It’s not about who shall win. It’s not about who has the better UI, it’s about going mainstream. But before that, it’s time to get inspired from a movie from ancient history -

In 1998 You’ve Got Mail represented the fact that email had gone mainstream. The story was not about the novelty of email but about two people unlikely to give each other a chance in real life, falling in love courtesy of email mediation. Email in 2001 was mainstream, Buzz is something that can take social streaming mainstream.

This struck me yesterday when one of my slightly tech agnostic friend was telling me how she found that one of her long lost ex-boyfriend was now “following” her on “Gmail”, so she sent him an email and they have been catching up over email for the last two days ! I asked her if she knew that it was Buzz that had automatically connected them – she had no clue.

If we fall back on the groundswell Social Techno graphics profiles – my friend would probably be a joiner. (I forced her to open a twitter account, which she might have opened once after that.) That in itself is the most interesting part of the whole Buzz story. In one snap, Google automatically matched up and more importantly introduced 150MM people to social streaming and real-time updates. Meanwhile facebook and twitter have been spending the last few years to woo the “critics” and “collectors” to join in their ranks. The whooping 150MM number contains the large mass of “joiners”, “spectators” and “inactive” (considering Gmail is not considered a social network). This is the event that could make real-time updates the new normal, i.e. taken for granted. In other words, if all goes as the Google-do-gooders plan, social networks would no longer be a novelty by themselves, instead the activity/content on them would reach a scale not imagined before. Meg Ryan’s tweets to Tom Hanks would be more important than twitter. That’s a hint to all marketers – we better brush our graph theory!

On a side note, buzz finally has given me a reason to open the Gmail window otherwise I was very happy with my apple mail. But for how long? When is the next Tweetdeck update?  And just for the record, the verb though shall forever be “tweet” it might never become “buzz”, and rightfully so.

WARNING: Just thinking out aloud here, nothing groundbreaking-

Twitter really leveraged the concept of an Asymmetric follow . i.e. I can find people I’m interested in, irrespective of our relationship, and learn from what they have to share. Similarly, Others can include me in their lists. It mimics real life, i.e. there are asymmetric levels of interest in all our relationships.
It also mimics real life since friendship grows with complete strangers over time only by communicating with them. In fact, through Twitter’s wonderful system of @ messages I find myself having conversations with complete strangers so many times. Most humans react positivley to attention, so we follow our @ messages more faithfully than our actual twitter streams.

Now comes the thinking aloud part:
Since the users have been warming up to the concept of lists, could twitter (or any network app) as a next step allow users to send directed messages ? For example: I have two very distinct set of followers on twitter 1) People in Bloomington 2) Techy/geeky friends from all over. The B-ton folks might like what I have to say about B-ton and everything else, but my techy/geeky friends from everywhere else might not be interested in what is happening at b-tons @bluebird bar tonight. Since there are specific lists that I follow, for example the really well curated list of Bloomington tweeple , I could plausibly @message the list & it would only show up in the twitter streams of my followers from that list . Or, since twitter already allows users to mention their location, I could @~ or @# a location ( e.g. @~bloomington or @#bloomington,IN ) when I tweet.

There could be many more interesting ways of using this, without making it into a twitter-HTML . Facebook already tries to do the same in very confusing and inefficient ways (my opinion). I hope Google buzz would have something on these lines. (This chain of thought started when I heard that google buzz, which mysteriously has not yet (1am,feb 10) shown up in my account, had mimicked twitter’s asymmetric follow.)

If everything goes as planned this is going to be my last semester as an MBA student. My friend Umair Qayyum and I were planning to cap it off with something interesting and representative of our passion for Social Media in Business. (Social Media = SoMe)

The plan is to propose a hypothesis connecting social media with business objectives. This process will involve documenting campaigns/initiatives by a wide variety of businesses.

This is the initial pictorial cause & effect diagram, which will serve as the basis for mapping the case studies:

For example: if a company is passively monitoring social chatter, it is able to react and minimize the negative impact of a conversation that might be harmful to the brand. This would be mapped as follows:

The current plan is to document these case studies in a blog format, keeping true to our SoMe theme. We have started work with an initial set of 5 companies, which range from a local non-profit media provider to a $25B B2B manufacturing conglomerate. You would hearing more about them soon!

If you or your company is open to participate in this project, please feel free to contact me at Gmail: UrbanTurbanGuy or Twitter: UrbanTurbanGuy. The burden-time would not be more than one hour.

- Gagan & Umair

As usual, I was bragging about the power of online networks and recent emergence of “social answer engines” like Aardvark to one of my finance MBA friends ( u know, the ones who love Microsoft products,  have a faith in efficient markets but feel social media stinks as it doesn’t smell of future cash flows ). I will call her FinMBA from hereon.

FinMBA said, lets give it a try – being from Croatia, she wanted to figure out the best way send a ton of books she had bought here back home,in the cheapest way possible. Now, being a self proclaimed Aarvocate , I rushed to vark.com typed in the question & prayed to the network gods. This is what happened. ( p.s. the emails are in Croatian.)

So , what happened is:

1) Aardvark sent it to the person when seemed to answer the most questions about Croatia
2) it turns out that he is a family friend of my classmates, so he fwds the email to FinMBA’s husband
3) he Fwds it to FinMBA, along with a few laughs
( here is the text of the email translated in English
Croatian guy’s message to FinMBA’s husband: Hahahaha… look where this guy is asking this from…
FinMBA’s husband to FinMBA: ” Hehehe… I told Cacan (Croatian guy’s nickname) that this is our friend who is probably trying to do us a favour…   )

Frankly speaking she is the best person to answer this question – I mean only a Croatian living in america with a ton of books would know the cheapest way to send it accross !

(btw. i love aardvark , and I have a aardvark t-shirt to prove my love – will upload a pic )