Naked Conversations 2.0: How Google is disrupting the social media starfish
When Shel Israel co-authored Naked Conversations with me we interviewed about 180 companies about how they were using blogs and how that usage was changing their business.
Today I’m watching companies and political candidates and seeing a new trend that I’ve written up as the “Social Media Starfish.” I just did two videos, one that defined the social media starfish and all of its “legs” and another that explains how Google is going to disrupt many pieces of that starfish tomorrow with its Open Social announcement tomorrow.
Some things in text. What are the legs of the social media starfish?
1. Blogs.
2. Photos. Flickr. Smugmug. Zooomr. Photobucket. Facebook. Et al.
3. Videos. YouTube. Kyte. Seesmic. Facebook. Blip. DivX. Etc.
4. Personal social networks. Facebook. BluePulse. MySpace. Hi5. Plaxo. LinkedIn. Bebo. Etc.
5. Events (face to face kind). Upcoming. Eventful. Zvents. Facebook. Meetup. Etc.
6. Email. Integration through Bacn.
7. White label social networks. Ning. Broadband Mechanics. Etc.
8. Wikis. Twiki. Wetpaint. PBWiki. Atlassian. SocialText. Etc.
9. Audio. Podcasting networks. BlogTalkRadio. Utterz. Twittergram. Etc.
10. Microblogs. Twitter. Pownce. Jaiku. Utterz. Tumblr. FriendFeed. Etc.
11. SMS. Services that let organizations build SMS into their social media starfishes. John Edwards is one example.
12. Collaborative tools. Zoho. Zimbra. Google’s docs and spreadsheets. Etc.
It’ll be interesting to see how deeply Google will disrupt the Social Media Starfish tomorrow.
What do you think?
Here’s the two videos:
Part I of Naked Conversations 2.0: defining the social media starfish. 22 minutes.
Part II of Naked Conversations 2.0: how Google will disrupt the social media starfish tomorrow. 18 minutes.
Powered By 
October 31st, 2007 at 2:08 pm
You should add social music sites to the list, eg last.fm etc
October 31st, 2007 at 2:24 pm
Looking forward to
The videos!
Thanks for the summary of points in text.
–Gib
October 31st, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Surprised that Thomas hasn’t come and chimed in that you misspelled Zooomr :)
October 31st, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Great video that I will be pinging over to a few customers. Still getting customers not wanting to look at even blog integration, let alone social networks.
One thought - all this starfish and no mention of Second Life?
October 31st, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Mmm for microbloggin: i think that Twitter is just a little bit different that Tubmlr. :-)
October 31st, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Oh gawd, you should really stop this, it’s only Valleywag fodder.
October 31st, 2007 at 3:18 pm
I was just talking about this the other day on Web Community Forum.
Facebook for Self-Promoters.
I think we may see a freemium service for Facebook that unlocks special features.
Also, they should come out and play on Open Social!
October 31st, 2007 at 3:19 pm
Christopher: someone has to give Valleywag something to write about.
October 31st, 2007 at 4:21 pm
…so where does this leave:
- all the social bookmarking(-sites),
- commenting (co-comment anyone ?)
- social TV (Joost, babelgum etc)
- location/map based social tools (dodgeball, navizon buddyfinder etc)
- crowdsourcing (amazon mechanical turk etc)
October 31st, 2007 at 5:37 pm
.. and
- reviews and recommendations (yelp, angie’s list)
- gaming (xbox live, playstation network, ea online)
- im (aim, instant messenger,…)
- web based events (webEx, genesys)
October 31st, 2007 at 7:51 pm
[...] Robert Scoble talks about the Social Media Starfish as a Conversion Engine: What are the legs of the social media starfish? 1. Blogs. 2. Photos. Flickr. Smugmug. Zooomr. Photobucket. Facebook. Et al. 3. Videos. YouTube. Kyte. Seesmic. Facebook. Blip. DivX. Etc. 4. Personal social networks. Facebook. BluePulse. MySpace. Hi5. Plaxo. LinkedIn. Bebo. Etc. 5. Events (face to face kind). Upcoming. Eventful. Zvents. Facebook. Meetup. Etc. 6. Email. Integration through Bacn. 7. White label social networks. Ning. Broadband Mechanics. Etc. 8. Wikis. Twiki. Wetpaint. PBWiki. Atlassian. SocialText. Etc. 9. Audio. Podcasting networks. BlogTalkRadio. Utterz. Twittergram. Etc. 10. Microblogs. Twitter. Pownce. Jaiku. Utterz. Tumblr. FriendFeed. Etc. 11. SMS. Services that let organizations build SMS into their social media starfishes. John Edwards is one example. 12. Collaborative tools. Zoho. Zimbra. Google’s docs and spreadsheets. Etc. [...]
November 1st, 2007 at 1:26 am
Robert
When you sign you name to something such as the “Open Social Web” Bill of rights, you should also defend the concept, trademark and all from being taken over by a single corporate entity.
Having the ability to own your data and move it from one site to another isn’t the same concept as Google’s platform which is all about Google having access to that data because all the services will be using the same API.
November 1st, 2007 at 1:30 am
Andy: good point. But so far I see a whole industry playing with Google on this and Google is playing back. That’s far different than Facebook.
November 1st, 2007 at 2:16 am
Heck Robert, a starfish has only 5 “legs” - you’re describing an Octopus (or more accurately a duodekapus)
:)
November 1st, 2007 at 4:07 am
To be a platform, any entity needs two things Metcalfe’s Law (each network addition affecting the outcome as some non linear function of total) and an API. OpenSocial has the API but it is not clear how a member addition on one site non linearly affects the whole. See my website for posts relating to the Metcalfe’s Law and Social Networking.
November 1st, 2007 at 5:44 am
I thought that the videos were great and they got me hoping… I posted my comments on this in Kyte at:
http://www.kyte.tv/ch/18877-chomer-com/67784-on-google-social-network-disrupti
We’ll see (hopefully) what Google has up its sleeve today!
November 1st, 2007 at 11:17 am
Scoble’s Starfish
Last year, while attempting to get a handle on the increasing number of social media, uh, mediums, I created this diagram. I’ve used it fairly often in talks to try to explain the different ways people are interacting on the web.
Robert Scoble re…
November 1st, 2007 at 12:37 pm
[...] these “Facebook killer” conversations in the first place. For example, Robert Scoble spent a lot of time yesterday talking about all the limitations that Facebook places on its [...]
November 1st, 2007 at 2:02 pm
[...] is getting really fun … Scoble has put forth the idea of the Social Media Starfish (technically they are called "sea stars") and Darren Barefoot made a nicer version of the [...]
November 1st, 2007 at 11:09 pm
[...] I wish it were as simple as the Starfish metaphor that Robert Scoble is using. Its actually more lik… [...]
November 8th, 2007 at 4:02 am
[...] week I made a pretty version of Robert’s social media starfish. Today Tom came by to show off his slightly more complex social media [...]
November 14th, 2007 at 9:37 am
[...] in marketing, rolling snowballs, scoble, social media snowflake, starfish A couple of weeks ago, Robert Scoble blogged and made a couple of videos talking about the combined use of a whole bunch of social media tools and wrapped them up by saying [...]
November 19th, 2007 at 5:57 am
[...] shared thoughts on the current state of social media by examining what Robert Scoble coined the Social Media Starfish. Essentially, from blogs, photos, video to social networks and collaborative tools, the web has [...]
December 10th, 2007 at 8:30 am
[...] are numerous definitions out there that detail specifics (O’Reilly invented the term… so his description is [...]
December 18th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
[...] is getting really fun … Scoble has put forth the idea of the Social Media Starfish (technically they are called “sea stars”) and Darren Barefoot made a nicer version of the one [...]
May 26th, 2008 at 2:55 am
Thanks, I learned a lot from this post. Stumbled!