Customized Social Network

The Internet as a whole has made accessing information and digital content a simple click away, but are you willing to pay to watch or access content online?  Are you currently paying to access content?  There are so many great places on the web to watch content through corporate video platform websites that are consumer facing such as Hulu, ABC, etc.  Even YouTube offers a great place to catch both professional content or that new viral video a friend turned you on to but again, are you or I willing to pay? 

In the case of YouTube, at this point I expect content to be free and to this point, I recently read a blog from Larry Dignan, Editor and Chief of ZDNet that was titled, The Cure for YouTube's Ills: Charge for Uploads, see: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=18919.  If you haven't read it, it's worth the read, as it brings up many of the questions around free business models that are "never free since someone always has to foot the bill."

These are all questions that hit me personally, as I was discussing a solution today with a potential client who is looking at subscription models to offer their niche content online through a Business Social Platform.  Overall, he is considering creating a customized social networking site with video content that is monetized through subscription.  This same person sent me an article from Brand Republic around Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal's plans to charge micro payments, see the article here:  http://www.brandrepublic.com/BrandRepublicNews/News/904742/Wall-Street-Journal-introduce-micropayment-scheme/?DCMP=EMC-DailyNewsBulletin.

In the ever moving target of digital media monetization, I don't feel that anyone has found the silver bullet solution that fits all and until that time comes, I guess we will all keep trying our best to find one ;-)





 

Affinity is the name of the game for communities and social networking tools can really help to keep a community focused on shared values. People like to live near people that are like them, this is a social norm. But does this norm extend to online communities as well? My basic observations say yes, as I evaluated my own online communities I found that the people I engage with are very much like my friends and neighbors of the physical world. As a matter of fact, some of them are the very same people.

Facebook is a great example, no matter how vast and diverse the universe of Facebook users is, my micro online community is very much similar to my physical community. Sites like Facebook make building a customized social network that caters to our basic community building needs easy. So the work of building online communities is more than half done by the users. You build the online social networking sites and let the community do the rest. People will find affinity with each other and micro communities will begin to spring up.

So big question, how for can these communities extend, how vast can they become? Can you create a social platform for elections that help to tie entire countries together? Check out these attempts at online political community building, from Google and Yahoo. Google launched Google India Elections Tools to help India's several 100 million voters make a decision about who to support in its upcoming national elections. Now this is community building on the largest scale possible. Honestly Yahoo India is doing a much better job at this with much less attention, (in the interest of full disclosure, I am an Ex-Yahoo.) Check it out and decide for yourself.