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Being sick has its advantages, since I have to lie in bed more often and can’t move around much nor get out, I have more time to read.

I am reading “The Starfish and the Spider”, a book by two Stanford alumni cum serial entrepreneurs, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. They also have a website here. It was a book I first came into contact from Noah Kagan some months back but you know, I have a huge backlog of reading I seriously need to catch up on (but not fall sick doing it).

I haven’t finished the book, but something I read roused me into blogging. Its about Auren Hoffman and why he’s a catalyst. Before I go into what a catalyst is, I need to explain what the book is about. The book is really about leaderless, decentralized decision-making and unstructured organizations versus centralized, top-down and hierarchical organizations. The former is likened to a starfish, which has 5 legs all of which have a full set of organs enabling each severed leg to survive on its own. Unlike the latter kind of centralized organizations, which is likened to a spider, a starfish does not die even if you chop it up. But a spider dies because it has a central command body the head. Destroy that and the whole organism is kaput. Try finding the central command of a starfish, if you do, perhaps you might beat legions of unsuccessful scientists and win some Nobel Prize.

The catalyst is characterized as a person that forms one of 5 legs of a “starfish” aka leaderless organization. (Catalysts are commonly used in chemistry where they speed up chemical reactions without getting used up in the reaction itself.) I realize I am a catalyst after reading this:

“Companies hire Auren because he’s able to navigate complex social networks. Auren constantly maps relationships in a way that is nearly impossible for most people. “A lot of people that you want to meet are not direct revenue relationships”, he explained. “You might want to meet someone who’s not necessarily a customer, say, but who might introduce you to customers. Or it could be someone who becomes a customer 3 or 4 years down the road.”

For Auren, making introductions is intuitive. If most of us started thinking about all the people we know, trying to figure who might benefit from knowing whom and how we could introduce them, we’d quickly get a headache. But for Auren,. it comes naturally: “The thing I do when I meet someone is make a map: you went to school at Berkeley, so… you must know so-and-so. I always make that map every time I meet somebody.” It takes a specialist like Auren to not only map people but use the map to make strategic introductions between the right individuals. He described a typical scenario: “So I say, ‘Bob, you should meet Jane. You should grab lunch. You should meet up.’ Before I do that, I will check in with Jane: ‘Jane, are you interested in an introduction to Bob’s company?’” What’s amazing is that everyone involved in the interaction ends up being grateful to Auren. If he does his job right, Bob benefits from meeting Jane; Jane, in turn, will have gained from meeting Bob. Auren makes the introductions, helps people connect, and then, in typical catalyst fashion, gets out of the way…

…The thing about Auren is that he is genuinely interested in helping people. “It does take a certain personality”, he said of the catalyst, “someone who like to help people. Lots of people just know a lot of people.” A catalyst, on the other hand, is “someone who every time they have a conversation, they’re actively thinking, How can I help this person? Who can I introduce this person to? O just want to help this person, I just want to make this person better. People really, really want to help other people. And thats the most underutilized tool there is”. Auren doesn’t get paid for the vast majority of the connections he makes, and he certainly doesn’t have an internal balance sheet reflecting whom he’s helped and who owes him one.

So now you know my little secret. I am not as good as Auren of course, he started a really successful tech company while I don’t. But reading these paragraphs is like reading my own thoughts.

I understand the importance of networking and I can pull networks of people I already know and make quick connections with new people I meet and insert them into the relevant positions. I dun have a map like Auren, I dun think that way, it just happens based on pure recall, just like how I can memorize phone numbers after I have dialled it twice. But I suck at shorter birthdays. I am still trying to understand how the brain works still so yes, neurochemistry or how the brain works is one field I retain particular interest for.

But I dun network with the intention of soliciting future benefits from people. No, I don’t. I never keep active tracks of who I help and who really gained with the intention of calling upon those favors in future. That is calculative. If I remember, fine, I dun make a special effort to follow up if a connection or introduction worked out, its too taxing.

So if you are someone I helped make introductions for in the past, and are reading this blog now, dun worry about “repaying” or “avoiding” me. I might already have forgotten you but will recall you when I meet someone who you might be keen to meet.

There is a new kid in the world of social networks. And its from the little red dot of Singapore.

Founded by two 26-year-olds R. Chandrasekar and Sam Hon, Velvet Puffin is an “always-on” service that seeks to bring together a seamless social networking and media (video, blogs, photos) sharing between the mobile ohone and your desktop computer.

The startup has received $10 million funding in cash-rich Singapore looking for our own Youtubes and Skypes. The Economic Development Board (EDB) is a public investor along with other private institutions. Such a large sum of money certainly raised eyebrows for a service which has no significant user base and is only launching its public beta today.

What is promising though might be in the intellectual property of Radixs, the parent company of Velvet Puffin. Radixs, in a press release in 2004, released information of their success in building the world’s first universal mobile operating system. This will greatly enhance the compatibility of mobile services across different handsets from the various mobile phone makers. The inter-operability of the mobile service with web-based standards might pave the way for what the Velvet Puffin team touts as “a truly always-on service” across the 2 important screens of the digital revolution.

A review of the startup is available on the Entrepreneur27 site, on Techcrunch and also on Business Times.

GigaOm makes his point on something I fully agree - social networking will become a feature.

Why? Because social networking as an independent subject matter by itself gets boring after a while. Scale has already been achieved by those that focuses on social networking as the end goal - MySpace and Facebook. You have to provide a greater utility beyond just “linking to your friends online”. Nor will explicit dating as the end-goal be a compelling reason for people to join a social network. I rest my case for networks like Xuqa that plastered hot chicks on their homepage a while back in order to lure desperados.

But I do not think the social networking war has ended. The definition of social networking is pretty wide to encompass just about any site that allows you to browse other people’s pofiles and connect with them as “friends”. Friendster used to dominate a few years ago, and then usurped by a new generation of teeny-boppers who never heard of Friendster but used MySpace instead. Similarly, MySpace will also be susceptible to an upstart social network - one that began by being highly customized for a local niche group, like the high school students 5 years from now who think MySpace is lame and want something their own generation created. There is, after all, a limit to the number of friends you can maintain online, hence network size, which MySpace has now, might not ensure its longevity. Secondly, a premium-content-based approach taken by Fox to make MySpace an entertainment portal is still an experiment by Old Media to see if they can transplant their ways successfully to a new medium. First movers never always win.

What do you think? Want to make your own social network today? See a list of turnkey solutions here.

Knowledge@Wharton, in an October 4th article, talks about the irrational exuberance in valuations of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. They compared it to the more stable business models of search engine companies like Google and Yahoo; ecommerce sites like Amazon and eBay. One example of such exuberance is the $900M offer for Facebook in 4th Quarter 2006.

“Last January, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, now 22, reportedly turned down a $750 million offer from Viacom, holding out for $2 billion, according to news accounts. This fall he is said to be mulling over a $900 million offer from Yahoo. Those are big numbers considering that the business, started early in 2004, has a modest nine million users and is believed to have annual revenue of around $50 million, though some experts expect that to double soon. If Facebook were valued at 55 times earnings, it would need a $16 million profit to justify a $900 million price.“

I particularly like this point on the different types of advertising pricing models that makes argument for valuations based on the oft-quoted metrics of unique visitors and page views, irrelevant.

The problem, as Wharton accounting professor Robert W. Holthausen sees it, is a dearth of information to plug into the standard valuation models. “You have little data on what kind of revenues they can generate and what their cost structure is.”

Valuing advertising-driven sites is particularly hard because the same numbers — such as the number of users or page views — can mean different things depending on how the advertisers are billed, Holthausen adds. “How often do they get paid for that advertising? Is it just when the advertisement appears? Or does there have to be a click through?” Similarly, not every user has the same value. That depends on how much the typical user is likely to spend and what he or she is likely to buy. Finally, Holthausen notes, a site will be more valuable if it uses a proprietary technology than if it simply offers services competitors can easily duplicate.

The full article can be read here.

My earlier post on Friendster has a new significant update. Bambi Francisco of Marketwatch informs us of the outcome of an interview with Kent Lindstrom, CEO of Friendster.

The skinny of this interview is that Friendster will now partner Google in making the latter its default search provider, in addition to an advertising deal akin to the Google-Myspace where ads are provided by Google.

Looks like Google gets them all, popular sites like MySpace, legacy ones like Friendster, to boost its online reach and its revenue, without the wholesale purchase of entire communities, an approach favored by Yahoo. This is a smart move by Google to increase its advertising inventory since its current web real estate are not really the destination sites on the web. It needs to literally get on as many online webpages as possible, considering that its hardly the No. 1 in content being served over the web, ceding that title to Yahoo, MSN AOL and MySpace. At the same time, it focuses on doing what it does best, the technical innovation of its web products without dabbling into its weak areas like content development or social networking site management.

The boffins of MIT have brought us a new creation, inspired by social networking success of the MySpace/ Facebook/ yadayada crowd.

Its what I call a back-to-basics approach, making social networking return to its offline roots.

A location-based application for “friendspotting”, iFind wants to help you find your friends anywhere, using data from WiFi access points to determine your location. Carlo Ratti, the director of the MIT lab that developed this, said he hopes this technology can help people “make serendipitous connections” Read the rest of this entry »

The Internet has already changed the way we relate to other members of society. For those of you who have Friendster/ MySpace/ Facebook, you already have at least 10-100, maybe more, “friends”, that you never met face to face and wouldn’t have been your “friends” if the internet was non-existent. Face-to-face interaction used to be the dominant form of communication and was the medium for what I call “connection” too, which is what I consider the definitive stage of friendship where an acquaintance becomes a friend. Other alternative forms of communication, pre-internet, included snail mail or “penpals” in the past where communication was through text and maybe the occasional photograph for closer penpals.

Obviously, all that has changed with the Internet. When a single click of the mouse brings you into contact with another person’s individual universe of photos in social networking sites like MySpace/ FB, textual expressions of their thoughts on blogs, and other media like videos, you feel like you knew this person for ages. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a classic story of a hot young thing that skyrocketed to fame, got blinded by the dazzling lights of scrutiny and thudded back to Earth to peter out of sight with a whimper.

There’s many success stories lately of Web2.0 companies making successful exits. MySpace and Youtube come immediately to mind at the forefront of these cool, sexy startups that rode on the wave of “youth-phoria” and their new-found social lives on the web. The founders of Youtube and MySpace may have become the new “rock stars” of the Internet Age, but for every rock star, there’s hundreds of has-beens..

Flashback 2002.

Friendster was touted as the coolest shit we had ever seen. A website that allowed internet users to create web profiles, connect with their old and new friends. The social networking industry was born and heralded as the Next Big Thing in the hype-fueled days of 2002. The mags were going gaga over it, from the notable Time, Forbes to chick reads like Cosmopolitan and Entertainment Weekly. Even Playboy was into them. Its founder, Jonathan Abrams, was THE STAR, showing up at events, with “strikingly beautiful women on each arm”, as NYT reports here.

And Friendster had powerful investors that read like the Hall of Fame of Silicon Valley. John Doerr, Ram Shriram, Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) , Tom Koogle (chief executive of Yahoo through the second half of the 1990’s). It was an All-Star Team. No one could touch them. Google tried buying them in 2003 for $30M but was rebuffed. Friendster thought it could be much bigger, maybe something bigger than what Google is today. They wanted to do everything:

We had a new clothing line come out last week. We’re talking about a reality TV show. I thought it’d be a cool Web site, but the whole cultural thing has been amazing. — Jonathan Abrams speaking on MArch 16, 2004 at the SXSW conference.

Besides, those behind Friendster were so convinced that they were destined to be the next big thing that they instead fixated on the actions of their presumed peers — at least that is Mr. Siegelman’s recollection. “I remember going to these board meetings and feeling disgusted,” he said. “Half of every board meeting was taken up by a discussion of what Google’s going to do, or Yahoo.”…

…The performance problems would come up, but the board devoted most of its time to talking about potential competitors and new features, such as the possibility of adding Internet phone services, or so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, to the site. Source: New York Times

But today, we know what happened, Friendster is literally the jaded cheerleader who never got laid after attending all the frat parties and courted by all the football jocks. It lies listlessly in 14th position in a ranking of all social networking websites, hundreds of time smaller in membership size behind MySpace. Its website still sucks, where MySpace has bands, TV celebrities and cool people hanging out, a $900M advertising deal with Google, Friendster has to make do with lame shit like this on its front page:

Do you want to be a fan of Cornetto ice cream?

So why did Friendster fail? I strongly think it is due to the absolute loss of control of the founders over the company’s direction and strategy. The “too many cooks in the kitchen” analogy came straight to mind. Secondly, the “experienced” investors dun get social networking. They focused too much on the money and not enough on the idea. Social netowrking is a real fuzzy concept that requires a lot of chemistry between the founders and its users. THink Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who was not even 21 when he started it, MySpace’s young music-loving founders, Youtube’s Chad, Jawed and Steve who digged videos. Can you imagine the 50-something board members understanding this?

The number of mistakes made at Friendster are many:

1. Founder Jonathan Abrams was replaced as CEO in April 2o04.
2. Board members who had great resumes but did not understand the product. The legendary John Doerr was deemed to have “little feel for the product”, and taken off the board by his fellow KPCB partner Siegelman.
3. A rotating-door CEO policy

The board replaced Mr. Abrams with one of its own, Mr. Koogle, the former chief executive of Yahoo. But Mr. Koogle served only three months, a temporary caretaker who showed up at the office only sporadically, former Friendster employees said. The board next chose a television industry executive, Scott M. Sassa, to replace Mr. Koogle. That selection might have made sense if the company had been in position to start cutting big advertising deals. But it was not, given that its Web site was not up to speed. Mr. Sassa left after less than a year, which was nearly twice the tenure of his successor, Taek Kwan, who left at the end of 2005, six months after he started.

I truly believe Friendster is a good lesson for social networking entrepreneurs trying to create the next MySpace. Its way too easy to think any kid can code a website in his room and ask 100 friends to spread the word and them to spread to another 2 virally by themselves and hope for it to scale the Hitwise/ Alexa ranking s subsequently. Yes, myYearbook.com, founded by a 16-year old student, is ranked higher than Friendster currently.

But if you think you can be MySpace, what makes you think you won’t become Friendster instead?

If you like this, this article here.

Drink up folks! From today, my best friend is Johnnie Walker and I love Grey Goose.

The academics have spoken: Regular drinkers make 10% to 14% more money than those who do not drink, specifically 10% more for men and 14% more for women. .

The study also concluded that men who drink socially — defined as visiting a bar at least once a month — earn an additional 7% more than those who do not. The same correlation was not found for women, however.

..according to the study, conducted by the Journal of Labor Research, published quarterly by the Department of Economics at George Mason University, and the Reason Foundation, a Los Angeles-based think tank. Click here for the Yahoo Finance article, and here for LA Times.

And CEOs agree too.

“The days of command-and-control management are over. Nowadays, influence has everything to do with developing relationships.”

~~Paal Gisholt, CEO of SmartPak, a 125-employee pet-supply company based in Plymouth, Mass.

Now before you start jumping off your seat to head for the nearest Happy Hour, its not only about drinking but more about socializing that helps you advance in your career. And really, do we need academics and CEOs to tell us drinking and socializing is good for us? Do we have to make socializing such an explicit activity that it will help fill our pockets with cash in the long run? Oh, and dun be stupid too, these guys say drinking helps, but getting drunk’s not cool…

My point in writing this article is not to encourage avid drinkers and socializers to drink more, although I am glad to help. =) (pssst… Buy me a beer next time you see me.) No, my point really is to use this research to reinforce my message that social networking is important.

Doing things in isolation these days is totally passe… You might be smart, but you ain’t an Einstein, Tesla or a JRR Tolkien that can create amazing theories, innovations, masterpieces by yourself. You need to share your own thoughts, listen to new, crazy, zany ideas in order to know what you really don’t know. In any case, “what-you-know” might not matter in any case, as sometimes “who-you-know” can replace that.

For my Singaporean friends, stop working your asses off. Work smart, not hard.

Develop a relationship with other real humans, not your office computer.

The way to climb that corporate ladder is not really to make that Powerpoint presentation look 3% better after 3 hours at 3am in the morning. No, you will be better off drinking with your coworkers or some hotshot in another company who will be rabidly sharing his career success tips at 3am in a nice bar on the Singapore River.

And yes, Maxim, if you happen to be reading this article, cheers to you.. =D

Oh, and a related sidenote here: You might find this LG phone useful..

I have officially become a Facebook junkie.. and stalker too, if you count the amount of times I have clicked on profiles and groups in order to identify patterns and behaviors for my thesis topic. Plus its an incredible time waster getting really distracted by cool stuff i find and not working on my thesis instead, thats the real killer.. I wonder how anyone doing research in this field can really do it without getting hooked eventually..

Maybe its not a good idea after all to write about about the web, cos I am really trapped in it now. =) But i’m luvin’ it. I also realize I am not an academic because all i can think of, while surfing Facebook, are not theoretical concepts but marketing ideas and revenue models.

My thesis topic is “Influence on Online Social Networks”. I am trying to investigate how information diffuses across virtual communities such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, by understanding individual motivations and also how social structure affects the desire to perform the action of passing along a meme. My goal is to work out a model for designing online marketing campaigns for online social networks. Particularly in the context of viral campaigns like the adidas world cup campaign on myspace that garnered thousands of “friends” within a week..

Such self-organized and organic evangelizing of memes hold massive potential for marketers. Being an avid user myself, I am  trying to think of a mechanism to ride on such trends as a marketer, but I cannot find a scientific way to re-create such viral behavior, much less find literature by academics who offer some insights. There are exceptions of course, Danah Boyd and Fred Stutzman. Which comes back to what I always believe in, only our own generation hold the key to the digital revolution. Online social networks are a slightly different ball game in terms of its sociological profile, they are not “real” and are only the “horizon” too what Fred calls the study of “socio-technical” behavior of web users on such networks. The disengagement of reality in some online interactions might just be turning some of us into cyborgs…

Back to the topic, some friends are asking me what I am writing about exactly. So here’s a draft abstract i crammed out of my confused mind:

In this dissertation, we will examine how ideas gain influence among members on online social networks (OSNs). An online social network is a virtual community of web users and is characterized by its consumer orientation and a platform that enables the creation and maintenance of web identities in addition to interactive features for the purpose of social exchanges between its members.

This computer-mediated form of communication is wildly popular among youths today. OSNs have been lauded for the swift propagation of recent pop culture trends due to the enhanced network effects offered by the internet form of information transmission. By studying the many interest groupings and movements in OSNs, we build a model that allows us to understand the diffusion of information. In particular, we seek to explore how network independent variables such as personality and network-dependent variables such as connectivity, social structure has an impact on the formation, growth and influence of web-based ideas/ memes. We compare the studies of such groups across some of the most popular networks today and attempt to apply these findings to the field of online marketing.

Some questions simmering at the back of my mind:

1. What causes an idea to spread in online social networks?
2. What is the “DNA” (genetic structure) of an influential/ viral idea on OSNs?
3. Is it the presence of “power connectors” or does the topology of a successful viral movement reveal how social structure helps in idea diffusion?

Think about this: why did you join a particular social network? You were not forced to by the company itself, no way. There’s no one who can command you to press a button and fill up a tedious form over the internet. Its your choice. And a conscious choice at that.

You were most likely influenced by your friends, people you trust who had sold you on the benefits of linking up on that network. It could be humor, could be voyeurism, gossip on friends, sharing interests, keeping in touch.. There’s an immense social blanket we wrap around us and an OSN membership might just help provide that extra comfort.

So we establish that a social network membership was obtained due to viral, peer to peer marketing. Most of your friends joined, and hence you join, and you move on to ask others to join. The cycle continues. No external influence, its all intra-community peer pressure plus maybe that self-initiated curiousity and desire.

But membership does not equate active participation. Some people never upload photos, nor leave testimonials, wall writings or update their profile. These activities are important in filtering the active members from the passive ones. Its a volitional/ conscious choice again. These people may just be passive consumers or voyeurs of your updates or they just fail to log on after that intial spike of interest. A social network has no value for any user nor marketer without constant activity. Hence, I postulate on the existence of an “effective social network”, one that creates and communicates social value, or what Malcolm Gladwell might call the mavens, connectors and salesmen.

These connectors are the true engine of a social network which thrives on content and media generated by its own users. They lubricate the entire operations of the network by contributing, publicizing, modifying, “stealing” and criticizing all this social content of their own, of friends or strangers. It is them which spark off “flame wars” or the next meme that will fuel a huge flurry of online activity that makes social network contribution so fun.

The focus of my thesis is on understanding the topology/ social structure of these social sub-networks, (the groups of users who have consciously rallied and engaged in activity around common memes) and the roles and importance of “influencers” (mavens, connectors, salesmen). I will also be attempting to create a link between how the process of meme propagation can be extended for application to consumer marketing campaigns in the form of memes.

It all sounds rather scattered now, lets hear what you can make of it.