Barriers to Exit

John Ludwig posted a link to a presentation by Amy Jo Kim at ShuffleBrain titled "Putting the Fun in Functional – Applying game mechanics to functional software". I'm not even sure why I clicked on it, I'm not a gamer, but I decided to check it out. I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

While the entire presentation is great, the best lesson of all, IMHO, comes on slides 46 & 47: "Customization creates investment and creates barriers to exit". This is huge and it was nice to see someone lay it out like that. We are always talking about lowering barriers to entry, but it is rare to see someone write about barriers to exit.

When building a product, it is difficult to constantly play "let's out-feature the competition". While you must always have new or updated features in the pipeline (ideally developed and ready to launch in a competitive response), the reality is a better product will always come along and people will want to switch (its human nature). Your user, I'm sorry to say, will sign-up for an account (if it's free), look around, go back to the service they currently use, and, if you've done your job, determine that it would simply be too much work to switch.

As much as I have issues with the current crop of social networks, the reality is, they have this down pat. The nature of a "social network" implies that I am actively connecting with other people, and therefore am making an implicit investment. The problem for non-social networks is that you have to work at building this type of user investment. Take the image hosting service Flickr. They have built in a number of features that, to take full advantage of the system, require investment. The user can look at other photo-sharing sites that come online, and probably will, but as soon as they look at the work it will take to move their images and the associated meta-data, this becomes quite daunting and they will stick with Flickr, thank you very much.

Image via

Social Networks = Glorified Rolodex

The more I explore Xobni Insight and come to understand my own true social network, and read articles like this ("Stop Building Social Networks") by Chris at Factory City, the more I realize that "social networking" as we know it is irrelevant to business.

Social networks are an abstraction of real life, and perhaps this is the intention. When you hear average people (not techies or business-folks) talk about MySpace, for instance, the way they "behave" online is different than the way they are in real life. Many have "fake" profiles to hide from their family or employer so they can act a certain way. For a "consumer" site such as MySpace, this could be the intended effect. In some cases they come right out and say what it is, Second Life.

But with a business social network, it seems that the true value would come from the opposite of this MySpace effect; the accurate reflection of your real life in your social networking. From a business standpoint, if you tied your "social network" into your actual daily networking activity, your LinkedIn profile would look a lot less impressive. All the people that have 5000+ connections on LinkedIn will be exposed for the invite magnets that they are.

These "social networks" also provide a false sense of inclusion. If Xobni metrics were included with your LinkedIn profile, anyone who thinks you are on a level playing field if you are outside the valley because you have access into the "social network" of the valley players would quickly see the truth. The elite only communicate with each other and they only "accepted" your invitation because they were trying to be nice or increase the number of connections shown on their LinkedIn profile page to look impressive. To test how "in" you are with Valley elite, ask one of your high-powered "social network buddies" to introduce you to one of their connections and see what kind of response you get. Good luck.

While Xobni is busy exposing our own real internal "social networks" and will hopefully soon bring it up to the network layer, companies such as Biznik and Xeequa have built (very different) functional networking platforms of their own. I will continue to use LinkedIn to search for resources in a somewhat structured format, but I think it is time to rethink what "social networks" all together; both the underlying functionality and the name "social network."

Rolodex image via

Xobni will disrupt Social Networks as we know them

Obviously the main value proposition of social networks is to show everyone else who we know. It's not about keeping in touch or keeping a record of our contacts, it's about proving to everyone else how popular we are. If we don't have many connections or friends, we simply say that we don't really participate; "I'm not an active user". It's pointless.

What we really need is a way to keep track of those people who are actually a part of our "social network" (can we get a new name, please), and a way to keep up with them and their changing profiles. Then Xobni Insight appears on the scene and seems to be heading in this direction. Read more about it if you are unfamiliar with the way it works here, here, and here.

I was lucky enough to get an early invitation to the Xobni beta was immediately blown away at how it exposes the social network that you already have and updates the "network" as you organically add people. Its not about meeting people, it's about getting to know the people that you know better, and staying in touch. If Xobni can figure out a way to build a network around the exposure of this data, they will instantly create the most useful "social network" around, at least for business.

Here is an example of how a Xobni-powered social network would have changed the dynamics of a recent Connection Request exchange on LinkedIn. A guy contacted me in an effort to make contact with one of my connections. I forwarded his info to my connection and never got a response. I tried again because I really wanted to hook them up (it was a potentially lucrative gig for my connection), to no avail. I eventually called and left a message telling my connection to contact this guy, but no dice. Oh well, time to move along.

Why did this happen and how could it have been avoided with network intelligence powered by Xobni? First, if LinkedIn had Xobni metrics embedded for my connections, or if Xobni had its own web-based visibility into my network (as I choose to expose it), the guy trying to contact my connection would have noticed that I haven't communicated via email with my connection in a few months. In fact, given the ability to drill down, they could have seen that the last time we had an email conversation was over three months ago and that I had, in fact, emailed my connection two times in that time period with no responses to those messages. Perhaps my connection is just that, a "connection", and not a "relationship". Given that, perhaps this guy would have avoided contacting me.

For someone doing prospecting who doesn't want to waste time, this type of network intelligence would be very beneficial (and valuable). I think it is safe to assume that only a handful of everyone's connections are their true friends or close colleagues. Of my connections, probably 10% are people I deal with even once a month. The rest are people I want to maintain a connection with "just in case", but rarely go to them for any thing of substance. I don't have any substantive metrics, but anecdotal evidence suggests that many (if not most) LinkedIn networks are like that. Most of the people I know really well are not on LinkedIn and, frankly, have no interest.

A Xobni-powered social network would completely change the dynamics of social networking; in fact, it could turn the entire model on its head. Create a way to feed the Xobni engine with multiple email accounts, IM, Skype, mobile phone and SMS data (via on-device software), and you can create visibility into who is really connected and who did a glorified reciprocal link bit. As long as the Xobni powered network is opt-in with the ability to expose my data to only certain groups of people and the network effect data is anonymous, the possibilities are incredible. So far, I am very impressed with the Xobni Outlook plugin and can see some incredible things on the horizon for this company.