Think beyond Build-A-BearVille (the Second Life for kids)

My daughter, Vania, loves to play Build-A-BearVille, the virtual world of Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc. After watching her playing several times, I find that the game is truly addictive to kids (especially to the girls) as many adults have been addicted to Second Life.

I suppose all of the Thinking Space readers must have had more or less experiences on the online social networking communities. By contrast, there are indeed a few very interesting innovation in Build-A-BearVille that are worth of sharing and thinking. Build-A-BearVille demonstrates something beyond its domain.

1) Virtualize the real world into the virtual world, and monetize the connection between the two worlds

The most impressive service provided by the Build-A-BearVille is to build a stuff animal in the real Build-A-Bear workshop and it immediately becomes a living pet of yours in the virtual Build-A-BearVille world. More than that, after declaring the birth of the pet Build-A-BearVille automatically provides you a well-designed virtual condo that both of you and the pet may live happily ever after together in the virtual world. This is the primary business model of Build-A-BearVille. (And you can imagine, we build a bear for Vania because of this game.) But it means more than the bears.

What Build-A-BearVille suggests is indeed that there exists a bridge between the virtual world and the real world. Unlike Second Life which sells virtual lands or the traditional online shopping sites which sells only the real products, Build-A-BearVille monetizes the connection between the virtual world and the real world. That is, once we have a thing in the real world; we may also want it in the virtual world (and be more fancy since in the virtual world it can be given life that is impossible in the real world). In similar, once we have experienced a virtual product in the virtual world, we may want it in the real form in our real life as well. This connection between the real world and the virtual world could become an even greater market than simply the virtual world stuffs or purely the real world products.

Imagine it. In the future, whenever one buys a real thing, the thing automatically becomes part of his belongs in his virtual community. Whenever one tries to buy a real thing, however, she may first experience it with very cheap (or free) price in her virtual life until being satisfied.

Many times, we do not really want to have a very different second life in the virtual world, which is too much unrealistic. By contrast, what we often expect is to have an adjustable clone of our current real life. By this way the virtual life becomes an experimental bed of the real life in which we may try varied options that are too expensive to test in the real life. More importantly, by which we may test the consequence of many of our decisions before we truly make them real in the real world (which will be unchangeable).

2) Make vocabulary be controlled

Unlike the adult social networking sites, Build-A-BearVille does not allow "free" speech. By contrast, all the allowable sentences and phrases are pre-built. The users can choose the phrases they want to say by selecting instead of typing.

The motivation of this design is obvious to the kid sites such as Build-A-BearVille. First, many of its users (the young kids) may not even be able to type, or at least to type correctly. Second, it ensures that the community is well guarded in good manner, only! Therefore, the parents become more willing to allow their kids playing the game.

My thought is, however, why not make the vocabulary in the adult social sites be controlled as well. And there are reasons.

First, controlled vocabulary brings more discipline. A social site (unless it is Facebook) needs to have a focus. To allow anything often leads to do nothing well, and then the users are getting bored. The controlled vocabulary will force the users to the theme of the site. Although it looks like that the users lose the freedom of speech, it increases the efficiency of getting the work done.

Do not try to hold the users indefinitely in your site by adding many meaningless fancy services. Remember that time to anybody is precious. So speed up the process. Let the users know what they can do/say and what they cannot do/say immediately without exploration. When a site does this, it keeps the right users to itself and establishes a strong and stable community.

Second, controlled vocabulary preserves virtue online. It helps building a great environment so that every user comes with happiness and leave with delightfulness. The users can be certain on what will NOT occur when coming to the site. This effect could be much greater than it seems.

Third but definitely not the least, controlled vocabulary enables strong support on user data mining and many other user data analysis services. With controlled vocabulary, it is much easier to build a network of the linked data. Therefore, the site is able to develop much better domain-specific services for the users that are very hard to be implemented without the restriction of controlled vocabulary.

Summary

Since our Web itself is in its childhood, we often learn more from the design of the sites for kids than from the sites for adults. The intelligence of the machines that the Web is upon is closer to the kids than to the adults. This is thus why I feel the beauty of Build-A-BearVille. Try it you may get more inspiration.

Marketing strategy in social networks

In a 2-minute yBC video clip, Anastasia Goodstein, a Gen-Y book author and the founder of Ypulse, shared how corporate campaigns might have missed their mark on marketing the social networks. I am impressed by her observation that opaque marketing is not the right way to explore business opportunities in online social networks.

By Goodstein, quite a few present retail firms try to hire online young ambassadors to spread their positive buzz over varied social networks such as Facebook. Instead of regular salary, the retailers give the young ambassadors free stuffs as gift. The retailers, however, advise their young agents not to disclose the gifts they received. The retailers ask their young ambassadors pretending to be objective volunteers who happen to like the services or product instead of being "paid" salespersons. The policy seems smart, while indeed, however, it is a miss of the mark on what social networks are.

Here are some thoughts that Goodstein did not explicitly say in her short speech while I want to extend the speech a little bit.

Social networking is to connect people with various "expertise". A social network is where one helps everyone else and everyone else helps her. To help each other, in social networks people look for a member's strengths but not the amateur comments. This is why the strategy executed by the retailers is wrong.

In short, objective volunteers are not necessarily experts (and most regularly they are not), even if their names are on the list of one's friends. This is where the whole problem is sitting. A person wants to seek professional suggestions in contrast to unprofessional buzz through her social network. Therefore, if the young ambassadors are known competing to be the official service/product representative and receiving free stuffs from the service/product providers are the proof of their expertise, their recommendation and comments would immediately become more valuable than the others among the friends.

Note that there is a subtle issue of trust inside social networks. In a social network, by default there is already existence of certain degree of trustworthy between declared friends. Hence being "professional" or not is a more crucial issue than the issue of trust since the latter one already has been reached. If I have two varied recommendation of services from two friends, I will certainly pick the service recommended by the friend who I believe is more expertise on the related domain. I trust both of my friends; but when trustworthy is not longer an issue, I choose the expert's suggestion.

Now the error the mentioned retailers made has been clear. These retailers are addressing the issue of trust instead of expertise. In real life we have learned that many salespersons are not trustworthy. Hence the retailers want their young ambassadors to be looked like trustworthy. What they missed is that the issue of trustworthy has already been automatically solved by default in the social network. The young ambassadors, no matter whom they are, are already quite trustworthy among their friends (or otherwise they should not have been friends at the first place). What the retailers really need to invest following is to train the young ambassadors so that they looks like professional in front of their friends. That is the miss of the mark!

Facebook Paradox: real social or unreal social

Today a post at TechCrunch blog caught my eye. From an official Facebook business letter to one user, it said that Facebook "expect accounts to reflect mainly real-world contacts" in contrast to "mainly internet-only contacts." Wait a minute, is Facebook an online community or an offline community?

I think the letter reflects the paradoxical thoughts among Facebook executives. In short, they are expecting to clone the real social network among real people onto an unreal world. What a mess of thinking!

Facebook, if you think yourself is real, please also respect the internet-only friendship be real too. Otherwise, isn't Facebook an internet-only platform of social networks?

Online Identity: what is it?

With the hype of Web 2.0 and social networking, online identity has been a popular term. The management of online identities, however, is gradually becoming a severe problem. Identity overload is a fundamental problem of Web 2.0. To solve it, we need to have a better understanding about the details of online identity.

By definition, identity means the distinct personality of an individual regarded as a persisting entity. There are three key terms in this specification---individual, distinct personality, and persisting entity.

Individual

An identity (no matter whether it is "online") is for an individual. Therefore, an individual person must exist before his identity exists. Although this derivation is trivial, do individuals always exist?

In the real human world, the answer to the former question is trivial. By nature, humans exist as individuals. Nobody lives due to the live of another person and nor does anybody lives because of the existence of any natural or social context. Being removed all context and relatives, an individual person is still himself. Being added any context or relative, an individual person remains also just himself; no more, no less. Every human being is a unique individual, or he is a unique, though shallow, image of God.

When we look for the answer on the Web, however, it becomes very different. Can anybody tell an individual person on the Web? Most of the time, we cannot. Most often, on the Web we may only tell a portion of an individual. For example, at YouTube we may tell an individual eye, at LinkedIn we may tell an individual hand, and so on. But does a unique individual person ever exist on the Web? Generally the answer is no till now.

Then back to the initial derivation stated at the beginning of this section. If online individuals even do not exist, how is it possible to produce online identities for these individuals?

Distinct Personality

An identity is about personality. This is an important catch of meaning because a common misconception says that an identity is such as a name or a social security number. In fact, either a person name or a SSN is just a reference to some real identity instead of the identity itself.

We may clarify a few important thoughts after insistently distinguishing reference to identity from identity itself. For example, identity is unique not due to the uniqueness of references. In the other words, whether references to identity are unique actually does not matter much; identity (if it is identity) is always unique discarding how it is referenced.

But there is a problem---personalities in general are not unique. As we know, varied persons may have the same personality. Hence identity is not just about personality, it is about distinct personality.

When identity is about distinct personality, online identities must be about the distinct online personalities. Moreover, the distinct online personalities are not the same as the references to the distinct online personalities. That is, an URI (or URL) is not and should not be an online identity because it does not determine any real distinct personality, even if the personality is online.

Persisting Entity

An identity is an entity. By being entity, identities are verifiable. Note that it is not verifiable in general to everything that is about personality of an individual. But if a thing belongs to an identity, the thing must be verifiable. Beyond, an identity is not only verifiable but also persistently verifiable. That is, an identity must be a persisting entity.

The property of persistence shows the existence of a constant methodology of identity checking. In the other words, we do not have to enforce the uniqueness of URL in order to perform identity maintenance. Allow me explain it using an analogue. I can always identify whether a woman is my wife not by checking her name, her look-like, her SSN, etc, but through the direct communication between us. I identify her by her unique personality and such a personality is actually an persisting entity.

Discussion wrap-up

So have we answered what online identity is? Not yet. But at least we now have a few insights about the answer.

1) We need to have online individual before assigning online identity to individual.

2) Online identity is not reference to online identity.

3) Online identity is an invariant on the Web.

4) Online identity can have very rich content (because personality is rich).

5) There exists an objective, constant method to verify online identity.

Any more words? Yes, on Web 3.0 the issue of online identity will be generally solved.

LinkedIn to Chinese market, oppotunity and challenge

My friend Jia Jiang, currently working for LinkedIn on its China marketing strategy, visited me recently. In his visit, we shared how LinkedIn might enter China---the largest growing market in the world. Linked into China, how many opportunities and challenges the company will face?

Social Network, the difference between Chinese and western culture

In western culture, social is part of the life. In Chinese culture, however, social is the life.

I have been at United States for more than 10 years. Before it, I was in China. For years I have observed the cultural difference between the two countries. Certainly in both countries social networking is a very important part of normal person's regular life. There is, however, some subtle but critical difference. United States encourages individual heroism. Social networking is thus auxiliary to this general goal. China, on the other hand, encourages collaboration but discourages individual heroism in general. In China social networking is thus the goal. When facing a problem, a typical American thought is to solve it by oneself or otherwise engage his social network under his direction to solve it. By contrast, a typical Chinese thought is to engage one's social network to solve it and make himself be a member of the collaborative team.

Philosophically, Chinese style social networking is based on the Doctrine of the Mean (Chinese: 中庸; pinyin: Zhōngyōng). Chinese people believe in that if one tree is higher above all the others, wind will destroy it first (Chinese: 木秀于林，风必摧之; pinyin: mù xiù yú lín，fēng bì cuī zhī). Hence the principle of surviving but also living well is to follow Doctrine of the Mean---be neither too outstanding nor too insignificant. This philosophy is the basis of Chinese social networking.

Such a subtle difference actually indicates some fundamental difference between Chinese social networking and western social networking. If a western social networking company wants to enter and make itself succeed in the Chinese market, it must not only understand the difference but also know how to adjust their particular marketing strategy and even technological user interface design respectively.

LinkedIn, strengths and weaknesses with respect to Chinese market

LinkedIn, as well as all the other western social networking companies, advocates individual-centric social networks. In particular, LinkedIn makes much effort on composing individual's professional profiles in order to strengthen formal business connections among its users.

The strengths of LinkedIn with respect to Chinese market are obvious. In general, western software companies have advanced technologies better than their Chinese competitors. As one of the early adopters of Web 2.0, LinkedIn has strong technology team as well as excellent management team who really understand Web 2.0 in principles and technical details. LinkedIn has successfully branded itself to be the leader of professional social networks. In its particular domain, LinkedIn profile is more effective than either Facebook profile or MySpace profile.

Lack of the elements of Chinese culture is an immediate weaknesses for not only LinkedIn but also all the other western social networking sites which plans to enter Chinese market. No western companies can succeed in China by simply translating their sites into Chinese, especially if they are the social networking sites. (Hence I don't expect the recently reported Facebook's initial plan of entering Chinese market would be a success.) My friend Gang Lu recently wrote at Read/WriteWeb a post about the Facebook clones in China. One reason that many of these Chinese clones of Facebook are expected to grow better than Facebook China is that every one of them has customized their sites with certain unique Chinese cultural elements that the official Facebook China does not have. If LinkedIn expects to enter China, the culture customization is the first crucial barrier it has to overcome.

Another specific problem of LinkedIn entering China is its requirements of filling in detailed career information in profiles. Certainly this requirement represents the value of LinkedIn services. Such a request, however, could be seen as a serious thread by the Chinese government. Many foreign observers are surprised that there are much fewer LinkedIn copycats than the Facebook copycats in China. Indeed, it is not surprising at all from a native Chinese's eye. The Chinese government would simply not tolerate any private company to collect sensitive employment records of all Chinese people, let it alone a foreign company. In tradition, (due to the so-call "national security") only the government or certain authorized public organizations may have the privilege of owning personal profiles with detailed career information (Chinese: 个人档案). This is why even Chinese people feel difficult to copy the business model of LinkedIn in China. This issue might be a killer for the future of LinkedIn in China.

Can LinkedIn succeed in China?

Despite of all the problems, LinkedIn still has its chance to succeed in Chinese market. The key of success is, however, a point I mentioned at the beginning---Doctrine of the Mean (中庸)! The following are several particular suggestions for LinkedIn to enter China.

1) Never ever claim itself to be the leader of professional social networks in Chinese market.

2) Narrow down its domains of professional social networks to only the insensitive realms. Explicitly prohibit the adding of career information from such as army, nuclear plants, police department, and various other sensitive, national security related government departments. Narrow the use of LinkedIn China to pure business, especially on the realms such as the Sino-American exporting business.

3) Change the individual-centric LinkedIn profiles to group-centric LinkedIn profiles. Intentionally decrease the significance of individuals in the LinkedIn network of China. By contrast, significantly increase the weight of groups in the LinkedIn network of China. Such a change may require a major re-design of LinkeIn China user interface.

4) Add the unique Chinese cultural elements to the LinkedIn China site.

I must say that some of my suggestions are indeed controversial. But they are critical for western companies to succeed in China, not only just about LinkedIn.

First of all, any attempt of monopolizing Chinese market on information management may not survive long, even if it would succeed once. Chinese government had tolerated foreign companies to monopolize the TV set market in China for many years, and it is now even tolerating the foreign monopoly of gold mines in China. But it would never tolerate foreign monopoly of information access or information management in China. Neither TV set nor gold mine is directly about people. But information management is directly about people. Loss of a few money would not be pleasant but it is tolerable. Loss of the control of people, however, would be a disaster in the present China, and thus it is absolutely intolerable. LinkedIn must abandon the unrealistic dream of being the leader of professional social networks in Chinese market.

By not being the general leader does not mean it would not be profitable. Due to the large population in China, LinkedIn China in vertical could be a great success. By narrowing its realm to several most profitable realms, LinkedIn may have more focused design of its Chinese user interface with unique cultural elements and improved the quality of its services that are then more focused.

Furthermore, by emphasizing the group-centric in contrast to individual-centric LinkedIn may help its Chinese subscribers release the pressure of disclosing information for a foreign company. Actually, it has been a general law of 中庸 in China since ancient time. Let LinkedIn China be in a chinese-style infrastructure of group guiding individuals in contrast to in the western-style infrastructure of individual composing groups. I guess the same philosophy may even be helpful for re-modeling many of the current Chinese social network sites too, if they want to get a break out of the highly competitive SNS market in China.

The last question: what is group-centric with respect to individual-centric in social networking? I may write another post dedicating to this topic later.

Genome: rethinking of Social Networking

Social networking is a fascinating topic on Web 2.0. Despite of the various social network sites, there are still open questions about social networking in general. Vladislav Chernyshov, one of the co-founders of Genome along with Andrew Chernyh and Dmitry Gorpinchenko, discussed several of these issues in his blog.

In the post, Vlad argued five major problems in the current social networking practices: (1) the lack of sufficient privacy protection, (2) the overflowing of social message, (3) the low quality friendship maintenance, (4) the poor performance of advertisement filtering, and (5) the lack of identity management. Nevertheless are all the issues critical to the future of social networking, Vlad and his peers founded Genome to solve the problems. The company is at Novosibirsk, Russia. Invited by Vlad, I am a member of the advisory board.

The Genome service aims to solve the problem of identity management first. From the solution it will gradually cover the other four issues as well. The essential Genome service well integrates social networks, instance messagers, contact managers altogether and makes the integrated individual identity be accessible anytime from anywhere in the world. In person, I call the service a real Web-3.0 effort since it directly addresses the primary Web evolutionary issue at the level of Web 2.0---the contradiction between unstopping quantitative increase of Web 2.0 resources and the short of managing personal resources cross various Web-2.0 sites. Thus, Genome is not another Web 2.0 service. By contrast, it will be a real Web 3.0 service once it is fully developed.

In summary, Genome shows that we really need to start rethinking social networking to its next generation. The flood of social network sites has gradually made us more trouble than benefit. As Vlad pointed out, with more social networks, the quality of friendship decreases, the individual privacy leaks, the personal identity is under risk, and let it alone the distraction of increasing pokes and advertisement from all kinds of "friends". Genome will help solve all the problems. Just keep on watching.

Check out your Web influence by Q-value

QDOS is a new online service for people to briefly measure their influence on the Web. In short, the service asks users to specify their names on the Web as well as the profile locations of their subscribed popular Web services such as Facebook and Blogger. Then it computes the influence of a Web user in four categories, which are popularity (who you know and the extent of your online network), impact (how much people listen to what you say online), activity (what you do online e.g. shop, chat, blog), and individuality (how easy you are to find online according to your name, your age etc). Combining the values on the four aspects, the service calculates a final score starting with a "Q" (hence I call it Q-value) followed by a number. The number of Q-value thus shows the relative influence of the person with respect to the other people subscribed to this service.



The figure above shows my Q-value, which is Q4056 that ranks 5,436 out of 61,589 registered users up to the date. In comparison, James Simmons, my friend and blog partner at Semantic Focus, is reported to have Q3844. Tim Berners-Lee, the father of World Wide Web, has a convincible Q7292 that ranks No. 135 at the meantime. Another Semantic Web celebrity, James Hendler, however, only has Q2507, which is lower than my value. This result shows that we might not take the number too seriously.

No matter whatever, however, QDOS is an interesting application and the value is useful especially for people who want to brand themselves.

Social Graph

In my most recent article at Internet Evolution, I discussed the emergence of social graphs and its impact to the Internet evolution. In fact, the social graphs discussed in my article are beyond connecting only human web users but also the resources that used by the users. So they might be closer to the semantic graphs that were described by Nova Spivack.

Social Network: devoting to plebeians or elites?

Not a social network, but a business networking tool. This was what Linkedin CEO Dan Nye spoke to New York Times recently. "Not a social network!" Is there anything wrong within the statement? Actually, nothing went wrong. What Linkedin really want to express (but be shy to say) is that Linkedin is aiming to be a social network devoting to elites but not plebeians.

By contrast, Facebook's policy of open platform (or open API) is the manifesto of devoting to the general public, i.e. plebeians. Anyone can get a free place for their dreams of social networking. The realization of dreams, however, may be inelegant and lack of well maintenance. But open platform gives rewards to creative and diligent minds, even if they are short of money and their plans are lack of consideration.

Plebeians do not care much about security. As a matter of fact, plebeians are often more willing to try unknown applications than the rich elites. Why? If one does not own much at the beginning, how much could he lose to the end?

Certainly noble elites think of things in some other ways. They own much, and thus they worry more. Noble elites care much of confidential. They want to be safer, i.e. to be more closed to themselves, even within a "social" network.

Well, I guess Linkedin has properly found their customers. However, isn't being noble also equivalent to being solitude and short of choices? So will Linkedin be.