Want to Know Where Facebook is Going in the UK? Look at AOL in the US 1990's...

Before you read the title of this and make any early decisions, realize that the similarities between Facebook, now, and AOL, in the 90's, aren't necessarily bad. Given Facebook's current prominence, with 550 million+ users and a penchant for rolling out new product offerings rather regularly, similarities exist between both user bases relative to competitors and rate of development. While AOL's time may have come and gone as the central portal for the internet, the move from then to the internet we know today, may indicate where Facebook is aiming to take us.

If you didn't get one of these in the 1990's, you weren't checking the mail enough....

A comparison involving AOL in its hey day may conjure up certain memories (ever-present cd mailers, paying to play such cutting edge games as SNIPER), but its worth going back and highlighting exactly how prominent the ISP/portal was in the market. AOL's role wasn't just as a site or a network, but, given the lack of any real broadband until the late 90's, also as the actual connection to the internet.

Once connected, AOL offered a consolidated internet experience, providing user communication (chat, IM, email), media sharing/identities (message boards, photos, profiles) & entertainment (shopping & games). AOL's walled garden was the primary destination for users to do everything they needed, with the rest of the internet being offered primarily through the AOL branded web browser. The network structure allowed the brand to be in control of almost all of the user experience, sitting as a layer between the user and the rest of the internet, though it also required that a large amount of development be done in house.

Source: Pew Research Center

 As broadband increases, dial up internet peaks in 2001, before declining to negligible numbers today.

AOL's heavy development requirements became increasingly important as external internet access/broadband penetration increased competition from other options. AOL's connectivity offering granted the network a position as a user's first destination within the internet. However, as dial up penetration began to decline and broadband share moved to replace it, AOL found itself reinventing as a content portal instead of just an ISP, throwing down any part of the 'walled garden' it once used. Once competition raged, the variety of growing internet content left AOL knocked well below its original prominence and users going to multiple sites based on their content needs.

I realize this chart is a rather general estimation of 5-8 years of very complex internet development, but running out of logo space is running out of logo space.

The internet post central ISPs such as AOL is the fragmented, but robust offering of recent memory (or possibly still currently). As generalist sites/portals such as AOL were beat by specialist offerings (why not go game at a site like Yahoo! games or Newgrounds), the primary location of internet users became a sequence of daily destinations. This ordering of daily sites led to micro-struggles for prominence within categories, instead of a macro-competition. While before, the competition was AOL vs. competitors or AOL vs. the disparate internet, struggles now existed between singular sites and networks. For example, within Microblogging, sites such as Pownce gave way to Twitter and Tumblr, with each competing to be the user's main destination within the sector, not overall.

Throughout this phase of development, social networking displayed some of the most fierce competition, both within the sector and with their media sharing/microblogging/etc. neighbors. The competition between Myspace and Facebook occurred simultaneously with a battle between social networks and media hosting sites, as both aimed to be the user's destination to share media. As the dust settles, we find ourselves in the current network ecosystem. Facebook has emerged as the mass market social network de jour, with 550+ million users, while networks such as Linkedin and Myspace (which recently added Facebook connect) focus on building interest networks and widening the overall ecosystem. The struggle between neighboring sectors and social media has been abated by integration, allowing for an overall media sharing network which allows content to move between each, aiding media sites in traffic and Facebook et. al. in capacity.

It is this overall ecosystem that has positioned Facebook in a similar space as our starting point with AOL. The network has grown to feature a robust internal and external network of content, strengthening its position as not only the most prominent site in a user's daily online destinations, but aiming to move into a different category, a layer slightly above the internet. Looking at current features on Facebook, it seems to increasingly mirror that of the ISP AOL, as it internally offers:

-Communications (groups, IM, status updates, notes & most recently Facebook Message Center)
-Shopping/Marketing (Marketplace, Pages)
-Entertainment (Apps, Games) 
-Content Sharing (Photos, Video, Profiles)
In this sense, Facebook has aimed to consolidate utility for the visitor, keeping a product offering more diverse and useful than most competitors can provide.

Unlike AOL , no purely walled garden exists for Facebook as any shortcomings are strengthened through integration (i.e. Shopping on Amazon.com or brand websites using features  such as Facebook Connect, Blogs or Microblogs can be syndicated easily to pages or the news feed), extending the reach of the network without costly development. Facebook's application development structure and API have also brought a network of developers in to enrich internal content. Gaming companies, lured by the possible player base size, have created successes such as Farmville, drawing upwards of 10 million daily users to the network to play, all the while stemming off possible external competition.

Facebook's external integration brings website content into the site rather seamlessly. This content aggregation is increasingly helped by leveraging Facebook user accounts as a tool to access data on other websites, through which Facebook aims to make the web more socially integrated. Facebook's content ethos has been the antithesis of what occurred with AOL, as the more content that can be easily shared through the network (from general sites, other social networks and competitors), the greater the value of the overall experience. In this way, Facebook avoids 'micro-competition' by being an audience multiplier, not a competitor to media platforms, websites & social networks.

The difference between AOL & Facebook's integration strategies means the way forward is different for the internet's most prominent social network. However, just as AOL faced its largest challenge in broadband and the wider internet, Facebook must reconcile its position relative to upcoming trends in search. Technological shifts in the market towards more efficient search threaten to be the largest challenge to Facebook's 'integrated garden' strategy. The company must move forward to meet both market trends and competitors such as Google, in serving up information based on the organization's strengths. The patent of social graph search Facebook obtained earlier this year is a start, but users expect a functionality in line with the network's current position on the internet. Just as AOL failed to adapt widely and quickly enough to emerging changes, Facebook must keep up the pace of innovation or risk being knocked from ubiquity in the same manner.

Mindshare & LG utilize interaction to engage consumers about 3-D TV

Disclosure: This is, pretty obviously, client work I was involved with, but I think its an interesting option to talk about how interactivity can be leveraged for education and consumer involvement. Hopefully a bit of follow-up at the end of the campaign might give some insight on where this tech is going. As usual, opinions stated on the site are my own and not the assumed position of either Mindshare or the client.

With consumer technology bringing more and more questions about what to buy and what is coming up on the horizon, Mindshare & LG utilized the increasing ability of web interactivity to empower the consumer. While interactive widgets such as Burger King's 'Subservient Chicken' & Tippex's Youtube Experiement with the hunter and bear have used Flash video interactivity to entertain, the 'LG Live Lounge' uses the same concepts to provide engaging and educational content about any and all things 3-D. The widget, produced in collaboration between Mindshare and Framestore, provides a mix of serious responses (try asking 'How much a 3-D TV will cost?" below) and funny ones (asking the presenters to 'jump around' is a favourite).






The use of educational interactivity shows how we can start to develop digital solutions for ambiguous technical areas. The algorithm which parses user queries into responses is limited by a possible knowledge base (the wider the scope of conversation, the higher the chance of an incorrect response), but within limited areas, this shows how we can marry technical information within an engaging vehicle. Given the extensibile nature of the flash widget, it is also distributed across the brand's Facebook page, tapping into the support built up within the network. Embedding code for the widget was also made available to bloggers, allowing not just news of the widget to spread through the blogosphere, but the actual experience.

The campaign extends the video content and the interactive algorithm, by distributing its presence across Twitter & Youtube. Videos were uploaded to the LG Youtube brand page, serving as answers to questions posed in the titles. Driving to these, the Twitter page ('@AskLG3DTV') serves as a destination for users to ask questions about 3D technology, much in the way that the full video widget functions. Twitter users can '@' a question to the Twitter page, which will parse the query and respond with an '@' tweet of its own to the user, linking to the pertinent video response.

By syndicating campaign content across as many networks as possible, the campaign aims to generate a search presence through both general and video/blog/update search, as well as create a branded, generally present experience.