A Pioneering Social Media Service

Ten years ago I was on the core team help­ing Sony envi­sion and develop an inno­v­a­tive online ser­vice for Euro­peans. Sony Inter­ac­tive Ser­vices launched “Friend­Fac­tory” in the UK and Ger­many as a pilot in 1998; they hoped to get enough trac­tion to work the bugs out of the busi­ness model and then expand into other coun­tries. It was an amaz­ing inno­va­tion for its day — most likely the world’s first social media mar­ket­ing plat­form — but way too early.

With the ben­e­fit of 20/20 hind­sight, I can see that it was an early pre­cur­sor to Twit­ter, but also offered per­sonal blog­ging, com­mu­nity build­ing tools, and other aspects of social media.

It was way ahead of Web 2.0 — in fact it was one of the first-ever Java-based web apps — so the dev team had to invent all of the ser­vices, a mas­sive engi­neer­ing feat. Meet­ing the design­ers’ and prod­uct man­agers’ require­ments for user expe­ri­ence was incred­i­bly demand­ing: no Flash, no Ajax, no Flex or Sil­verlight… (Our lead inter­ac­tion design archi­tect went on to a lead­ing role in user inter­ac­tion design for Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mobile.)

We’re All Connected

At a time when the “AOL walled gar­den” was the norm for con­sumers’ online expe­ri­ence, Friend­Fac­tory offered per­son­al­ized ser­vices based on user pref­er­ences (implicit and explicit). There were tools for self-pub­lished home pages, as well as com­mu­nity build­ing so like-minded peo­ple could meet and share inter­ests or activ­i­ties online.

Its core ben­e­fit was the peo­ple-to-peo­ple mes­sag­ing capa­bil­ity, which we called “eNotes.” (The PC client inter­face appears here.)

eNotes enabled “friends” to exchange brief mes­sages, either via instant mes­sag­ing, PC-to-PC, or SMS, PC-to-cell­phone. It also pro­vided real-time sta­tus infor­ma­tion about other friends who were online. The PC-to-SMS mes­sag­ing was a real hit among early mem­bers.

The home page fea­tured a dynamic activ­ity indi­ca­tor to help peo­ple see what was going on in the com­mu­nity — both in gen­eral and spe­cific to each mem­ber’s inter­ests.

We planned to offer capa­bil­i­ties to notify mem­bers when their friends were online or had recently updated their per­sonal home page or com­mu­nity page. (I don’t remem­ber whether devel­op­ment on that func­tion­al­ity was com­pleted before Sony ended the pilots.) We also planned to enable mem­bers to find new friends based on shared inter­ests or other things they had in com­mon (pro­file-based match­mak­ing).

Pioneers Are Sometimes Too Early

Based on early opt-in notions, it enabled mar­keters to send tar­geted mes­sages to peo­ple based on the con­sumers’ expressed inter­ests and pro­files. 

Some pio­neer­ing brands and agen­cies were quite inter­ested in this con­cept. But the tim­ing was­n’t right. Because there were so few inter­ac­tive mar­keters work­ing for agen­cies (or within Euro­pean firms) at that time, there was a real short­age of tal­ent who could imag­ine how to make use of this oppor­tu­nity. This made it chal­leng­ing for Sony to recruit a crit­i­cal mass of B2C direct or brand mar­keters. Sony’s prospec­tive part­ners may have “got­ten” the vision but they could­n’t find the tal­ent to act on it.

Even Sony’s own brands were still trapped in the broad­cast, mass-mar­ket model and had trou­ble envi­sion­ing how to lever­age this oppor­tu­nity to expand their busi­ness. (We tended to view them as still caught in their old “ana­log habits of thought.”)

Euro­peans had just enacted their first data pri­vacy laws, so the busi­ness team had to expend a lot of resources edu­cat­ing legal coun­sel and try­ing to fig­ure out how to com­ply with the reg­u­la­tory envi­ron­ment with­out com­pris­ing the core value propo­si­tion. (Few lawyers could even fig­ure out how to advise us!) Because the con­cept and its ram­i­fi­ca­tions were so new, there were few com­pa­ra­ble mod­els for them to look at.

Most Euro­pean con­sumers were going online via dial-up or very slow ISDN lines, so not all were able to ben­e­fit from this graph­i­cally rich, inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence. A few lucky dev­ils lived in places that were get­ting early cable pro­vi­sion­ing. Those who had fast con­nec­tions loved the ser­vice.

One of the fatal flaws in the busi­ness model was the assump­tion that Euro­pean tele­coms would dereg­u­late faster than in fact hap­pened; that band­width would increase quickly to sur­pass dial-up; and that the prices con­sumers would pay to go online would fall much faster than they did. The slow and expen­sive online access chal­lenge proved to be its Achilles’ heel. For the Euro­pean Inter­net infra­struc­ture of that time, it was too early to mar­ket.

As a ser­vice con­cept it was way ahead of its time. No one — part­ners, media, par­tic­i­pants — really knew how to cat­e­go­rize this offer­ing. They knew it was­n’t a “site,” a “por­tal” or an ISP, which were the usual ways to clas­sify Inter­net ser­vices in the late 1990s when Friend­Fac­tory made its debut.

In 1998 it was a break­through con­cept, a true ser­vice inno­va­tion. And that’s not always a good thing.

Today we’d call it a social media plat­form, com­bin­ing aspects of Twit­ter, blog­ging and online com­mu­ni­ties for like-minded con­sumers. Ten years later, we’ve fig­ured out the ben­e­fits of ser­vices like these.