This article was taken from the January 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
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When Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage at the eG8 conference in Paris last May, he explained why social-gaming company Zynga was now worth more than EA, the market incumbent. "They understood that people want to play with their friends [so] they make games with social baked in," said the Facebook CEO. "Gaming is a naturally social thing. Movies, TV, news, books -- those are [also] things people just naturally do with their friends. These applications and industries will be more social in the next few years."
One by one, Zuckerberg said, all sorts of businesses would be reinvented around the social graph. "We have this principle that we call social design at the company," he said. "A lot of the ways that you design social products are fundamentally different from the normal interactions that you would design in other products." Take friend requests. Feedback had taught the company to offer "accept" and "not now", rather than a traditional "yes" or "no". "It makes people feel less bad about rejecting requests," he said. "There's a lot of things like that that tap into the social nature of humans. This principle of social design is going to be baked into all of these different social applications going forward."
Welcome to the age of social design. If Facebook is right, industries from media to medical care will need to transform their business processes in response to the dominance of social networks. "At the core of social design is the thesis that the web is being rebuilt around people," says Dan Rose, VP of partnerships and platform marketing at the company. "Over the last five years, as people's identities have moved online, the information web has given way to the social web.
They're able to engage with content in a more natural way, through serendipitous interaction with friends and acquaintances. We're moving from the 'what' to the 'who', from the wisdom of crowds to the wisdom of friends."
The term, championed internally by VP of product Chris Cox, emerged from the unexpected success of Facebook's photo-tagging app. Within months, the ability to share photos socially had made Facebook the web's largest photo library. "When Mark saw the success of the photo application, he thought about all the other products that could benefit from making them social," Rose says. "The list was too long for us to do ourselves.
That's why we launched the Facebook platform -- to unlock the innovation of other entrepreneurs. Every category on the web will be impacted by this new design principle."
First came gaming, then online retail and media. "From there, every business on the internet can be designed around putting people at the centre -- commerce, travel, all can be rethought," says Rose. In practice, it typically involves letting friends influence each other based on their purchasing or browsing history or "likes". Spotify lets you discover the music your friends like; room-rental service Airbnb lets you filter transactions through friends whose friends may have stayed there; Trippy lets you plan a journey around personal recommendations; Appsfire lets you know what apps your peers are downloading; Flipboard turns links recommended by friends into a personalised digital magazine. "Every company we engage with has a question at board level about what their Facebook strategy is," says Christian Hernandez, the firm's head of international business development. "What does it mean for a utility company trying to get new users, a bank, a private-equity shop looking where to invest next? What vertical is not inherently social? Even financial services are: if John who knows a lot about finance recommends an accountant, that has weight."
Longer term, says Hernandez, your social graph will influence everything from the restaurant you eat in to where you educate your children. At that stage, the social graph, like electricity and water, "becomes a utility, a service needed in your life".
Already the company wields dozens of case studies as evidence that social design drives transactions. Outdoor sporting- goods retailer Giantnerd doubled revenue through Facebook within two weeks of adding the Like button, it says; social-recruitment service BranchOut, through which friends are recommended for jobs, grew from 10,000 to 250,000 users in a month. The model will transform traditional expectations of advertising, Hernandez predicts. "Today you target ads to me based on a cookie, which is based on assumptions," he says. "If I'm 34 and female or 24 and male, that should trigger different commercial offers. It doesn't. Social design will at some stage catch up and better target the consumer."
On the Facebook developers' blog, a post (Liked 17,157 times) explains that social design consists of three elements: identity, conversation and community. "Community refers to the people we know and trust and who help us to make decisions," it says. "Conversation refers to the interactions we have with our communities. Identity refers to our sense of self and how we are seen by our communities."
Privacy advocates worry about the intrusive nature of such thinking. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that widgets such as the Like button can potentially track internet users and link their web-browsing habits to their social-networking profile, even if they do not click the Like button. But Dan Rose is on a mission. "This is the most important thing we're working on in terms of the Facebook platform," he says. "Our focus is to enable lots of companies and lots of industries to reinvent their product and their business through the lens of people and friends. The next 12 months will unleash a huge number of companies doing this."
Explore more: Big Ideas For 2012
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
