etailology

Great responses to the question: “What are the most important topics in Social Networking today?” on LinkedIn Answers.   Check out the entire thread here, or see the excerpt below one one particularly good reply from Gaurav Kanoongo:

We have following issues,

1. Ownership of user data, and legal rights.
2. Standardization
3. Decentralization and Interoperability
4. Social Network Fatigue
5. Privacy
6. Authentication and Authorization
7. Portability

What is user data:

I consider user data is profile/contact information, social public and private relations and history of relations, links to other social sites/profiles, bookmarks, microblog/social message updates, blog Posts and comments, pictures, videos or any other media.

1. Ownership:

In my opinion the most important issue is the ownership of user-data, the users should be able to control their data and its visibility, licensing, and accessibility issues. Yahoo’s Flickr is a good example, here users can specify their rights and can choose licensing type for their data.

2. Standardization:

Social networks should use standard formats, these formats should be machine readable, Microformats are a good choice they have standards like hCard, XFN, hResume, hAtom, XFolk, and many others the use of Microformats should be encouraged in social networks.

3. Decentralization and Interoperability

Social Networks should be decentralized, instead of having duplicate data on many social sites, users should be able to aggregate all their online social data within their social networks, the sharing of this data we already have RSS/ATOM. Users should be able to show their Flickr or YouTube contents on their social networks, instead of uploading it again, or creating duplicate data. The Decentralization and Interoperability are similar topics, Social Sites/Networks can provide access to user’s public data with RSS/ATOM feeds that are read only to encourage decentralization, but for interoperability, we need standards to provide controlled read/write access to and from other social sites. Interoperability can be bidirectional, and can be achieved with technologies like OAuth, and RESTFul APIs.

4. Social Network Fatigue

I live in India, and my friends use Orkut, I like Facebook but I have no existing friends there, people are comfortable with Orkut in India, I want them to come to Facebook, but they are not interested in joining other social networks, so either I have to remain on Orkut.

So we can not be-friend unless we are on same social network, this should be changed, when we will have inter-operable social networks, people should be able make social relations with other networks, instead of inviting them to join your social network, Social Network providers should works on this, I want to be able to scrap my Orkut friend, from my Facebook wall.

5. Privacy

Users should be able to control privacy/visibility of their contents, and it should be customizable, what I want to put for public, what I want to keep private, or what I want to show a group of selected friends, should be controlled by myself.

6. Authentication and Authorization

We live our life on internet, most of us use same user-ids and passwords on many sites, do you think is it secure ?, why not use technology like OpenID, that provide authentication on OpenID enabled sites with your OpenID url. For authentication, Social Networks should support OpenID, and for authorization, soon we will have OAuth, with OAuth users will be able to authorize other sites, to have controlled read/write access to user’s resources, without the need of sharing your password with other social sites.

7. Portability:

People use many social networks, their data should be portable, and social networks should not restrict users in any case to own, modify, delete, or move their data. Still almost all social networks are closed networks, they do not provide APIs or technology to provide their data to other social sites/networks.

[techtags: issues+in+social+networking, facebook, myspace, twitter, delicious]

I am a bit of a coffee nut, so the reference in this rant on Joho the Blog caught my eye. The lesson here is that email support matters, and while some guy named “Joho” may not seem to be “all that important” he is, quite.

Now, here’s the etailer’s dilemma. How do you know who’s behind the email? (Answer: you don’t, so treat everybody right.) Not treating your customers wrong is perhaps the most right thing you can do for your online marketing.

Product reviews have been an important topic of late. While we’ve all seen the evidence that they improve conversion dramatically, it’s also clear that they can be done right, done wrong, done yourself, or done by third parties.

Some links today about product reviews:

1. Bazaarblog’s Interview With Shannon Glass About Product Reviews via eCommerce Optimization
2. An overview of the social computing context which powers Web 2.0 at Groundswell
3. Understanding and dealing with fake customer reviews: via GetElastic
4. Some consideration of how those comments might function in pre-shopping via Retail Design Diva
5. And finally, a look at 30 Retailers’ Customer Reviews via eCommerce Cache.