Social networks

Thoughts on Social Network evolution

Facebook certainly is the topic de jour. Jim makes a compelling case for getting first mover advantage within F8, the designated name for the FaceBook platform.

More interesting are the 893 new services have opened their doors on the platform. The most popular, Top Friends by Slide, already has 6.4 million users. Yes, that is no typo, in one month a Facebook service grew to more than 6 million users. With traditional marketing, it would have cost a bank or card company as much as $1 billion to attract that many customers assuming acquisition costs of $100 to $150 per new account.

Source: Netbanker

But while I agree, I found it interesting to read Brad’s post on the new set of problems that the F8 platform creates.

In addition, Facebook has shifted all of the infrastructure costs to these apps developers, creating the “I have 250,000 users, now what?” problem.

Source: Feld Thoughts

Finally, Dave Winer talks about the things that need to get invented, and that will drive out disaggregation of services from Social Networks.

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself.

Source: Scripting News

Relevance to Bankwatch:
Social Networks are today, where internet was in 1996. There is much evolution and development to come. F8 is just a start, but a good start.

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4 thoughts on “Thoughts on Social Network evolution”

  1. To be honest, Colin, I’m still trying to get my head around this challenge…what’s the win-win-win for consumer-social networking site-and FI’s? You have affinity groups, social things happening in Facebook and other networks, but what’s the value add to the consumer to do their banking in Facebook?

    Maybe we can chat about this over a beer in NY next week. See you then.

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