Social Media Technology Assessment
Nathan Burkhart
Jeff Chen
Matt Chew Spence
Mario Espinoza
Jeffrey Kalvass
Devang Parekh
March 14, 2007
Strategic Computing and Communications Technology
University of California, Berkeley
1.Introduction
2.Key Players in Social Media
3.Technology Case Studies
3.1MySpace
3.2Flickr
4.Policy and Legal Considerations
4.1Copyright Infringement
4.2Indecent Content
4.3First Amendment Rights
4.4International Policy Differences
5.Business Models
5.1Business model analysis and design
5.2The value of Social Networking: creating identity, consuming and sharing content and communicating with your people
5.3How can social media leverage these communities to create real economic opportunity?
5.4How to grow the social community? Creating positive feedback and network effects
5.5How to make money? Revenue models for monetizing social sites without jeopardizing the relationship with the customers
5.6How to create stickiness? Creating and managing lock-in
5.7Conclusions: Social media will emerge as a real economic opportunity.
Appendix A: Social Networks Revenue Model Components
Appendix B: Social Media Sites overview
References:
1.Introduction
Social media is a term used to describe online content found at the intersection of social networking and new media. The Internet has enabled people to interact with media in ways not previously possible with traditional media such as printed text or analog audio. Individuals can interact with others around the globe, mix audio and video seamlessly, infinitely copy digital content, and create communities around shared interests and experiences. The popularity of social networking websites and Web 2.0 technologies has resulted in an explosion in the development of social media applications. Interlacing text, audio, and video with social networking components like personal profiles, friends, and groups has produced a wide variety of social media websites.
Social networking researcher Danah Boyd defines social networking sites as web applications with profiles, semi-persistent public commentary on the profile, and a traversable publicly articulated social network displayed in relation to the profile. Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble describes how these components of social networking sites differentiate social media from traditional media. He argues that the ability to comment on new media, copy it infinitely, and mash it up with other new media are important parts of defining social media and identifying why it has become so popular with users around the globe.
As social media applications gather steam through large increases in registered users and the amount of user generated content on the Internet, investors and entrepreneurs alike have been eager to evaluate the presence of real economic opportunities for both owners and users. While some social media business models have been met with skepticism others have received great deals of investor confidence. Our goal for this paper will be to outline the key players in social media and the effectiveness of current business models. Through an analysis of technology and policy relevant to social media networks, we will evaluate current applications and business models using a specific methodology and deliver suggestions for the future of social media business models.
2.Key Players in Social Media
It is estimated that nearly three hundred social media and social networking sites exist on the Internet. Each enables users to build and maintain an online social network centered around a certain set of goals such as self-expression or sharing of media. In this section we will describe key players in the social media landscape. These players formed the basis for our assessment of social media business models
Every social media site chooses to present its users with content in a specific way. User-profile focused applications are centered on a personal profile page that a user customizes and shares with the community. Content is centered on the user's on-line persona as described in their profile. Other users visit the profile page and communication is directed through the profile page. In interest driven applications, the focus is on a specific interest such as music, photography or automobiles. The elements of social networking are centered on communication and contribution centered around the interest. Most social media websites either serve a functional purpose, such as business networking or group organization, or are used for entertainment, such as meeting new people or sharing music. We classify key players in social media on a two-axis scale. The horizontal axis shows the degree to which they are user-profile focused versus interest focused Placement along the vertical access describes whether they are primarily intended to be used to fulfill a functional need or are primarily used for entertainment.
Figure 1: Categorizing Social Media Websites Along Two Axes
Although most social media websites are a hybrid of these descriptions, we have positioned their relative locations on these axes above. We have chosen to classify these major players as a foundation of our analysis of social media business models. The type of social media application largely impacts how users contribute and navigate the website and thus can play a large role in the choice of business model and its ultimate success. For a brief description of these key players, please see Appendix B.
Underlying Technologies
As individual users access social media companies through the Internet, the underlying technology used by Social media companies is not substantively different from that used by other commercial websites. The technology solutions employed in social media applications do not generally involve the use of cutting edge technology. A social media application needs a webserver and a database to function, and uses some sort of web programming language to combine the two to dynamically display content. Below is a table enumerating the operating system, web server, database, and programming languages used by key players in social media applications. The technology decision represented therein is whether to use an open source architecture such LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or to develop with proprietary technology such as Microsoft Windows Server, SQL Server, ASP.NET, and C#. Some sites not only use open source technology, but also contribute back to the open source community. Facebook actively contributes to open source projects like memcached, phpsh, and APC to help their site as well the open source community.
Social Media Application / Operating System / Web Server / Database / Programming LanguageClassmates.com / Linux / Resin 3.0.18 / MySQL / Java/JSP
Craigslist / Linux / Apache 1.3.34 / MySQL
Facebook / Linux / Apache 1.3.37 / MySQL / PHP
Flickr / Linux / Apache 2.052 / MySQL / PHP
Friendster / Linux / Apache 1.3.33 / MySQL / PHP
Gaia Online / Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP
Google Groups / Linux / GWS-GRFE .5
Last.fm / Linux / Apache 1.3.33 / PostgreSQL / Java, PHP
LinkedIn / Solaris / Sun-One-Web-Server 6.1
LiveJournal / Unix / Apache / MySQL / Perl
MySpace / Windows Server 2003 / Microsoft IIS 6.0 / MS SQL Server / C#/ASP.NET, Cold Fusion
Second Life / Linux / N/A / MySQL
Vox / Unix / Apache / MySQL / Perl
Xanga / Windows Server 2003 / Microsoft IIS 6.0 / MS SQL Server / C#/ASP.NET
YouTube / Linux / Apache / MySQL
Yahoo! Groups / FreeBSD
Yelp / Linux / Apache 2.0.59 / MySQL / Python
Figure 2: Core Technologies of Major Social Media Applications
Choice of development platform needs to be carefully considered due to the lock-in that occurs once a significant development effort has happened. But not all underlying technology components have the same level of lock-in. One can relatively easily switch the operating system in a LAMP implementation, whereas it may take some effort to switch to a different database. The highest level of lock-in occurs with the custom applications and glue code written in the chosen programming languages. Social media companies tend to stick with the software used from the initial launch of their web application unless there are scaling issues. However, due to the sheer size of many of these websites, being able to scale efficiently a problem that is constantly faced. For example, MySpace decided to upgrade from using ColdFusion to BlueDragon.NET. A key factor in this decision was that BlueDragon.NET had the ability to understand Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML) as well as C#, allowing an incremental transition to C# as the programming language.
3.Technology Case Studies
In this section we will take a closer look at the technology of two social media applications: MySpace and Flickr. From these technology case studies we can draw on the key components that enable the technological success of social media websites.
3.1MySpace
MySpace is a social networking site that allows users to create and customize a profile that describes themselves, their interests, and the types of people they would like to meet. This site differs from many other social networking applications in that users can use HTML/DHTML and CSS as part of their profiles, allowing significant customization in profile layouts. Users can upload pictures into MySpace and link to them from their profile. They can also link to music uploaded by others so that a particular music track plays when the profile is viewed. One must have a "musician" account to upload music. Other specialized account types include "filmmaker" and "comedian," both of which allow the user to upload video. In this way, Mypace provides role-based account versioning.
The social aspects of MySpace include the ability to join groups, and to designate other MySpace users as friends. Content within a profile can be limited so that it can only be viewed by friends. Additionally, friends can add comments to a profile that can be viewed by the public. Communications aspects of MySpace include instant messaging, email, and the aforementioned comments. Users can block other users from contacting them. MySpace also has forum and classifieds functionality, and has developed an interface that allows MySpace services to be accessed from a mobile phone via services offered by companies like Helio.
Like most social networking sites, MySpace uses a webserver front-end to access a database and application server back-end. The database portion is used to store the text part of the user profiles, photo/video uploads, and metadata associated with friends, group membership, user blocking, and rating information. The application servers are used for the blogs, instant messaging, and email applications. Like most high traffic sites, MySpace uses managed DNS services, is fronted with caching proxy servers to offload frequently requested data, and uses loadsharing across multiple servers within a large datacenter environment.
3.2Flickr
Flickr is a social networking site focused around the sharing of photographs and other digital images. Where MySpace is centered around a user's profile, Flickr is centered around the individual images a user chooses to upload, allowing a user to apply view or comment access permissions on a per picture level of granularity. Like MySpace, Flickr has the concepts of friends, groups, and comments. Flickr also has social tagging, which allows users or their friends to add searchable keywords to an image. One can associate an image with a location through the use of geo-tags. Another feature is interestingness, in which is partially determined using automated image analysis derived from Russian signal processing algorithms developed for missile detection.
Flickr uses the same underlying technology combination of a web server, database, and application server as MySpace. Where Flickr differentiates itself technologically from many other social media applications is the functionality it chooses to enable. Like MySpace, Flickr is accessible via mobile phones. Unlike MySpace, Flickr allows external applications to access content via RSS feeds and APIs. This allows anyone to create mashups with web applications that make use of Flickr content, resulting in a large number of potential complementary services.
Flickr does versioning by providing "Free" and "Pro" accounts. The Pro account costs $25 per year. The Free accounts have limits on the size and amount of images that one can upload, the number of photo sets a user can have, and the groups one can join. Unlike the Pro account, the Free account displays advertising to the user. A significant amount of the advertising featured on Flickr is for complementary services, such as photo printing, incorporation of a user's images into calendars (qoop.com), posters (bighugelabs.com), T-shirts (zazzle.com), and DVD based archives and slide shows (englaze.com). Regardless of the account type, Flickr promises to never delete uploaded images unless they violate Flickr's usage policy. This promotes a level of lock-in as users develop a growing archive of images over time. Flickr was purchased by Yahoo! in March of 2005, and since there has been a steady migration of legacy Flickr accounts to Yahoo accounts. As a result, Flickr is becoming one of Yahoo's many bundled services.
4.Policy and Legal Considerations
Because social media sites allow users to create, display, and share various types of content, they must be conscious of the myriad different legal restrictions involving what can and cannot be displayed. Especially relevant are laws involving copyright and intellectual property protection, indecent or obscene content, and freedom of expression. Moreover, due to the nature of the Internet, this content may be created, stored, and displayed in any given country, forcing social media sites to take into account many different and sometimes contradictory legal policies.
4.1Copyright Infringement
Though it mainly pertains to content focused sites like Flickr and YouTube, almost all social media sites allow users to upload potentially copyrighted material such as music and video files. By offering access to such content for free, sites may undermine the ability of copyright owners to monetize their content that had uploaded without permission. As there is not yet an effective automated way to determine whether or not uploaded content is protected by copyright, social media sites can choose to either manually review all content before it is displayed on the site, or to implement an automatic filter to attempt to minimize the amount of copyrighted content that is posted. The first approach is an extremely expensive process, and the delayed upload time decreases the value to users. The second approach, however, runs the risk of both displaying copyrighted content on the site and denying non-copyrighted content from being uploaded, due to an automated filter's inherent inability to perfectly distinguish the two.
Since being acquired by Google, YouTube has been the target of multiple copyright infringement lawsuits, and has had to remove a large amount of content from its site. YouTube's approach to battling copyright infringement, the same policy adopted by most social media sites, is simply to put a clause in the terms of use that says the user must agree to not submit copyrighted material. If copyrighted material is posted, they rely on the copyright owner to submit a notification of copyright infringement.
4.2Indecent Content
Similar to copyrighted content, indecent or obscene content needs to be restricted by social media sites if the are to comply with legal mandates. Because virtually none of these services implement an effective age verification system, the display of material deemed inappropriate for minors risks civil or criminal penalties. Though it is easier to automatically filter obscene content than copyrighted content, no method is 100% effective. Thus, a similar situation occurs: these sites must strike a balance between hosting a small amount of indecent material and restricting the uploading of completely legal content. Due to the morally sensitive nature of indecent and obscene material and its viewing by children, lawsuits in this area can tend to discourage both current and potential users, dealing more damage than the actual cost of the lawsuit.
Because of its high number of younger users, MySpace has come under scrutiny for its potential to disseminate indecent material to minors. Though the site officially prohibits pornography and indecent content, there are no measures taken to actually prevent it from appearing on the site. Instead, MySpace relies on the userbase to notify them of inappropriate content, which is then removed if it violates the MySpace acceptable use policy . YouTube takes the same approach to identifying and removing indecent videos.
4.3First Amendment Rights
Most major social media sites are based and incorporated in the United States. Of special interest is the First Amendment, which gives United States citizens substantially more freedom to express themselves than many other countries allow their citizens. Because the First Amendment gives United States citizens this right to free expression, enforcing too broad a policy to protect against uploading the aforementioned kinds of content may itself be grounds for a lawsuit. Therefore, it is in the best interest of social media sites to make their content filtering policies as specific and fine-grained as they can, both in the interest of forestalling First Amendment issues and allowing their users as much freedom as possible.