SOCIAL NETWORKING 101

Social Networking is one of the 4 technologies (Mobile, Cloud, Social and Big Data) that make up 3rd Platform.

Social Networking Connecting People

Social networking is a method of communicating with people using web and or mobile technology over the internet.

Ray Tomlinson Email Inventor

When I think about where social networking came from... it's like most technologies that did not simply pop into existence but evolved from earlier communication technologies. The very first way humans communicated on the internet was using email. In fact, when the first few computers were connected to form the early internet around 1971, it was Ray Tomlinson who sent the first email from one computer to another by inserting an @ symbol. Before this email was only sent between users on the same computer system.

UseNet News 9 Top-Level Groups

Usenet news was another early method of communication. Users could post messages to series of groups whose names centered around topics of interest that are abbreviated as comp. "computers",  sci. "science", news., talk. and soc. "social".  these messages where all grouped together and copied between servers on the internet. Usenet readers could download some of all of the groups using a usenet news client similar to an email reading program.

Bulletin Board Systems

BBS or "Bulletin Board Systems" were a lot like Usenet news except they were generally not copied between servers but hosted on a single computer that often required the people to connect to the BBS server by dialing into it using a modem. CompuServe was the first to institute a real-time method chat services that was a big hit with users.

Chat programs came into existence everywhere with names like IRC, AOL and ICQ.  Many of these chat programs quickly added features like group chats and even file sharing.

Email, Usenet and BBSs were NOT real-time communications. IRC, AOL and ICQ were a big step forward from a users perspective.

Personal Blog/Website

As personal websites became popular, readers of these early websites wanted a way to communicate with the authors of the sites and that lead to having a comment section on websites. I think of this as the beginnings of blogs like the one you are reading now.

Sharing stories is how early humans evolved and social networking software and websites are just our way of using technology to share stories faster and even globally. Today, Social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter, SnapChat and Linkedin are just a small sample of what is available.

Avatar

Many of these online social services revolved around you creating a personal profile with an avatar or digital representation of yourself. People are very conscious of how other view them. Your digital representation is very important for those who chose to create one. Once your profile is created you can search to find others who you wish to follow and attract them to follow you. Friendster was an early example of this.

Social network is having a massive effect on our global culture. Today any human being with a cell phone can stay connected globally to what is going on in the world. Twitter can be used to spread news around the globe in seconds. There are many famous examples of the effects of people who can communicate instantly to gather in protest or for fun such as "Flash Mobs".

1/2 Price Coffee

I imagine that when the first business was created so were the first attempts to market to potential customers. Before social networking,  phone, road signs, snail mail flyers, and windows signs were how companies marketed to potential customers. Today businesses have a way to connect with any human carrying a smart phone, laptop or tablet. Marketing requires 2 things. 1. Locate the people you have identified as being most likely to purchase your product. 2. Get your pitch in front of them.
Businesses today identify the keywords associated with their perfect potential buyer and can simply search billions of digital profiles on the web to locate their model audience. Sometimes it's not enough just to find the users but to hit them with your pitch at the perfect moment. By gathering information from the phone such as their current location or recent search keywords, companies can target their marketing efforts to those likely to purchase their goods or services at the perfect moment. Imagine being able to popup a 1/2 price coffee offer to a user phone as they walk past your coffee shop.  Google has made a fortune from Adwords that appear in your customer search results.

If you are not seeking and getting in front of you customers in social networking... your competitors are. Buyers are making their decisions using technology such as their phone and the web. Only after their decision has been made do they drive to the store. Traditional marketing groups will find their nontechnical marketing attempts becoming less effective moving forward.

3rd PLATFORM 101

IDC and Gartner both define the 3rd platform as a loose collection of technologies consisting of mobile, social, cloud and big data.

Mobile Apps

Mobile
Smart phones and tablets are ubiquitous. I would use my smart phone for everything if I could. (insert joke about tiny unreadable screen here)
I want the power to Google whenever & wherever I am!

The trick to understanding Mobile is... it's more about "how we are doing things" these days rather than "what we are doing them on".

2nd Platform required thick SW clients installed on laptops. These SW applications were large, complex applications installed using a CDROMs and required complex updates. They were designed to solve many generic challenges for many generic users.

3rd platform mobile apps are small, click to download, mostly free apps that solve a users single challenge. Mobile "App Stores" are full of millions of small simple apps rather than boxed rather than a few large complex SW applications that solve many generic challenges.

"How" mobile is doing things - The app logic and the data both run and are stored on the web.
This is the salient point. Web apps don't require thick laptop clients with powerful processors and big "local" storage.

Social Networking

Social
Now that these simple mobile apps are keeping you connected to the web not just when your sitting in front of your laptop at work, you can share what you do, when your doing it. @AirportGate @KidsSoccerGame let us know.

Personal websites that required HTML coding knowledge have given way to Facebook pages, blogs, Linkedin and wikis. Users can link themselves to their friends and favorite companies, TV shows, products, etc. These linkages work both ways. Companies can now learn who is following and commenting on their products.

The enormous amount of data being produced from billions of users can show us connections we did not know exist and shape how we feel about the world around us.

Cloud Computing

Cloud
I worked for a Web Hosting provider circa 99's early 2000's and with so much competition for pricing,  we knew that win market share you had to keep capital and operational expenses down by:
1. USE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
2. AUTOMATING

Private IT firms still used commercial off-the-shelf SW or developed their own coded enterprise applications. Cloud providers had self-service e-commerce websites that automated the deployment of Open Source SW for paying customers. System administrators were only there to step in when the automation broke. Customers were signing up for services online with credit cards in the middle of the night and when we arrived at work we would see that the service had been automatically provisioned before we had arrived.

Big Data

Companies have been building relational databases to store their enterprise application data for years. Companies would aggregate their daily generated OLTP transactional data from enterprise applications into data warehouses at corporate HQ. They would then restructure that warehoused data into OLAP databases for analysis.

Enterprise applications are not the only things generating data that companies want to analyze these days. Mobile apps, social websites and the IoT (Internet of Things) are generating huge amounts of data nowadays, Relational DBs just can't handle the this type of data. Big data is not just BIG but FAST and UNSTRUCTURED.

How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time.
To analyze big data you must divide and conquer. Dividing the data, analyzing the many pieces independently and putting it back together requires distributed computing and storage. Analyzing unstructured data often requires key-value pairs and columnar not relational databases. Enter Hadoop, Redis and other NoSQL DBs

I will break down each of these 4 technologies Mobile, Social, Cloud and Big Data in future blog posts - stay tuned!