It looks obvious

Reading the comments to my post about Travbuddy I realized that we have deeper problem of understanding the concepts of social applications. The somewhat lame discussion developed with “A” was therefore very problematic since although we said the same things we addressed completely different ideas. I’ll try to clarify some of the confusion with clarifying the terminology. In this post I’ll use travbuddy as an example but it is represent other similar site. Social networks intend to create communities with shared interest in some subject. This is not new and it existed since the beginning of the internet - Usenet and newsgroups were exactly that. When MSN lunch its first version it was built around set of communities with chat rooms and discussion forums. There is nothing new here and the “new” applications offer, sometimes, some technical improvement but not real revolutionary idea. Building an application that will survive the hype can be achieved only if this application creating value for the users. In the past the most reasonable way to create content was to participate in one of the virtual communities and to be part of the discussion forums. However this is not the case today, the natural place for people to create content is their blog. I saw in Travbuddy several nice services. The mash up of the trip log with the map is rather cool. The problem is that all of this services relaying on content submitted by people. This content is the data I was writing about in the discussion and which “A” failed to understand. I claimed in the past that relaying on the masses is wrong. Paul Kedrosky defined it much better than me:

“Relying on users to do the heavy lifting - however intellectually appealing - is not going to work in the real world of lazy users who see little in it for them”.

The users are “lazy” because they want to get value and they don’t want to have extra duties as price. So if applications, such as Travbuddy, want to attract the user beyond the initial fissionable excitement they need to focus on what will bring people to use them. The approach that I suggested, as an example, was to collect the data directly from the blogosphere. I wrote about social searches in the past. This is much more challenging technological task, but good companies doing hard things. Once the data is collected it should be organize in a way that it can be search, aggregate, filtered mashed with map you name it - the sky is the limit.

Technorati Tags: Social Search, Social Applications, Travbuddy, Web 2.0, Bubble