Mini-Applications Are the Future of the Social and Mobile Internet

The age of min-apps is here, creating a new set of problems and opportunities for the entire internet supply chain - from developers to VC's. With the announcement of the Facebook Verified App program, we've clearly entered a new level of social ecosystem. The amazing number of 48,000(!) applications available for the Facebook will continue to force the platform to adjust and change in ways they could never predict. As a corollary, the mounting number of applications available for smart phones / mobile platforms like the iPhone and the new Blackberry Storm are pushing new boundaries in application availability. With the Storm setting a MySpace record for application downloads, and MySpace's focus on all mobile platforms, the age of applications (min-apps) built for multiple platforms is apparent. If the social leaders on driving mobile use, the mini-apps will surely thrive there, too.

What does this mean? Well, a little something for everyone.

Platforms
Facebook is leading the charge here, but even after the '5,000 apps and counting' announcement a year ago, it was clear that for a normal user to find and sort through that many available apps was going to be a challenge - even at that time. With boundaries to app development getting lower and the ability to monetize getting easier, the challenge of creating a user-friendly experience for finding apps has only grown. Facebook's Verified App program is a great step here, giving credibility to hopefully some outstanding apps, and verification is something I've been discussing for a year now. But, that's not going to be enough. The FB app directory needs a huge overhaul (OpenSocial directories need this too). Every provider, from Apple to Bebo to MySpace will need to provide more detail to users about each app as they search and browse, so installing the app isn't required to figure out what the thing really does.
Hmm...where else are there tens of thousands of products?
Let's take a look at software download sites like CNET's download.com, eBay and Amazon for some examples of 100k+ items for sale. App listings will need to be filtered and results sorted / refined by multiple factors, including verification, popularity, user-ratings, and maybe a few new factors like a 'usefulness' rating, 'virality' (do people recommend it to their friends on purpose?), and a SPAM rating, and maybe some categories (productivity tool, utility, personals, game, group management, time-waster, etc.). User comments are there today, but a way to quantify these would be more helpful for the fast-reading user. Maybe the app canvas page needs more screenshots, a video demo, and some good usage data (installs v. un-installs is an interesting metric). The more ways to differentiate the app, the better for both the developer and the user.
Better directories mean more users will look for and find apps that are useful to them, driving up time on the site and ad clickthroughs.

Developers
You could see this coming like a train wreck - it's too hard for 'useful' applications to stand out from the crowd on Facebook and other platforms, and just developing a good app isn't good enough. (When I say 'useful' I mean the apps do something other than make you invite your friends to join - a pretty low bar, I know.) Developer emphasis on app virality has been capped in FB and other networks, and is not the way to propagate an app on any mobile platform. What's a developer to do?
I'm predicting that over the next 2 years, we'll see more 'app factories' that roll developers and their apps together under a single company name, much like the organic way that Slide and RockYou developed, but with freelance developers instead of employees.
These 'App Studios' will be able to market the apps on behalf of the developers and split revenues. They will have much more success due to the volumes they can manage and the brand association / credibility they'll be able to create. We'll see an app built for one platform, then under this movie studio model be adapted to multiple platforms and marketed and cross-sold as an incremental addition to a brand portfolio across networks. You'll be able to install an app on your iPhone and Facebook profile, and maintain your single data profile between the two interfaces. This concept really makes sense from a user, developer and investment perspective, it just needs a bit of juice.

Users
Platform users have benefited so far, and will continue to benefit as the platforms and developers make it easier to determine what's good, what works and what doesn't - and what fits the specific needs of each individual. With future programs like 'Recommended Apps' based on demographics, usage and preference selection, platforms will be able to deliver a lot more value through their developer network directly to the user, because, of course, they have the data. They can offer a product they don't own to their users, with a direct benefit to them - a very unique concept and a true ecosystem at work. Maybe by recommending apps instead of ads, then advertising in the apps, they'll see a more effective model for monetization. You get a specific usage scenario, a more specific set of profiles, and a user who's doing something, not just socializing. Users would feel more catered to and have a better experience wherever they are. (Platforms: leverage these apps to gain the hearts and clicks of your users.)

Investors
The venture capital community is already transforming to respond to the new world of mini-apps . It's faster and much much cheaper to develop an app when you don't need to develop the platform, the user database, or do the same amount of marketing to find users. VC's continue to raise large funds, and it seems they need to seek later-stage investments to put the 'right' amount of money to work. Small apps aren't home runs, and they aren't going to use enough capital with a $100 - $350k launch range. Just enough to keep a developer or three happy for a year. Again, the 'App Studio' concept with an aggregation of apps, "ownership" of the user, and marketing of a product portfolio makes a lot of sense - the scale of such an operation fits more inline with a $2-5M 'A' investment. There will be 3 trends: a) existing VC's will continue to only invest in game-changing platforms b) mini-funds will form, with much lower investment parameters c) VC's will see the App Studio concept as a viable option.
An App Studio acts like a proxy for the VC to diversify and invest in multiple apps. It makes betting on any one app a risk, but with the main focus being operational expertise and distribution, the risk is much less. We'll probably see a few VC leaders start (if you've seen any, please comment!) and the rest will follow soon after like sheep and saturate the market...

Applications that reside within networks (social or mobile or both) are the new Chinese menu model of the internet - use what you want, where you want it, wherever you are. This is the intention of Facebook and the concept of the social utility - it's actually becoming a platform and a new operating system. Mini-apps are going to be here for a while - this is just the beginning.

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New Media, Social Publishing or just Social Media?

I get asked quite frequently what makes OleOle different from a 'social network'. The concept of tracking your online or offline network of friends, family and colleagues was never the driver for the OleOle site design, even though 'networking' features are available. It was the ability for amateur or professional writers to instantly find an instant audience of people interested in the topic they were writing about. Publishing and immediate delivery of relevant content, from multiple sources, personalized for each individual, delivered in the way they want it.

Publishing through social media, or Social Publishing, is really that ever elusive "New Media". Everything a newspaper does offline leveraging everything possible online in a true crowd-driven, automated fashion. New Media still in relative infancy and continues to undergo transformation as technology and understanding of crowd behaviour and the social network matures. The idea that blogging is dead - don't beleive the hype- is related. We're seeing a change, and blogging as we know it is evolving as rapidly as it's appeared. We're seeing far fewer independent blogs and more commercialized blogs and blog networks. Not only that, but the standard web-based blog post is changing shape - into iPhone app snippets, Twitter tweets and - get this - ListServes. There are still millions upon millions of blogs, but there are fewer independent blogs making it out of obscurity. Not because it's any harder to setup and write a blog - that's getting easier every day. Rather, it's much more difficult to get an individual blog (like this one) read. Bloggers are now finding that the laws of big numbers work, and blog networks are able to pass along Pagerank, a captive audience, and 'recommended reading' to visitors in a way that a stand-alone blog cannot. Not to mention the ex-old media writers, left to wither on the street in the past two years, are bringing their organizational maturity and editorial skillsets to the web.

So we're seeing a professionalization (not sure that's a word but we'll go with it) of blogging; networks are better able to monetize their readers in aggregate, and able to pay the blogger a bit of that. Blogs and 'collectives' are still working at generating any significant ad revenues, but lumped together with an audience around a single theme, it gets a lot better. Writers are banding together, and we're seeing publications that are challenging 'old media' sites as they grown in prominence, reliability and even scope - even without that offline "doorstep" delivery.

OleOle takes the social media concept to this new level of Social Publishing. Where it's possible to have enough content on a site about dogs or cats or maybe even cars created by a team of 5-20 bloggers, it is impossible to have enough content about a topic as big as soccer / football with a paid writing staff. Covering 6,000 professional soccer teams - around the world - would be far too cost prohibitive. Big media companies haven't done it, and will never do it - TV, radio, newspaper, magazines - nobody. But, find one (or more) passionate fans per team who are basically literate, and you've got a global publication that covers the entire sport. Fans are out there, otherwise the teams wouldn't exist - it's a matter of time before they stop relying on the AP for their news.

But how do you organize posts from 6,000++ independent blogs? Throw in millions of photos, videos and other user-generated content - how do you find it all? Its not reasonable to be 'friends' with all 16 mllion fans who follow Manchester United. Social networks aren't geared for this for sure.

Social publishing takes the concept that everyone in social network (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc) can publish things to their profile and pushes that to the public arena. Social network blogs are only available at the profile level - so you've got to know the person or have access to their profile to read the content. With organized blog publishing (TechCrunch, Huffington Post) everything is public but there's a high standard of editorial - someone manually arranges content, features it on the right page, and even commissions it in the first place. Again, impossible to do at reasonable cost for 6,000+ bloggers speaking 20 languages in 200 countries. Social publishing enables individual bloggers to self-organize their user-generated content for public consumption leveraging an underlying publishing framework. Social publishing relies on the concept of "Topic Centers" that visitors can easily find and access, and individual contributors can push their content to. Topic centers can be built around any topic the site anticipates - in the case of football it's players, competitions, teams, leagues, WAGS, etc. Finding a topic center must be easy for the user (accessible directly from their homepage) and it must be easy to navigate to, and find new ones. This requires something big - a reversion to what web 2.o brought to the world - the sidelining of those uber-cool things called 'tags'.

Tags, by their very nature, are personal. They are used on blogs to group and classify content around a specific keyword, and that keyword is completely variable based on the author's preferences. A topic center requires centralization and sharing of keywords, so that every author has equal access to publish to where their best audience is visiting. A Topic system is at the heart of the OleOle publishing platform - providing a way for authors to publish and visitors to find the right content - outside of profiles, outside of user idiosyncrasies. The topic system also drives site navigation, page generation, menus and SEO - it's the fabric of the platform matching publisher and visitor together invisibly. However, just because topics are site-wide doesn't mean they need to be static, although in the case of football they are hierarchical to some degree due to the complexity of the sport. So, you're not really giving up the personalization of tags (which can still be employed to filter submissions made by a single user) - but tags are now "personalized" for the collective editorial team, and evolve as needed.

Social publishing is the organization of social media. It's the next step in Web 3.0, social aggregation and smart filtering. Social publishing means leveraging the power of the crowd and the individual writers to publish. The organization is automated, not human, and visitors and volunteers stand in for a managing editor to both rate content and correct things published to the wrong topic centers. Where social networking is useful for keeping tabs on people you know, social publishing is the maturation of social media and user-generated content enbling groups rather than individuals.

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