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You are here: Home / Marketing / A Pioneering Social Media Service

A Pioneering Social Media Service

April 10, 2009 •

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.

FriendFactory-Logo-designed-by-MetaDesign

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.

FriendFactory-home-page-early-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-example-for-messaging

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.

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Reflec­tions on life, travel, books, and yoga. Think­ing out loud about the pur­suit of mind­ful­ness and well-being.

Learn­ing how to recover from the loss of a beloved spouse, and then to find a trans­for­ma­tive path for­ward.

About Me

Semi-retired marketing exec, transitioning from a career in high tech. Now "managed" by two Tonkinese cats. Missing travel and friends on the West Coast. Avid reader and foodie. Staying active with long walks, biking, kayaking and yoga.

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