This is the guest lecture I gave at Singularity University on June 28, 2012 on the topic "The Future of Social Networking". It covers a high level review of the history of social networking, what differentiates it as a disruptive platform, and ideas for how mobile will accelerate it as a disruptive platform in the future.

1. The Future of Social Networking

2. The Future of Social Networking
Adam Nash
Executive in Residence, Greylock Partners
June 28, 2012

3. Where to begin...

4. A little about my background (and bias)
Education in Computer Science, focus on Human Computer Interaction
Most recently Vice President, Product Management at LinkedIn
Led efforts around:
• User Experience
• Growth
• Search
• Mobile
• Platform
• Hackdays
Heavy bias towards social networking & mobile platforms

5. Precursors to Social Networks
Wide variety of relevant / related products
• Email
• Addressbooks
• IM / Chat
• Discussion boards
• Photosharing
• Online identities
What is unique about the modern social networking platforms?
How did we get from there to here?

6. Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0
Web 1.0 introduced a massive, disruptive platform
• Open standards for content definition and transmission
• Centralized software deployment (versioning, configuration,
specialization)
• Massive resource scalability
• Massive conversion of PC clients to networked clients
Two significant weaknesses for operational / economic scalability
• Content generation
• User acquisition
Web 2.0 added two disruptions to the platform
• User generated content
• Viral social distribution

7. Social networking is a massive, disruptive platform
Disruption is enabled when something extremely powerful and valuable
goes from being expensive & scarce to being inexpensive & abundant
People are (currently) the most interesting & valuable elements of human
interaction.
Fundamental changes from precursors
• People are first class entities
• Profile data is user-generated content
• People & Relationships rationalized in the cloud into single graph
Social networking platforms make information about people inexpensive
& abundant
• Data about who a person is
• Data about who they know

8. Three pillars of social networking systems
An identity only has value if
the human behind it cares about
it.
Relationships are a
fundamental component of
communication & relevance.
There must be a flow of
activity between the identities and
across the relationships that
Identity Relationships Activity justifies, maintains & magnifies
their value.

9. The platforms work because we care

10. LinkedIn as a Platform
Jobs Advertising Subscriptions
...
(Hiring Sols) (Marketing Sols) (Freemium)
Users
Platform Technology
Content Activity
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11. What’s Next?
We have gone from platforms that can reach tens of millions of people to
platforms that can reach billions of people.
At this same instant in history, we now have two billion-person
platforms:
social networks & mobile devices (“gigapeople?”)
Distribution scale & velocity is unprecedented
Costs of providing a service that reaches 100 million+ users and getting
100 million+ users on that service are orders of magnitude lower than just
five years ago.
• LinkedIn took 494 days to hit 1 million users
• Instagram took 76 days to hit 1 million users
• ... they had 1M downloads in 24 hours after launching on Android

12. Mobile is the ultimate social enabler
It’s a personal, sensor-enabled device
91% of people with smartphones in the US keep it within 3 feet at all
times
They are tactile, touch-based devices. We are wired to love them.
They are communication devices & know who we care about, how often,
how recently
We don’t have a crystal in everyone’s ear (yet), but we’ve got a rough
approximation.

13. What is now becoming abundant & effectively free
Ability to process & manipulate
absolutely massive data sets in realtime
Ubiquitous location for people
What people are thinking and/or
doing
Emotion & passion

14. Don’t be anti-social
Adam Nash
http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamnash
@adamnash
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