Email - the next social network?

From time to time, I like to read the magazine "The Economist", a weekly news and international affairs publication from the United Kingdom. I read an interesting article, published at the beginning of this year. In the following, I want to share my personal findings with you. Enjoy!

MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn are almost always related to the term “social networks” and most of us are more or less active members in such networks. "Social networking has become an ubiquitous feature of our online life – but does that mean it is also a business?" As an ongoing manager it is your duty to be interested in the facts behind the scenes. The article “Everywhere and nowhere”, published in March 2008 in The Economist gives a good insight in the business behind social networks and broadens one's mind to the networking power of the old-fashion things: emails. (cp. source 1.)

On the one hand, it is obvious that social networks equal business. We all know about the big deals in e-commerce business where Yahoo and Google acquired social network companies (cp. source 2.). In the majority of cases, they would not do that without having a clue of a revenue-generating business model behind. What does the business model look like? As often in business, two problems come together and become a win-win-situation. First, web-mail has certainly never become a big business. Second, the problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The user is “forced” to maintain separate accounts on separate networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing, blogging-sites, etc. Therefore, the company's value of social networks is limited to its borders. By combining web-mail and social networks they try to make the first more profitable and the second more open.

To be precisely and show you the possible effect on the further development of social networks: please, think about it for the moment. What personal information is available for both, email-providers and social networks? - Yes, the user's address books, in-boxes and calendars. It is the most important and valuable information. By combining web-mail and social networks, each provider is not only informed about the invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections, but also about the quality of these relationships. An email account offers valuable clues about the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs. This combination results in a new kind of social intelligence which can be used to build many new services and a more open web. Nevertheless, the evidence of a profitable business behind still remained outstanding.

Assigning the final thought to future organizations. They also could use the same kind of social intelligence to use their existing email infrastructure to analyze and optimize their own “social networking assets”. The technology will not be the limiting factor, nessesary tools are already developed (cp. source 3.).

Sources:

1. “Everywhere and nowhere”, The Economist, May 2008 (please click)

2. “Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network”, The New York Times, Nov. 2007 (please click)

3.“Fuser: Manage All Your Email and Social Networking Messages in One Place”, Techcrunch.com, Sept. 2007 (please click)