nuance intelligence

People who are leading a business, non-profit or other organization instinctively know that “online social networking” will, can, and should have a big impact. But during the busy business day, week, or month, it’s hard to find the time to translate this notion into practical strategy and performance metrics.

Although the development of functional tools have trailed transformative vision during the early stages of this important evolution, an important change has happened in social networking technology in the past six months. At the end of 2007, Google announced a standard for the exchange of information between and among social networks. OpenSocial was announced late in 2007, in partnership with the other major social networks, save Facebook, who released their own competing standard several months prior.

Last week, Google annoucned their own framework and mini-applications for integrating OpenSocial tools on almost any website, called FriendConnect.  These simple widgets are installed on any site to “socialize” it (and release your inner Stalin).

What’s the nuance?

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With the whole silicon valley echo chamber trying to figure out how to make money from social networks, I had very low expectations about our tiny little blog’s performance on Google search results.

When researching CPM and other detailed info on that very subject, our own blog hit the front page of google, specifically for the search “vertical social network monetization,” not exactly an obscure search given the scale of these business opportunities.

Proof, with apologies to George Jefferson, that we “finally got a piece of the pie”:

OK.  Back to work.

Really. I don’t think they’re joking. (edited to add: it turns out, of course, that they are joking. I was fooled on April 1.  Turns out they’re well known for this.)

Virgin and Google have teamed up to send a team of people to Mars “within the next 20 years.”

See for yourself.

This is some ‘disruptive technology’ that transcends ‘globalization.’

It has taken me the better part of a decade, but I finally think the Economist might understand a thing or two about the business of digital media. Throughout the 90′s and into this century, it seemed they were late to the table, with obvious observations that hit the newsstands six months after they hit the digital zeitgeist.  Living outside the echo chamber, they provide good triangulation and outsiders’ detachment, as demonstrated by this week’s piece on the business of social networks.

As fits their milieu, they cover the battle of the titans with some accuracy, but miss the nuance of how social networks create value in a more distributed way.

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