Below is the script I wrote. I could provide simple notes but at least with a script you have the full details, should you wish to bore your children to sleep with them. Links are included in the text.

There’s actually extra content below, as I cut some out to save time (lucky you!).

Being Heard Through The Noise
(5 trends in digital media and their relevance to the creative industries)

SLIDE: Community Management

Social Media has become the big thing in online marketing.

Email was perhaps the first big surprise success – then search – then social media and the rise of Web 2.0.

It soon became clear that at the heart of the social media was the notion of Community. A very old concept. Very powerful and seems to be fundamental to human nature.

Term Community Manager first came onto my radar in about 2007. Shortly afterwards, I got an illegal copy of a Forrester Research report about the new role of the community manager. May still be relevant now. Suggested that companies would increasingly hire people to manage relationships with their online communities. Just as PR agents have managed relationships with media influencers, like journalists.

Since then, the role has become quite common-place with the leading big brands – Coca-Cola, GM – and the rising stars – Twitter, Google, Facebook – hiring Community Managers.

It can be a full-time role. Even for a small organisation it could feasibly require a dedicated person but budgets rarely permit. But before considering the specifics of a community manager as an individual, consider this: I think the entire process of communicating with your audience via social media – all the people, tools and content involved – can be considered as Community Management. It is not so much a role as an organisational capability.

So what is your community, in the context of digital media? I think it covers every person, brand and organisation that influence your future. It’s not just the public, or end user of your product – it’s not just the obvious influencers such as journalists – it is your peers, leading thinkers and managers in your sector, your friends, competitors, financiers, employees, and so on.

They all have different needs and you have to communicate with each of them appropriately. So the challenge of the community manager is to systemise and operate this communication as efficiently and effectively as possible. I typically recommend a trial-and-error approach, whereby many different tools and tactics are employed and you force yourself through a constant process of measurement, assessment and optimisation. Selecting and dropping tools and practices as appropriate.

As I see it, perhaps a holy grail of digital media is waiting for the person who finds a way for us users to manage the two-way flow of information between us and other people at the end of internet terminals.

We have browsers for interacting online. And there are other tools, that can be added to our browsers or operate independently. Some of them are great. No one tool makes it that easy though. We end up creating a suite of tools tailored to our individual selves to make the process easier.

The good news for creative businesses is that creative communities are fervent online. Social Media were made for you. People like to get together, and make. And creative people tend to be early adopters of new channels and tools. Until you have experienced it first hand I doubt any of you realise how much effort creative people are willing to spend making things for each other, for free, just because they’re on the same social network as someone else.

But the bad news is that creative communities are fervent online. There’s a lot of noise out there, and members can be very protective of their communities. Brands and business are typically unwelcome too. Ultimately, the biggest pill to swallow is that the best way to work with online communities is slowly, as a part of them, just like everyone else around you.

SLIDE: Content Curation

As I say, there is a lot of noise out there. Now, I love the internet, it’s a really big passion for me. But it’s like a chain of disparate tropical islands floating in a vast, seething ocean of banality and crap. And in the last couple of years there has been an increasing trend for the concept of Curation. More specifically, Content Curation.

The idea is that, while an ever increasing volume of new content is uploaded every day, there is already a lot of good stuff out there. We have created the greatest knowledge and entertainment resource in history, by a very long way. So there is value in piecing together relevant and interesting chunks of content and presenting them together.

This is perhaps what a news reporter does when putting together a compelling article from the information available. But a traditional Curator does more than that. A Curator of, say, a museum, lays on a show for the audience. And key to this role is an intimate knowledge of both the audience and the subject.

As creatives, you have your own product to deliver. You should consider curating your own content into packages and themes that will be digestible and appetising for your audience. And you should also consider taking content from all over the internet and gluing it together to present with or around your product.

I would say that the biggest thing to remember is this: always add value to the conversation. By all means republish, but don’t just republish – say or do something in addition.

A couple of fundamental parts of the curation process, and part of your wider community management, are:

Aggregation – setting-up feeds of streams of content, such as blogs, specific search results, and newsletters in towards you so you can keep up with the conversation and identify new opportunities.

Syndication – essentially the reverse of aggregation. The process of publishing content and messaging out to multiple channels, to make your communication further-reaching and more efficient.

Also, consider the niches. One of the emergent properties of the sheer vastness and openness of the internet is that specialised communities can be powerful and big. It is easy to dismiss highly relevant groups of people over huge groups of randomly generalist people. You should aim to establish a presence as a valuable member of your niche. Then you may benefit from not just a reputation but a waiting audience of customers and promotional advocates, as well as constructive feedback from people who know and care about what you do.

SLIDE: New Economics

It’s pretty trendy at the moment to feel suicidal about money. Western economies are in some kind of catastrophic nosedive, no doubt ending in some kind of cannibalistic zombie apocalypse. People eating dirt. Badgers rule the Earth.

I like to take the other trendy outlook on the situation. That of the cocky new media types who think they know everything because they know how to type stuff into Google. We say this is not a recession, it is an industrial revolution. It is a transition of evolutionary epochs. The big lumbering dinosaurs can’t handle the unexpected change in weather, and us furry little buck-toothed rodents are about to become the dominant species. Right now, we are still somewhat in the messy boundary zone between one age and another, and typically this is when the most interesting stuff is possible.

With this new, digital age comes a new economy too. At it’s heart is a very important price: zero.

I recommend a book by Chris Anderson, all about the new economy of free. The book is called Free, by Chris Anderson. You’ll be pleased to hear that the audio version is available at the very affordable price of free. Chris Anderson helped to formalise for me an economic concept that I think is important: That in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost.

In the digital environment, this marginal cost will always be near-zero and typically getting smaller. So, theoretically someday, any digital product will inevitably become free in some form. Now, you may not create digital products, maybe you make real things, but at the least, the digital world probably slashes the complexity and cost of more traditional sales channels open to you, and drives down the prices you can ask for.

And what’s more, you’re facing a culture that has become used to getting lots of things for free. I for one have become a terrible miser online.

To manage your creative career online, I think it is worth looking at a concept that is well illustrated by quite an old article now, by Kevin Kelly, called 1,000 True Fans. He describes a true fan as someone who buys the T-shirt, comes to the gigs, and actually pays for the album, and proposes that an average artist might need about 1,000 true fans to make a comfortable living. Of course this varies and multiplies according to the size of operation.

In a similar vein, you should consider what you can live with giving away for free, or for crazy cheap, and then keep giving it and similar things away, perhaps for a long time. Then, when your audience has developed around your lovely output of content, you can ask them to pay you to make more, or move onto the more advanced version, and so on.

There are many models but the principle is the same. Call it freeconomics, if you like – and keep your chin up, you have more opportunity now than ever before to make a living from doing what you love, and manage your own success while you’re doing it.

SLIDE: Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Creativity

I have to tread on some unsteady ground here. I am extremely lucky to be friends with some very creative people and I cringe at how insular some of them can be. I understand. To be good at what you do you have to take your craft seriously and personally, and everything you make becomes a very personal possession, like a child. So many creative people don’t like to work or share with others, especially not their consumers.

Well lighten up. I think most people benefit from sharing and discussing ideas with others, both from their specific communities and from other areas of interest.

What’s more, that amazing idea you have… you didn’t think of it first.

Collaboration is a massive word in this new digital world. It just makes so much sense now. You can do whatever it is you’re good at, and hopefully people will appreciate you. And you can get together with other people who are good at other stuff and make even better things. This is especially exciting when you find people who need what you have and have what you need. To take an example from science, there are experimental labs on one side of the world teaming up with theoretical institutions on the other side, to support each other’s work.

To take this a step further, there is the concept of Co-opetition. It’s an ugly word, a contraction of Co-operation and Competition, and it only works as a noun. Nobody wants to say “Let’s co-opete” – or “Comperate”. But the principle is appealing. Instead of fearing your competition, and keeping all your assets tucked away from their view, approach them for opportunities to benefit mutually. Share knowledge and tools. Then you can raise the standards of your whole industry, and collectively have more power and reach. Such practice may have been around forever but the scalable and connective nature of digital media make them highly conducive to such social behaviour. (Good Mashable article on this).

With crowdsourcing, we see many industries turning to large audiences to perform tasks that they may not achieve individually. This has been very influential in the creative world. Crowdfunding platforms, such as Kickstarter, and now FundIt and others over here, have funded creative products without sacrificing a single penny of equity and with many of the funders being ordinary, skint people like you or I. Or me at least.

Creativity is crowdsourced too. Take the remarkable example of Threadless, the T-shirt guys. People submit designs for T-shirts to the site, and the community, which consists of people who are into that kind of thing, mostly designers I suppose, vote on which ones they like best. The most popular designs get printed on T-shirts and sold, with proceeds going partly to the designer.

Likewise, the crowd can be asked to write scripts, design logos, edit content, find information, not to mention constructively criticise what you do. The most successful project yet on Kickstarter, for instance, the Tik-Tok and Luna-Tik watches, deserve a mention. A designer from Nike posted images of these watches that were also iPod nanos and asked for $15,000 to make them. People didn’t realise the watches weren’t real, they were just an idea. A hunch of something people might like.

In the few weeks the bid was live on Kickstarter, 14,000 people invested just under $950,000 in the project.

SLIDE: The Game Layer

Gaming is an often misappropriated word. Game Theory is an important academic subject crossing over economics, sociology, politics and maths, and it doesn’t just mean games in the sense of board games, video games, sports and suchlike.

Gaming looks at structures for the way people interact with each other, whether for fun or not. And it offers us a series of, often simple, processes for inciting desired responses from people. These are game mechanics.

Game mechanics are everywhere, whether you like it or not. When you fill out a questionnaire and a little line along the top progresses to the next step, stating that you are 75% complete, you are being influenced by game mechanics. When a website tells you you can get a hefty discount if you get five of your mates to sign up too, game mechanics.

Gaming in the more recognisable sense is of course big too. And it’s changing. The likes of Zynga, who created Farmville and Cityville on Facebook make essentially simple video games that look like they’re from the early nineties, but they engineer extremely addictive game mechanics into them, and release them for free. It’s also worth noting that they employ a rapid R&D feedback process too, whereby they release unfinished games into the public and then respond swiftly to community feedback with game developments, sometimes in a matter of hours. Now Zynga has a captive audience in the hundreds of millions, and that gives it a potential market value in the many billions.

Every industry and category is being enhanced by gaming, as game mechanics are being spread like a layer over everything, affecting the way we experience and interact with things and people. The important question being asked by experts in this area seems not to be, “is the game layer going to be a big thing”, but “how can we take ownership of the game layer before brands and governments do”. (Here’s a good TED Video on this).

As you make and do whatever lovely things it is you make and do, consider how to gamify your creations so that they enhance the experience of the user. But be careful of people like me using words they don’t understand, like gamify, they could be talking nonsense.

I invite anyone involved in website creation to amend, append and critique the template until we get it into really solid shape. By all means take it and use on your own business or clients. UxDs, developers, strategists, marketers, managers, take a critical look…

Click the image to visit the public document. You can edit the document by creating a Google Docs copy, or downloading it to a useful format. And any comments below would be most welcome.

• Answer every email, tweet, etc.
• Respond to fan feedback with updates.
• Design a game for everyone, young and old.
• Make something with international appeal, and get big in countries with smaller app markets (not US, UK, etc.) first before hitting the big ones.
• Appeal to different levels of gamers by having an easy version of the game (eg. pass the level) and concurrent harder versions (eg. pass the level with maximum points).
• Build and release fast and cheap (Angry Birds is Rovio’s 52nd title).
• People love physics games.
• Providing rapid and constant iterations of small rewards is a fundamental game mechanic (think slot machines, not weekly lottery).
• The ‘overnight’ success of Angry Birds took eight years, so work from your long-term interests and personal goals to stay passionate.
• Profile the users of each platform (eg. Rovio identified iPhone users as everyone, not a niche at all).
• Test concepts on real people (eg. your mum).
• Success in smaller app stores is a good preemptive sign of impending success in The App Store.
• ‘Near misses’, where the players can see where they went wrong, is another effective game mechanic.
• Games should be easy to play from the start, with no instructions needed.
• Intuitively train people to use their handsets in new ways.
• Facebook requires very different models to mobile apps, being more social and collaborative in nature.
• Design brands that could work on multiple platforms (eg. films, comics, merchandise).
• After having a hit game, build distribution and multi-platform capability.
• Connect every detail of the game: back-stories, styles, etc. – aiming to create a ‘virtuous circle’.

It’s worth stating the obvious at this point, that there are no guaranteed paths to success, and if someone replicated the Angry Birds model precisely with a better game – and there are much better games – they would be more likely to fail than succeed. For entrepreneurs, failure is the norm and luck is inescapable. But more of that later. Funnily enough, that’s what this month’s Wired is all about.

I must be turning into a proper marketing wanker, as I experienced a brief smugness last week after inventing a new acronym. I sat back, sipped my americano and thought, “great, I should blog this!”

I should probably kill myself now.

Nevertheless, there was a mote of sanity in my coffee table scribblings so I share them with you now.

The acronym is S.O.M.A. – Story / Objective / Market / Audience. It’s a quick reference list of the main attributes to cover when analysing an organisation or project for a new strategy. I’m not trying to coin some groundbreaking feat of business theory, I’m not hoping to hear other people using the term at the next TED conference. It’s a throw-away mnemonic to serve as a kind of checklist of what needs to be covered in order to understand where the client / project is at, and where it should be going.

In detail then…

Depending on the project, and resources at hand, one can spend months on situation analysis in order to formulate a solid strategy, be that digital strategy, business strategy or any other kind. I’ve been in circumstances where we’ve just had to do it in a few hours and go with what we’ve got. No matter what depth you go to, the principal factors remain the same. SOMA is one way to define them. I hope it will be most useful in those initial new business meetings where I’m facing someone who could become a client one day, who’s regaling the pained history of the organisation and all the tricks they’ve tried to succeed. In those meetings I try to ask the right questions and convey the right prompts until I’ve slotted as much information as possible into the boxes below:

Story

• History; origins; the Idea
• Status
• Brand; marcomms activities
• Structure; resources

Objective

• Vision
• Mission
• Objectives (on all levels, eg. entire business, project, communications)

Market

• Competitors
• Collaborators (I wrote about this recently)
• Best Practice
• The 4 Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion)

Audience

• Demographics; segmentation
• Influencers
• Channels
• New targets

SOMA is one way of categorising the necessary data on which to found your strategy. You can cut your research anyway you like. I tried all sorts of acronyms, like SHOBMA, but none of the others made a real word, or a cute literary reference.

When a digital property achieves a very large, or very niche, user base the opportunity arises for subtle, useful and highly targeted advertising. Facebook’s existing targeted ad system is a good example of this. Sponsored Stories sounds like it’s been approached in the right manner, softly dropped into the streams of relevant online action announcements. It’s a far better approach than the disastrous sledgehammer of Beacon.

But it also looks like a rather prehistoric way of monetising a potentially potent service. So my friend checks-in to Starbucks via Foursquare and, since Starbucks is a paying story sponsor, an ad appears on my friend’s Facebook, or on his friends’ Facebooks, saying “hey look, we’re Starbucks and your friend loves us!” It’s not very exciting, is it? It doesn’t smack of fairness or organic growth; it doesn’t sound very useful. Nevertheless, Facebook is right to seek ways for advertisers to pay small sums for individual recommendations on Facebook, and I can’t think of a better way to do it right now…

While we’re here, I must take a moment to say that TED is simply one of the most enlightening things I’ve encountered online. It is perfectly pitched to teach, inspire or entertain within a digestible time limit. I typically watch TED talks while cooking my dinner so it doesn’t feel like I’m losing valuable media-consumption time while bound to the mundanity of prepping vegetables. Yeh, learn while you chop.

This is just an eclectic taster, you know like a seafood platter. I’ll probably post some more soon.

• Pure inspiration, delivered perfectly – Sir Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity …and his beautiful follow-up about Changing Educational Paradigms.
• Convincing evidence that mushrooms will change the world, especially the mighty Mycilium – Paul Stamets on 6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World.
• Gripping insight into insight itself. How it feels to open up the creative right brain hemisphere – Jill Bolte-Taylor’s Powerful Stroke of Insight.
• Introducing the designer’s designer, Ross Lovegrove Shares Organic Designs.
• A quick show of just how complex and beautiful marine life can be – David Gallow Shows Underwater Astonishments.
• Practical approaches to design in a disadvantaged part of the US – Emily Pilloton Teaches Design for Change.

Helping companies use social media effectively is challenging for lots of obvious reasons, not least of all because a lot of the people using social media don’t want to hear from them. But it’s hard enough building communities around completely non-commercial themes. The internet is littered with well-meant forum threads and blog posts that will forever stay unanswered and unread. It’s obvious that traffic and engagement can be boosted by real world activity. But the exploding list of (lists of lists of lists of) successful social media marketing case studies rarely gets to the heart of how face-to-face interaction supports the online communities.

This issue is particularly close to my heart because it’s fundamental to how I became so enamoured with working online in the first place. I tell this story to clients all the time. It’s simplistic but gets the message across.

In 2004 I was invited by an old friend to meet a bunch of his “internet friends” in the pub. I went primarily our of a voyeuristic – not to mention, in retrospect, snobbish – curiosity. I wanted to see what the hardcore center of computer geekery looked, sounded, smelled like. What I encountered was an eclectic collection of surprisingly ordinary people, who were all far cooler and more interesting than me. It wasn’t a humbling experience, it was an enlightening one. It was a key moment in what I see as my digital epiphany. After that, things changed.

It’s not just that, after six years embedded industrially and socially in the online world, having “come out” as a geek, I now sympathise with people building social lives through the internet. The impact of Facebook and its kin has persuaded most luddites to accept that which used to be a hyper-niche hobby. No, it’s not about acceptance, it’s that my life really changed – substantially, permanently, positively. Suddenly I was communicating with people who had some shared interests (otherwise they wouldn’t have been friends with my friend) so new friendships grew much more quickly than they would have from a more random clustering of near-strangers, such as university freshers or pub locals.

Offline, for the most part we went to parties and bars, talked rubbish and consumed booze. Online, for the most part we sat in our homes, talked rubbish and consumed media. But sometimes we made things together, real things, good things. We solved each other’s problems. We nurtured each other’s ideas. We still do. Directly and indirectly, for the modest immersion I’ve had in digital communities, I’ve loads to be thankful, not least my wife.

It’s not just about the media mix – remembering to connect the dots between on- and offline actions, or between social media and social gatherings. That stuff is important for marketing managers, but there’s this subtler, less tangible aspect of the real world cross-over. It’s about allowing members to speak their minds and for the community to evolve autonomously. It’s about making all that time for all that banality surrounding the potent bits. It’s about drinking and sleeping with each other. It is, in short, not about the kind of things that most companies have much time or love for. There’s something comforting about that.

Writing a research plan for a strategic tender last week, I was struck with a familiar pang of awkwardness when I added a competitor review to the process. Competition is an ugly word but it has real-world, often productive, manifestations. It is essential to good strategy in products, marketing, business planning, etc. Next time, however, I want to include a collaborator review to complete the circle. Below is a sketch of how such analysis might be conducted.

Starting from the competitor review process

Depending for whom it’s conducted, I would approach a competitor review more or less along the following lines.

The principle aim of a competitor review is to inform your market positioning. It should guide you on what strengths to play to and what parts of the industry to avoid competing on.

Defining the collaborator review

What might fundamentally set collaborative apart from competitive analysis is that competitors indicate the market gaps to be filled by your offering, whereas collaborators are sourced to fill the gaps in your offering. Thus, just as your strengths are leveraged to beat the competition, both your weaknesses and strengths are supported by co-operative agents.

So, that table again, adapted for collaboration:

Following such a review, the obvious next step is to plan your approach to your collaborative community, if I can call it such. Meeting them is essential but you can go into that process armed to the hilt with:

• A tailored elevator pitch
• Packaged products/services (ie. brochure content, positioning, etc.)
• Team personae and a working environment that are conducive to friendly interaction

Busting the Fear of Competitors

Finally, mention must be made of the growing middle ground between competition and collaboration. Whenever I’ve seen agents from competitive organisations opening up to each other and sharing intelligence, I’ve seen shared progress. Viewing competitors as potential allies is liberating. It can accelerate the evolution of an entire industry, or drive a cluster of allies within an industry at-large to take on the big players.

One of my favourite social media case studies, How The Roxy Became the #1 Venue on Twitter, quotes the term “co-opetition” (the nerdy contraction of competition and co-operation). Wikipedia’s definition of co-opetition is as a neologism for “when companies work together for parts of their business where they do not believe they have competitive advantage and where they believe they can share common costs” and suggests that “companies save money on shared costs while remaining fiercely competitive in other areas”. Well, quite.

It’s rather obvious really, let’s all be friends.

…here’s a few things it might be:

• A set of viable models for profiting from digital IP, as people get increasingly exposed to, and comfortable with, taking other people’s creations for free.
• Protecting the world and its children from hackers, frausters and moral perversion, without spoiling the socialist ethos on which the web was built and still operates.
• Mobile solutions with which we are so comfortable that they become ubiquitous and our daily activities become substantially more “connected”.
• Hardware that facilitates more fulfilling digital experiences, such as “electronic paper” readers.
• Location-based services that make geographical proximity important again, in the context of our digital lives.
• Services launched via gaming models, thus making the boring but important stuff fun.

…and here’s one thing it could well be:

The term digital curation has been bouncing out from the hard techie core of the web into more mainstream publications since March 2007, which unsurprisingly coincides with that year’s SXSW Interactive. Technologists and sociologists have been talking about the Semantic Web for longer. Some commentators like to refer to the next life stage of the internet as Web 3.0, and usually reference the semantic web in the same breath.

The broad principles behind curation and semantics, insofar as the evolution of the internet is concerned, come down to one core problem: information overload. The idea is that we already have masses of data and we’re only going to get more. We can’t handle it all in a way that brings the most useful or entertaining stuff to the fore. So we are looking for solutions that manage and filter, ie. curate, that data in ways that are meaningful, ie. semantic, to our real lives. Just as Google revolutionised search by using algorithms that attempt to mimic human decision making and pattern recognition, the next big web technologies are likely to do the hard work of presenting existing information to us in human ways.

And if you can find 15 minutes in your frantically tuned-in life, Kate Ray does a much better job of explaning the above idea in her documentary.

Most of us remember the last great migration, from the MySpaces and Orkuts of the world to the shiny new Facebook. We didn’t leave the other networks because we had come to hate them, we did so because the alternative was fundamentally better. From the stroboscopic assault of MySpace pages, Facebook looked more like an orderly collection of personal profiles, with more features and room to store all the media that makes us who we are online.

The last two big rounds of Zuckerberg-bashing – in response to Beacon (R.I.P. Nov 2007 – Sept 2009) then the recent privacy settings debacle – made Facebook look like a big organisation turning its back on its once-beloved community to graze on bigger profits. Those were hefty mistakes but they were rectified in short order and the expansion steamed on. This kind of rapid-adaptation evolution can be effective and, if only the errors could be redeemed by the release of more user-centric improvements, it could yet keep Facebook light and fluffy enough to survive the changing climate. Three years ago I could hardly bear Facebook. The structure was illogical and the design was – still is – impersonal and dreary. Even the name “Facebook” sounds like a violent sexual manoeuvre. But my friends were there and I couldn’t bear to miss out on the conversation. With subsequent upgrades came waves of complaints from industry commentators who collectively missed the point that the network was, subtly, improving by the version. Now it’s pretty good. However, the following fundamental weaknesses remain:

- It’s proprietorial: feeding content from or to locations off Facebook can be difficult or disallowed, and the network assumes ownership of everything we publish through it.
- It’s arrogant: (see the current privacy backlash meme!)
- It’s uniform: every personal page looks and functions more or less like every other.
- It’s ugly: personal content is lost in page templates that should promote it and make it shine.

So here’s a portrait of an alternative social networking service, sketched by a few key attributes:

Community Rights
Users would expect complete ownership and freedom of movement, such that they could keep their content on existing services and simply republish it through their social network account.

Persona Management
Facebook is right to resist the creation of fake profiles, as it stops people like me representing my clients productively unless I publicly associate myself with them. But we lead many online lives and must have greater control over publishing and receiving data dependent on the role we play at each moment.

Location Awareness
With the integration of GPS-enabled devices, linked in turn to venue and event locations and times, the seams between our on- and offline social lives could be eroded further.

Personalisation
Outwardly, each personal domain on the new network should be led by visuals and content, with custom features easily disabled and enabled. This would have to be a prettier and more manageable solution than the eye-bleeding horror of MySpace pages or the impenetrable dross of Facebook tabs.

Large Scaling
We patronise the same soulless mega-venues often for the simple reason that they are where everyone – our friends and potential new friends – is. So how do you get hundreds of millions of people to move from one place to another? Two ways. Either do what Facebook did, by filling a tiny niche (Harvard students) then expanding by degrees (the Ivy League, all North American universities, all schools, exclusive organizations, the world); or mash-up existing services through a killer portal. Or both.

It’s worth noting that most of the features listed above are being developed already in disparate places, like Mozilla Labs, OpenSocial, Brightkite, Foursquare and lifestreaming services. Likewise, Facebook has launched features to answer some of these needs, such as its Graph API and FBML development.

Perhaps the most exciting project at this time is Diaspora, which looks on paper like a full-blown contender for the next big social networking framework. Instead of hosting our content and claiming rights to it, Diaspora would be a source-agnostic, decentralised network of “nodes” through which we could control data flow with our friends while maintaining total ownership of what we create. It’s still just a vague idea in the heads of the four socially-awkward young geeks who want to build it. They made a request for $10,000 on Kickstarter in mid-April, to fund them through the summer writing the code. When funding closed on 1st June the pot stood at $200,642. Doesn’t that just make your heart a teeny bit warmer?

Facebook is still on its feet not because people are too lazy to desert it but because nobody is pulling hard enough on the rug. The half-billion-user network may yet stay ahead of the game and, who knows, even regain its reputation as the network of the people, if only it can retain focus on user needs and keep its greed at a reasonable level. Facebook is already serving a third of the UK’s online ads, how much more do they want? In any case, a successful giant-killer would at some point inevitably start sniffing around for a decent income, for which it might do well to look to a few contemporary models such as community donations (like Wikipedia) or decent pro accounts (like Flickr). Even targeted ads and demographic data sales can be bearable if they don’t infringe on our privacy. In the meantime, please, please stop whinging and let’s put our heads together to see if we can come up with something truly exciting.