So far we have finished our prototype, related research to justify it, the business model, now we’ll focus on marketing, how to reach our users.
There’re over 156 million blogs online, 600 million active users on Facebook, hundreds of millions of users on other social networking sites. As long as the condition that they have to socialise with group of people residents in more than two social networking sites or blogs are meet, they’re our potential users. What’s more, as more and more people aware of the importance of their personal data, seek a better solution for ensure their privacy, they don’t want to trade off their privacy for free social networking services, they will find us.
However, the problem we meet so far is that how can we survive in the climate that monopoly social networking sites such as Facebook dominate? How can we get the snow ball rolling?
We have 2 steps to go, step1, we’re not going to seek any commercial profit, we will get as many users as possible. We need to target to the exact user group for our application. The aim is to prove that our idea can sell, it is useful to people. We split our users in to two user groups: potential commercial users, and individuals that only share photos with our application. For potential commercial users such as night clubs, places of interests (Warwick castles, National Sea World etc), we’ll provide them our API with full document, we’ll convince them that our tools help them to share their products all over the social network sites but not only Facebook. Our tool is easy to integrate, handy to use and effective for marketing. One click to all. For individual users, we want to make sure they enjoy sharing with our tools. We’ll provide social networking plug-ins and web browser plug-ins to make sure that they can share anywhere, any time, they can view their friends’ share any where any time. At the end of step1, we’ll have a mature implementation of our initial idea including our own official sites, social plug-ins and web browser plug-ins, what’s more, our users.
Step2 will start after we have reasonable number of users. The reason why we put it in Step2 is to protect ourself. As our idea is neither patent nor implemented maturely, it could be easily copied by other companies, those giants could move a finger to finish us. If they team up to sharing data, we’ll not survive. Therefore the timing is we accumulate reasonable amount of users, the business model generates healthy profit, we’re confident that we can grow healthily no matter what other companies move (dominant strategy in game theory), we have built our barrier against other companies. we will approach giants to convince them that we’re doing the future, our open standard is the better solution for future social networking development, we talk not only with ideas or open standard pioneers “OXExchange” example, we talk with figures, the figures our idea generates. As long as we can get one giant on board, the number of users will explode and the network effect will automatically drag people in.
We concretely believe in that we’ll embrace a decentralised social network future, everyone owns their data, we don’t need to trade our privacy for social networking services. When this is coming, that’s when our vision is fulfilled. The Linked Data project will dominate and we’ll have one protocol (FOAF) and get rid of gardened social networking walls and our open standard will be part of it.