What's beyond Facebook and Twitter?

I recently listened to a panel with the suggestive title “Beyond Facebook & Twitter: The Social-Media Future” moderated by Bambi Francisco, the journalist turned entrepreneur heading up Vator.tv. It took place at the AlwaysOn Conference Thursday afternoon, July 30^th. The panel examined how start-ups were leveraging the “social graph”—the sticky title blogger Brad Fitzpatrick described as "the global mapping of everybody and how they're related" to offer users new forms of information and entertainment.

As networking technology moves forward, the newest innovation—facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube… have, in turn, become the platform that the next wave of entrepreneurs is building upon. The site colleca.com, for example, uses the social graph for streaming real time search. A visitor to the site might search on a real time event such as the “launch of the space shuttle” Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell explains. The site’s search engine then searches across every news feed—Reuters, AP, ABC, etc and every social networking site including youtube to locate any current or recent posting about the space shuttle launch and provides the information to the visitor.

Entering the search term “Afghans vote for president,” into Collecta produced 10 results. Most were twitter posts with links to an Associated Press new story. The results also included Twitter pointers to the Kansas City Star, Philippine Star, Boston Herald, and WBAY, an ABC affiliate in Wisconsin, however these all were reprints of the AP report. Entering the term “Michael Jackson” produced a larger and more varied set of results including stories in different languages, however, most were from Twitter postings—with commentary or references to blogs or news stories. It’s an interesting concept still in Beta.

Another new venture hoping to leverage off the social graph is Aardvark.com, which has yet to go live. It hopes to use the collective knowledge of all those actively on line at any given moment as a form of real time information resource. “It’s about getting into the experience and knowledge of your friends and their friends that no one would ever write down but if you happen to run into them and ask ‘where should I go in Belize?’ And someone says, ‘I lived there for four years, check out this, this, and this…’” Max Ventilla, Aardvark CEO said. “That’s an incredibly satisfying experience for both of you, (which) we’re able to productize because these platforms (social networks) not only have created the data (but) open themselves up to third parties.”

The third panelist, Shervin Pishevar, CEO of Social Gaming Network, had a more conventional approach to exploiting social networks by offering Facebook users interactive games, such as “Nicknames” and (fluff)Friends—which plays across Facebook, MySpace and the iPhone. The offerings seem to be a hit as (fluff)Friends has 584,137 monthly active users and 22,892 fans and Nicknames has 440,720 monthly active users and 24,211 fans, both building the SGN brand rather than generating income. SGN’s real money seems to be in iPhone games such as F.A.S.T. downloadable from the apps store on iTunes for $0.99. Bambi asked Shervin to confirm a million downloads, but without success. Shervin did state that SGN has recorded around 15 million installs of his software on the iPhone. That has to be worth a few million in real money.

The final panelist Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Labs, not to be confused with the Hearsay Lab offering from IrregularStuff Academic, was less forthcoming about how her company planned to draft off the social graph. “We’re developing tools for marketers to measure and optimize their campaign interactions across Facebook, Twitter and their own web site,” Ms. Shih stated. Her background building Faceconnector gives some clues to her new venture. Faceconnector is an integration between Facebook and SalesForce.com CRM (customer relationship management), which in many ways suggests that Facebook and Twitter are the new CRM. The concept of mixing anything “management” with a social networking site sounds a bit Orwellian.

The takeaway from this panel discussion seems to be that the metamorphosis of the “continuously connected” world from high speed connection—the 1980s, to web storefronts and search—the 1990s, to social networks—the double “00s” is moving to the next stage as the new decade looms. Let’s see if the next Facebook is among any of these early ventures.