decentralization of social networking. Kristen Nicole has a piece at Mashable about OtherEgo.Com–a revamp of the social network formerly known as Rantiq. Kristen identifies the killer app hidden within the new service–the ability for users to make all their social network profiles available in one place–but criticized the company for making the feature hard to find and inconvenient to use:

Surprisingly enough, the ability to add other profiles, OtherEgo’s major differentiator, is not prominent on their site at all. The link to add a profile is rather low key, and any added profiles actually show at the very bottom of the page. Another concern I have is the ability to add anyone’s public profile to your own OtherEgo space by simply inserting the URL. Those things aside, it’s an interesting (but not totally convenient) way to keep your social networks in one place.

On his blog, Internet Outsider, former Wall Street wunderkind Henry Blogett called attention  to a report from Vidmeter suggesting that YouTube’s success is not predicated on copyright infringement. Blodgett draws the following conclusions from the report:

• Traditional media videos make up only a small percentage of YouTube views.
• NBCFoxTube, the hypothetical consortium, even if successful, won’t dent YouTube’s growth.
• Online video viewers usually watch short clips, not full shows.

But Pete Cashmore at Mashable offered a more detailed reading of the report, one that pokes holes in Blogett’s over hyped reading:

Well, bear in mind that since it’s unfeasible to crawl all of YouTube, they stuck with a sample size of 6,725 clips. This was not a random sample – it was taken from the most viewed list. Of those, 9.23% had been removed due to copyright violations, and the removed videos only accounted for 5.93% of video views in the sample. Viacom removed the most clips: about 40% of the videos removed were from Viacom. What’s more, Viacom clips accounted for 2.37% of all videos views counted.

There are lots of ways to interpret this, and we actually think it’s risky to draw conclusions. The thing is, Vidmeter only counted removed clips, since they’re unable to count the total number of copyrighted clips that haven’t been taken down. They also used the most viewed list as a sample, meaning that it’s not necessarily representative of what’s going on elsewhere on the site. And Viacom’s 72 videos in the sample still accounted for about 38 million views.

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Pete. The complete report is available here.