Economists Social Network With Thunderbird.

I read a nice article about social networking business on the economist. It was an enlightening read about online business. I just wrote about Google complaining about "Social Network Sites Do Not See Our Ads" and perhaps that all does not fit in the same old mold. Yes the cartoonist at the Economist also need change. These days we don't struggle against walls that prevent us from freedom, we break them!, remember Berlin wall, or the Firefly powered "The Wall" by Pink Floyd or similar. This is specially because the article mentions about decade old technology, email.

"The opening of social networks may now accelerate thanks to that older next big thing, web-mail. As a technology, mail has come to seem rather old-fashioned. But Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other firms are now discovering that they may already have the ideal infrastructure for social networking in the form of the address books, in-boxes and calendars of their users. “E-mail in the wider sense is the most important social network,” says David Ascher, who manages Thunderbird, a cutting-edge open-source e-mail application, for the Mozilla Foundation, which also oversees the popular Firefox web browser.

That is because the extended in-box contains invaluable and dynamically updated information about human connections. On Facebook, a social graph notoriously deteriorates after the initial thrill of finding old friends from school wears off. By contrast, an e-mail account has access to the entire address book and can infer information from the frequency and intensity of contact as it occurs. Joe gets e-mails from Jack and Jane, but opens only Jane's; Joe has Jane in his calendar tomorrow, and is instant-messaging with her right now; Joe tagged Jack “work only” in his address book. Perhaps Joe's party photos should be visible to Jane, but not Jack.

This kind of social intelligence can be applied across many services on the open web. Better yet, if there is no pressure to make a business out of it, it can remain intimate and discreet. Facebook has an economic incentive to publish ever more data about its users, says Mr Ascher, whereas Thunderbird, which is an open-source project, can let users minimise what they share. Social networking may end up being everywhere, and yet nowhere."

Read the complete Economist article here.

tag: social networking, social networking business, social intelligence, Facebook, Thunderbird, open-source, The Wall,