It’s been about a year and a half now since I originally conceived the idea of HiPPstr; a new social network, a unique social network. During that time, I’ve learnt a lot; more than you could imagine. Today I’m going to talk about social networking as a viable business model. People keep pressing the question to me, how will you make money?

My answer is usually, I Don’t Know. The obvious path is targeted advertising, the current model that supports all the big social networks, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Although is it a viable business model? There are two problems at the moment, with social networking as a business.

1. The founders are developers not business men.
2. Ads at best, break even.

Most of you will argue the first point is good, which it is but not if you want to make money. Developers are interested in having a successful product; if you offered them 100m dollars, they would sure take it, but it’s not usually their goal. On the other hand we saw the disaster that was caused by the so called Web 1.0 start-ups, founded by business men. I’ve said since the start that my goal with HiPPstr is not to become a billionaire but to advance technology.

So, if none of “us” want to make money, where does the problem lie? Social networking start-ups can only live of VC funding for so long. Bills need to be paid but more importantly so do employees.

How is this fixed, the current problem is that the internet is still expensive. It’s expensive to get 1 million visitors at once and it’s expensive to handle that traffic. So the answer to this problem is not more advertising but better infrastructure, infrastructure that is paid for by the ISP not the content provider, infrastructure that allows for cheap bandwidth.

In this particular article I’ve used Social Networking as the example but this applies to the new internet: IPTV, Social Networks, File Sharing, Video Conferencing, VOIP, etc.

Is social networking a viable business model, not yet.

Last week Google released it’s new platform OpenSocial, this platform allows a developer to write an application for MySpace for example, or Orkut (Google’s unknown social network, it’s popular in Brazil…).

I’m going to talk about why I like opensocial from two standpoints, the developer and the end-user.

OpenSocial from a developer’s standpoint is a godsend, from both sides, on the HiPPstr side it allows me to really easily have hundreds of great apps of which users can put on their profile, on the other side it allows great traction I can instantly have an application deployed all over the web, before you had to write your app for Facebook, not too hard, what about if you write a Mac OS X app, porting that too windows isn’t easy.

I think this is the future of computing, a thin client that accesses, could be Web 3.0 (This idea is brought up a lot by the infamous Molly Wood); a diverse and open platform where I can write an application and it will work universally any where.

From a user standpoint OpenSocial is just as exciting, lets look forward a few years, when OpenSocial is a developed and mature platform, imagine the things OpenSocial will be able to do, essentially this is the death of Facebook, which in my opinion will result in huge fragmentation of the Social Networking space. There will be lots of small networks interconnected by an open platform, OpenSocial. Greatly improving the user experience, when it no longer matters if half your friends are on Bebo and half on MySpace. You might say, “You’re an idiot, OpenSocial is for widgets not interconnecting social networks”, true that’s the use at the moment, it has been talked about that in the future OpenSocial, will provide methods for sharing data between different networks.

This seems to be a common Google strategy (mentioned on TWiT), if you can’t buy a market fragment it, or at least try because all of above is irrelevant unless this catches on and at the moment with partners such as Bebo and MySpace I am not doubting it will be popular.

While working on the HiPPstr comments, I didn’t understand why other sites required you to go to another page to submit a comment, maybe to prevent over submission, Well I went ahead with it anyway.

I settled on JQuery for my Javascript Framework, it seemed to do a lot out of the box, with lots of plugins and a big community, also the base distribution was a lot smaller than other tools such as MooTools.

I had never done any Ajax Before so this was a little bit of an adventure. If you don’t know ajax is really just a buzz word it stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML, it’s a very commonly used technology in web 2.0 web applications, which allows actions and http requests to be done without requiring the page to be reloaded. This gives web applications more of a desktop feel.

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