It started with Google Buzz, and continued with Apple’s Ping service; just because you have 500 million users, each with a unique ID, doesn’t mean you have a social network. Mark Zuckerberg understands this all too well. He grew Facebook by expanding slowly, starting with Harvard and expanding only when he was sure there was enough user demand. This grass-roots growth strategy is almost the exact opposite of Google’s and Apple’s approach. Both companies hoped to take their large user base and simply add social tools on top of existing services. While this sounds great in theory, successful social networks have always been an opt-in experience.
So what does this mean for large corporations that want to make their products or services more social? They need to think carefully about how they promote their social services and what control they give to users. Google never gave Gmail users a choice, they just turned Buzz on and made users go into account settings to disable it. Social networking is a deeply personal computing experience, and users are quick to abandon a platform, when they feel like their privacy is being invaded.
We won’t go as far to say that it is impossible for large corporations to create a social platform. Many web services have successfully integrated Facebook Connect to bring social features to their product. We hope in the future that there are other social platforms out there that businesses can plug into but at this point, Facebook’s social graph is far more sophisticated than anything else out there and we strongly suggest that other web services take advantage of it, rather than trying to build something from scratch. Your users will thank you.