A number of interesting issues have come to light in the recent announcement of Google+ intention to move into social networking in direct competition with Facebook.

"Getting It"
It may be that Google finally "gets it" with the idea of "circles" and "sparks" as a way of understanding social network segmentation that is superior to Facebook. Specifically the ability to segment different friendship groups into separate conversations is not just a grouping of relationship data but a fundamental "wakeup call" that this is how virtual communities actually work. It's often been surprising how this social graph reconstruction (to build value from the graph) has gone missing from the mission statement of Facebook in their every population expanding "one size fits all" approach.

Don't get me wrong, Facebook has obviously been wildly successful, but with all that tag and edge data just collecting there, it's kind of up to the user to work out how to make use of it. It's a good business growth model to get your customer to do all the work of course, collecting and contacting friends, tagging photos and linking to other "walls" and events that are of personal interest. A veritable cornucopia of semantic identification and "hot topic" trending. And it's not a phenomenon to just Facebook - Twitter hash tagging, YouTube video ratings and Groupon location-based deals all target trending behaviors. Whole online businesses have even been built on this premise such as Foursquare, driving location-based incentives; Quora facilitating knowledge marketplace exchanges between users and Last.FM recommendations engine feedback based on past listening and viewing behaviors. The list is growing. The value of information and its connections between interested parties feeds on itself as more possibilities become evident from connections between the owners and consumers increases.

But let's recall why Myspace fell from grace from its hedonistic year of 2005: One industry observer concluded in their blog that factors resulting in its demise included an inability to appeal to the aging teen customer base it had originally "captured' as they became young adults, its lack of innovation, a lack of understanding about itself, and a lack of control over its own destiny. At the end of 2010, Myspace's chief executive Mike Jones admitted the site was no longer a social network but now a "social entertainment destination." But it's hardly surprising that things do change in business and Facebook has evolved in its short and glorious life, introducing gaming integration like Farmville with mass appeal, and it's certainly still its own master with an IPO likely in the near future.

With Google's attempt to launch Google Wave and the recent Google Buzz, this is not always plain sailing in trying to create a new game changer in "composition of web social experiences" or a Facebook "killer app." At the center is the need to understand how ecosystem domains segment into social and business networks and, furthermore, how dynamics of online and physical communities really work. Perhaps this time round Google has hit on a more intuitively aligned function that mimics social media behavior rather than trying to manage it.

New Social Network Architecture - Understanding the "Edge"
This trend in "precision networking" is not just a public social media experience and feature. It's also a structural change in the way social and business networks actually work. It has a direct impact on the way social network architecture design is evolving right before our eyes. The early days of Web 2.0 and mashups that started to "build online edifices" are now giving rise to a richer online landscape of connected people, web sites and services that continually overlap and co-evolve.

A view is that these connections are more likely to succeed by understanding the mapping of online and physical social networks behaviors in the wider ecosystem in a much more direct way.

• Defining network domains that control information access
  • In reality people typically can have multiple "personas" and multiple memberships of networks that represent social, business and personal network behaviors which are typically not linked. The ever-expanding Facebook security setting page suggests there may be a growing problem in differentiating the "facts from the players" in the social network through a "settings page" alone. Behaviors are not based on a "check with your mother" reference to the rules every time you want to speak. Often it's dynamic and interactive. A fact that is both a blessing and a curse in the immediacy of the online world as seen in the case of the social revolution contributions from online social media to spread the word in the "Arab spring" to unfortunate misplaced libelous words on public social networks.
• Defining network domains that create network-to-network access
  • Crowd sourcing for ideas (Google Sparks) rather than locked away on separate web sites dedicated to "innovation portals" and "rent a guru or idea." The connections are made via the edge data and tags between people.
• Defining the value of tag data in and between networks
  • Often information modeling has been seen as an "all or nothing" exercise. This has been either a holistic model of "all data" or specific "master data" islands that are internal to specific systems or devices. Yet in social and business networks parts of the data can be "tagged" or published into a growing public or controlled private network of information sharing and collaboration. This means that information architecture may be entering a "third era" that is looking at this "edge data" that constitutes the corners of social and business networks and how they connect. This becomes highly relevant in understand the value of networks and how information is evolving in new business models that stream, aggregate, mash, search and repurpose information for personal, collaborative or company competitive advantage. With the growing awareness of "where is my data" starting to raise increasing security issues for big data and distributed data leakage, this is a pressing topic to map out and track for security and for value leverage reasons.

Building Architectural Value in the "Cloud of Contextual Networks"
The Google+  "circles" and "sparks" mapping directly to real networking behavior patterns are just two examples that speak of the potential range of new architecture design features for integrated information management and social and business networks. This is beyond the specific transaction management and online stores we see today that are the "online edifices." The "first stage" establishment of web sites are the stop-off points in the network journey that every online user does intuitively everyday as they "randomly walk" between sites and networks. Supply chains evolve to supply chain networks as these connections become ever more rich and contextualized through tagging and improved online community experiences.

But it doesn't stop there. Combining search engines, personal, social and corporate preference data and expanding the myriad of online activities and interactive experiences of endless possibilities, and opening up geographical markets and the security and market trade legislations are just some of the other challenges that face this evolution. This has already started and the truth is we probably haven't seen "nothing yet" as to what the possibilities of new dynamic social and business networks could be in the future.

The challenge for companies is in visualizing and identifying how their business model and markets are changing and can be changed through new network ecosystem architectures. For a large enterprise such as Google it may be they can make the next leap forward in contextual searching and tagging with its search engine, so that it can create real value to the social networking. Could another grand slam result? The customer doesn't have to work all the time to search and get added value information and content. Equally, from the consumer side, the challenge for large-scale country and regional marketplaces will be in the ability to create and incentivize competitive policies for products and services that enable interoperability and commercial success across the many business and social networks and cross-cutting provisioning and sourcing opportunities.

In practice the very concept of competition may be a kind of co-evolution when seen through the lens of networks and ecosystem big picture thinking. When looked at it from the perspective of edge data and tags, the intersection of shared data could never be more conjoined. Data exposed can be connected or searched and the barriers to entry or use of that information can potentially be lowered and a different kind of experience can be created in social and business networks. What's to stop information from being reused from one service to another if the personal data is portable and connectable? These walls can be broken. We have already seen examples of embedded services of Google connect running on Microsoft Office or Google Android connections to synchronize with MacBook online stores. In future months and years much of this will be played out in the ensueing battles of where the data and services will be hosted, the patent and IP content battles, and the interface APIs that connect networks.

"Innocence Lost" - The "Walled Garden" vs the "Free Network Ecosystem"
Social market growth is in the interconnections, not just the product features. If Google strategy can get it right for capturing social dynamics in the "circles" and "sparks," this could then enable other Google+ features of "Hangouts" and "Huddles" for event and photo integration to be even more successful.

Perhaps it is "innocence lost" as the realization that the growth of connections comes at a price of personal privacy and security issues with the increasing awareness of new connected value models that are made possible through the edge and networks. If the volume of written material on the Internet regarding the issue personal security is anything to go by, this is surely a big issue. The possible threat of hackers accessing your profile or the less nefarious but none-the-less insidious unapproved use of network social graph connections raises questions of "how secure is your edge data?" and "what data is being collected about you and what is it being used for?" Yet the explosive growth of the Internet continues to drive relentlessly forward in spite of these technical and real social concerns. The "walled garden" of security and information networks may be a thing of yesterday-year, which kept "the lid on things." However, this may no longer be completely sustainable as the pace of innovation removes advantage in a matter of a few years and the value is in the network of interconnections and the wider ecosystems of products, services and sustainability of the environmental impact.

Ultimately it's in understanding the connections to the people and marketplaces and how this is enabled that grows the critical mass to succeed.

Impact on Monetization Strategies
While social network strategies have hitherto been a feature of what has been described as the "social business" or "social media convergence," what may be emerging is the "new monetization model front" of dynamic cloud-based business models. If the first stage of hyper growth of large public cloud providers is now moving into maturity, a next stage is to seek out new business models to capitalize and enhance the experience and retention of the acquired membership base. Myspace, for one, is perhaps moving into a new renaissance phase of growth in focusing on a full discovery service for entertainment as the theme for the network. In the online world it's relatively easy for new entrants to spawn and new services to migrate users away from one site to another. Branding still counts for recognition in the online and offline networks, but there is now more at stake. How to leverage information and edge data of the social and business networks is changing the shape of business models at the "front store of the enterprise." How to connect and reach these existing and new networks is fast becoming a hot topic.

If lessons are to be learned from the shooting star rise and bust of past hyper growth and rapid demise of the user network base to new entrants, it's this: a keen understanding and regeneration of new value networks must surely be an imperative. This is not just an issue for well-known public cloud sites, but probably an even bigger need for smaller players and the markets that they operate in to reach those citizens and customer networks in an effective and monetized way. Constructing channels to pull networks and consumers as well as services and products together will be an important part of creating sustainable monetization volume with appropriate services and products that target the real needs of those individuals and network dynamics.

References

1. http://www.google.com/intl/en/+/demo/
2. http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/sectors/media/four-reasons-why-myspace-failed-to-retain-the-social-network-crown/3022208.article
3. http://mashable.com/2011/06/28/google-plus-review/