This is the first in a series of posts. The introduction and links to the entire series can be found here. This installment is also my column in next week's AdAge.
Hi. My name is Steve and I suffer from Shiny Object Syndrome (SOS for short).
SOS describes the digerati's never-ending obsession with emerging social sites. First came blogs. Then there was podcasting, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and finally Twitter. Some stick. Others don't. The key is to addressing SOS is to take a step back and look at the the consumer trends and potential business models.
My latest fascination is Friendfeed - a site that in one place aggregates your friends streams from across different social sites. Right now Friendfeed's audience is paltry. According to Compete.com, it has 300,000 active users. Still, I believe that Friendfeed has the potential to become as big as Google. Others who are vying for the crown include SocialThing, Facebook and Google themselves.
Why am I so bullish about such a small site? Simple. There are three mega trends at work here.
First, there's the rising influence of peers. Some 58% of opinion elites 35-64 said they trust a "person like me," according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.
Second, there's search. Some 90% of the online population searches, according to the Pew Internet for the American Life Project. It's part of everyone's life.
Finally, there's the giant pool of Millennials - the descendants of the Baby Boomers. They have no problem living their lives online and are predisposed to creating and consuming content created by peers.
Combine these three trends and you can think about easily searching content created by people you trust. That's huge and monetizable. This is where I see Friendfeed, Facebook and perhaps Google all headed. They will all build businesses around social contextual search advertising. Danny Sullivan calls this Search 4.0.
Social contextual search addresses Google's Achilles Heel - superfluous content. Right now when users scour the web they can't easily separate content they trust - i.e. what's been created by their friends - from everything else. It all gets piled into pages of indiscernible blue links that all compete for attention. However, if you can just search just what your friends think and prioritize it over everything else, you have a very powerful recommendation engine.
As an early Friendfeed enthusiast I find myself increasingly turning to its terrific search engine when I need product and service information. You can give this a try yourself here. However, it works best when you have added a bunch of people whose opinions you trust. Advertisers will soon be tripping over themselves to make sure their ads show up at the precise moment when such searches are executed
I believe that Friendfeed will be the first to implement an elegant advertising system that complements aggregated content from friends. The company's founders are ex-Googlers who know how to build simple systems that scale and have excellent search and monetization capabiliites. Watch for Facebook and Google to follow suit and a race to take off in this area.
The social networking and search mashup is big and extremely monetizable. Will Friendfeed be able to scale? Time will tell but someone will make this work.
