“Panace is an Augmented Reality application that uses real time face/image recognition technology, and provides for Contacts Management and HyperLocal communities inside an Enterprise.”

You can find the presentation about Panacea below, or find it on Slideshare here.

The core idea behind the product is that, inside a closed community, it should be really easy to exchange contact and schedule information. Just like how inside an enterprise there is a Global Address Book and also shared calendaring. Panacea extends that by associating a facial identity with each person in the closed community. I mention closed community a number of times, for even I cannot fathom the privacy implications such an application will have in the public domain. We used Face.com‘s face recognition technology to aid in Face Recognition and used OpenCV’s face detection algorithm by accessing their compiled libraries via JNI calls on the android platform.

Scenario 1: You meet a colleague in your organization or at your local community meet. You need exchange contact information. Now, instead of exchanging visiting cards, you could just switch on our app, point the camera at the person, wait till the algorithm recognizes the person, and then add the person’s contact information via a single click. Better explained by a video demo of the solution.

Like any pattern matching algorithm, face.com’s algorithm is also a trained algorithm. Better the sample set or the reference set, better the matching. To make the algorithm work consistently, we need to train the service by sending at least 7 to 8 different photos of the person and associate a unique identifier for that set. When a candidate input is presented, the image clicked via the camera on the phone is sent to face.com and we get back that unique identifier with a matched probability score. Now, this unique identifier could be anything from your corporate id or your twitter handle. The important thing is that there is a backend system which you can query using that unique identifier and retrieve contact details associated with that id.

There is a problem though – I cannot ask every person in the community to upload 10 mugshots to our system to be included in the training set. I would need a more scalable solution. We solved this problem by providing a training mode in the app itself.

Scenario 2: If you realized that one of your colleagues or friends isn’t registered on the service, you can switch on the app and switch to training mode. Start the training by pointing the camera to the person and associate the unique identifier for the person. You can then fill in the contact details yourself or fetch it from the centralized contacts store. Follow the progress bar in the training mode and wait for the training to complete. Once done, any user of the app can now add your recently added contact using the mechanism described in scenario 1. Adding a new user to the application & service is crowdsourced. Again, better explained with a Video demo.

Now that we had sort of envisioned this technology and its working, fleshed out some initial prototypes, we brainstormed about how this technology can be used to solve other problems. I was also in the market to buy a smart phone myself. I did some research and found out that smart phones in India, with Assisted GPS support, started at around Rs 12,000. But high resolution camera phones were selling as low as 6. Also, I was fascinated by the whole location service apps like FourSquare and Gowalla. It turned out that only 13% of all smart phones sold in the world were location aware. This means there was a big market for location based services for non GPS enabled smart phones.  This is how we tried to crack this problem.

Scenario 3: You have a smart phone with an internet connection but no GPS. You want to use a location based service to get some deals on items, check into the place, or just give some feedback or tips for other travelers.  Our application defines what we call as a PlaceMark, a unique image of some sort which is linked to a location in our service. To perform any of these functions, open our app, point to the place mark and wait for the location features to load up. You will now get a feed of past conversations, tips, tricks shared by people at that place. The owner of the location can also target people by providing them deals for checking in and giving a social recommendation of sorts. You can even use these as mechanisms to receive feedback, complaints or engage in a Q&A at a large conference. The possibilities are endless. The example video shows a distributed discussion happening on the wikileaks issue. You can join this discussion by using our app and start conversing. The app even sends notifications to your phone when new messages come in.

This was mostly what we came up with. There are plenty more things that can be done with this application, and this, or a similar technology, can be used to solve many other problems.  We also want to take this product to the market and see what responses it receives. Feel free to leave comments.

There are claims that Open Source will one day completely displace closed software. Same goes with free online advertising, sometimes also referred to as ad exchanges, where a person places an ad on his/her site and in turn gets his/her ad placed on somebody else’s site. There are claims that free online advertising will one day displace Google’s monopolistic hold on online advertising. Frankly I think most of these claims are exaggerated and baseless to a certain extent.

Am I the only one who has a problem with transactions that do not obey the traditional laws of Economics? The market, or as Adam Smith would say – the foundations of human society,  runs on the buy-sell model. When something is free, it means other non quantifiable commodities get traded, like goodwill and trust.  In such circumstances fairness is the biggest casualty. But is there really a model which can ensure fairness in these situations ?

Yes, there are plenty of trust based networks at play in our real life, but they all reach a saturation point. A typical game theoretic scenario, the person to defect first gets a very high payoff ; In a network, everyone else suffers. People will cheat, one way or another. Like I mentioned before, fairness becomes a higly debatable issue. Though, the categorical imperative bestows humans with decision making powers, it doesn’t state the thresholding for these decisions. The only final outcome of these networks is that one person is going to hit it big and make the others suffer.

Naturally the follow up question will be:  how does Open source survive? I explain this using results from game theory. In any homogeneous population, ie either a defecting or a co-operating , a small group of people,  co-operating with each other while defecting against the general consensus , always has the ability to hold their own and, in some cases, even win against the entire population. Examples of this are plenty in real life,  for ex: corruption or the mafia. So, as long as that small bunch of people stay loyal to each other, such networks will continue. Open Source, is slightly a more complex beast than I described it to be, but it broadly falls into the category I mentioned.

Incentive mechanisms like reputation points, virtual currency etc usually try and emulate a real world materialistic economy, but they are limited in their reach and appeal. Eventually, people loose the initiative to compete for these non materialistic resources. Besides, in a medium such as the internet, where identity itself is questionable, how will people trust each other. Has anyone ever wondered if those mails, which inform you of the billions you have won, were ever real? I guess not.

In conclusion,  I ask, is there some mechanism design or a strategy that can ensure fairness (provided its defined accurately) whilst ensuring the continuing growth of such trust based networks ?

I can integrate gmail or yahoo mail and send pages, links, images are email to people with just a single right click button. The web clipboard which is also a godsend is wonderful when you are puling images, links and other paraphernalia from the net for your blog. For me the flock experience is perfect as it takes browsing to a whole new level. For all firefox users, try flock, you wont be dissapointed.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

What if you want to hire someone to build an online community? Somebody to create and maintain a virtual world in which all the players in an industry feel like they need to be part of it? It would help if that person understood technology, at least well enough to know what it could do. They would need to be able to write. But they also have to be able to seduce stragglers into joining the group in the first place, so they have to be able to understand a marketplace, do outbound selling and non-electronic communications.

Seth Godin writes about the Online Community Organizer as the job of the future.

I agree with Seth on this point. Apps are becoming more and more social. The social product is only as good as the hype it creates. Take Kevin Rose’s Pownce or Guy Kawasaki’s truemors , these sites generated enough hype prior their launch because of their high profile entrepreneurs. Almost every person wanted to take a peek at these products when launched. Aren’t these people organizers in their own ways ? Marketing a product has been closely associated with getting Techcrunched or Read/Written, its word of mouth marketing at its best and these people are the ones that are drawing audiences and giving them reason to stay.

Even Joshua of Social Design vouches by it. After a certain point, it will be people who will influence the audience of a social app. I sure as hell would join a social network where I could find the Real Bill Gates, if he can be there, so can I, thats the idea. An Online community organizer will have to be one with an impeccable reputation and a neat resume, one that can turn heads. He/she must be able to talk people into joining a product and using it and even deliver the promise of a fruitful app. Its not enough having high profile people in your Organizers list, you need to a have a good product. Marketing will only take you half the distance, the product has to endure the other half of the audience’s prejudice. Its a tricky predicament to let people from all walks of life into a product that was never meant for them; your organizer must have been a patron of the genre or must be at least influential enough to draw audiences of the right kind.

Its indeed a job for the future.

There are innumerable number of apps that are being created on the facebook platform. Existing applications like wordpress are taking heed and porting their apps into the platform. Some of the initial apps have been taken over and VC’s are announcing seed fund for apps built on the facebook platform. Its like everyone wants a part of the 26 Million uniques visiting the site and want to cash in on the phenomenon. So what did facebook do right ?

As I had written earlier in my barcamp post, it makes more sense for applications to be launched as a part of a larger community rather than brave the web alone. Social networks have proved time and again to be good source for informing people or attracting traffic to your site, essentially great place for marketing. Facebooks plans of monetizing the network had to make the site open to public , which they did by opening up to public signups. The next step was to innovate inside the network. Knowing very well that cramming features into facebook will not result in anything but chaos, facebook needed a serious shake up in terms of the features offered to the users. Rather than putting in the effort themselves, they put efforts into making a platform that allowed for people to build apps on top of the facebook community. This ensured a plentitude of apps and also increased pageviews because of these apps. Its a killer strategy.

The popularity of the platform speaks for itself with tons of apps being built on facebook and the increase in activity on the network. Does this mean we will see more social sites opening up to inorganic growth ? There’s no doubt sites like myspace and digg bring in large number of uniques to their site, but will they provide a way for external sites to tap into the community, if it guarantees them more pageviews and more uniques. This has an implication of spinning off into a business of its own in which you sell a community to a service provider. I call it community as a service.  Or will they risk deterioration in quality and increase of spam due opening up of their services and continue to stay organic. Its pretty obvious that the wealth of resources the platform got facebook was plenty but it was facebooks inherent security and privacy features that made sure that there was minimal exploitation.

Do you think your app can provide Community as a service ?

Google Gears is designed ingeniously. Gears is an activex plugin on IE and an XPI on firefox(installables) . Gears then works in your browser for any applications designed to use the gears technology. The foremost application that uses gears is Google Reader, which can store and retrieve almost 2000 articles. The transition between online and offline web is supposed to be seamless, as in one taking over when the connectivity is out and the other when its back. In reader, you have to explicitly make the shift from online to offline, something like the work offline option in IE.

The core essentially consists of three modules :

• Local Server Module : Creates a local server like emulator in which you can cache urls javascript, image etc. The ResourceStore module is used to capture resources that have to be accesed using a URL. ie supposing you were visiting my homepage, the resources like my resume or my portfolio , that need to be accessed via URL’s can be cached. The other variant is the ManagedResourceStore which automatically updates the cached information. In each case the URL’s and the cache in general has to be specified in a manifest file. The LocalServer intercepts HTTP/HTTPS requests and serves them from the cache if URL is cached in a ResourceStore or ManagedResourceStore (which is enabled) and the cookie of that information is present. This happens irrespective of the network connection.
• Local Database : This module is taken as an enhancement to SQLite , the micro database in C that can be configured and run in under 250Kb of memory. The gears javascript library provides method to create a new local database and also allows from complete SQLite SQL operations.
• Worker Pool : Almost every web developer has come across the long running script -> continue or break dialog. This usually happens due to an infinite loop in javascript or sometimes a very intensive calculation. The downside to this is that UI becomes non responsive and no action can happen on the front end of the app. The worker pool helps the cause by running these operations in the background. People familiar with thick app programming can relate this to threading, but at the javascript level. But unlike threads the workers do not share state information. The workers can communicate with each other by passing message strings or use JSON.

This advancement not only makes offline web possible but also allows for a new breed of applications to be born. Applications that need a server only to sync and not to compute or perform functionality. Think of a MyBlogLog offline for example, you visit a blog where you have a MyBlogLog reader that you have already encountered before the system tells you about your past encounters and on what pages. A distributed social network of sorts!!

The fact that we don’t understand what value others get from social web apps is part of the paradigm of social software. The key is that each person has their own social lives, their own social circle, and thus their own social values. What is important to their social life will almost certainly be unimportant to us because we have our own to worry about.

Think of it this way. Each person has their own social network. Chances are that social network overlaps very little with yours. If, say, that person wanted recommendations for watching a movie, they might turn to their social network, which is made up of their family, friends, and colleagues. They would ask these people, the people they know and trust, what movies they recommend.

Now, would you turn to the same social network for movie recommendations? Of course not. You trust the people you know…your social network, and so any of the chatter from their social network has no value for you. It’s meaningless chatter. Just like most people’s Tweets on Twitter.  In a larger sense, this opaque value problem affects most social software. Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, most social software is built around providing personalized, socially-focused conversation. It’s person-centered and as a result is difficult for anybody but that person to really appreciate: the value becomes opaque in this way. Designing social software is going to be very difficult. The designers won’t be able to put themselves into a position of someone who wants to keep up to date with their social network, which is something that all of these sites are doing.

What the excerpt from the original blog clearly states is that a person using a social software has his/her own reasons to do so. The fact that the others don’t know what value the other person sees in a social network is the entire basis behind social software. I may log into myspace to chat with my peer group, but I dont know what my friend X does in her network, so what do I do ? I snoop around their profiles and walls to get a glimpse of their world coz her value from the network is opaque to me .

The goal of social software is evolve from this paradigm to a more productive one. Efforts are on to make social software enter the productivity space and that too with good success. Based on all of these observations, how do you design for a social concept. How do we actually add value to the users ? Its not easy to please everyone, but at least if the majority is kept happy, you can be sure of winning product.

Ten years back you couldn’t imagine IM in enterprise software;today most of the enterprise vendors supply their own chat service for support and maintenance. The recent acquisition of Tribe.net by Cisco and the more recent IBM including a social network in the recently revamped Lotus suite are just indicators of how big this phenomenon is. The general know how is somehow concocted to a statement “regular productivity apps like email will be ditched“, is not all there is to enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 will see penetration of tools like blogs, RSS, wikis , Instant messaging and collaboration, which can be defined as the aorta of web2.0 enter enterprise space. The benefits are tremendous in terms of productivity. A social network as a base for all applications makes the software more friendly , collaborative and builds better communication capabilities.  Instant messaging can replace those single sentence emails, wikis can replace knowledge bases. Community portals can represent newletters and bulletin boards. Discussion forums can help solve and analyse problems better. Mindmaps makes brainstorming more productive. RSS and its enterprise filtering can make information management and overload a little less cumbersome to deal with ( see newsgator and Knownow ).

Take Basecamp for example, it encompasses a true project management tool with 2.0 capabilities. Updates through RSS. Blog like memos, easy to use resource and task management interface all this with a very social feel to it. If you look at Zoho and their productivity 2.0 suite, its got everything that any business needs. Online Office automation, wiki tools, mail and chat , their newly released meetings and project all are excellent examples of how 2.0 can be introduced into everyday enterprise applications and not compromise on quality.

The race is on and more and more enterprises will compete to cover as many 2.0 technologies as possible. Not all of them will prove useful but they will be an asset anyway , if not that at least for the sake of competition, the 2.0 radar will be covered. If you are an  enterprise customer and is jittery about trying 2.0 , don’t fret, it may be too late when you do. You wouldn’t something as unimportant as new technology let your competitor get the better of you .

click on the image to enlarge……

 This mind map was created using MindMeister , a wonderful tool still in beta which lets you create mind maps and also collaborate in real time with your friends. If you are interested in making mind maps and are on the lookout for a tool, then this is the one for you. Its got a real neat interface and is very responsive unlike the other tools that i have used and its got a great export option. Thumbs up from me.

    I shall take two examples to prove a point here. I shall start with MySpace the socionet giant, who until recently was considered a open haven for people to  make services that could somehow be used in myspace. This was clearly a good strategy considering the fact that demographically MySpace had more leads than any other form of marketing. Understandable that many startups built their business models around the giant , completely depending on myspace for traffic and usage. Services like photobucket, slideshare and even youtube were built on top of the myspace phenomenon. The giant turned sore and became very protective, started blocking parasitic entities who were trying to make money out of myspace. Many businesses are scampering to find shelter and look for alternative business models.

   Next I shall take Facebook as an example. Facebook has a very strong community in college folk, until recently they weren’t even open to public registrations. Though the growth of the network has been slow and not many features have been added, its healthy. The network to this day remains closed to the public eye. A beter suited example for India would be Orkut, which is a closed network, meaning all the data is generated inside the network and stays in the network.

  So what am I trying to say here? Both these models have a little to learn from each other. Though its not wise to allow any website to publish content in your service, its not completely wise blocking them altogether. Services have to have their niche to survive, you have to concentrate on you core strengths, but service need to be sliced and diced, thats the essence of 2.0. A social network will demand bookmarking, photo sharing and blogging. Its not wise to build your flickr, del.icio.us or wordpress into your network. Even if on the long run you do manage to build these services yourself, you cannot compete with other services who would have become giants in their own right.
      No service can aim to be a closed service. You have to incororate third party services to make your service better, but make sure you allow the right services inside and keep the baddies out. As the popular Indian saying goes ,” If there is something that can be exploited, then we will ” , people will always try to fit in unparliamentary elements into your service. Delegate them well, decide on how it should work. Making API’s would be a good option. Follow good patterns like those of flickr , use a similar approach. And please do not block content, its what people are looking for.
  And if none of these things made sense, then it was never supposed to.

I had written about Music 2.0 and the different services that were there that helped popularize and sell DRM free music. My first pick was definitely Last.fm

Last.fm gives you an embeddable radio that you put up in your blog or website and play music from a particular genre. Just provide your artists name and Last.fm will suggest bands that play the same kind of music and will play them one after the other in your radio. Its again social music, so you can suggest your friends a particular band or a particular style of music, write reviews, give ratings etc. I got to hear some amazing bands thanks to Last.fm

Following close behind is Pandora. An initiative of the Music Genome Project, pandora and its flash based player streams quality music. Its plays a mix of songs from the artists that you want to listen to and those that play the similar kind of music. Worth taking a look. I found some really neat music on Pandora.

My old time favorite live365 provides thousands of radio stations that people broadcast. Ads are played in between songs for revenue, but there is a VIP alternative that you can buy for very less. You can even start broadcasting your own station if you choose. There are some really interesting music stations that play some really cool music. Worth taking a look.

Yahoo’s LAUNCHCast service has been around for ages. Probably my first internet radio experience came when I unknowingly clicked the Launch button in my Yahoo messenger. Launch has got a big big load of songs that you can listen to. Also considering that Yahoo is launching its own music player, Sansa Connect, in association with Sandisk that plays Launch music in a wifi spots for a price of $15 per month subscription. Both Sansa connect and launch will be things to look out for in the future.

There are other services like amiestreet which recently launched the first DRM free album by Barenaked ladies and then there is Slacker who has ambitions of becoming the Rupert Mudroch of online audio. Think thats enough for you guys to get started

Mozilla corporation are themselves working on a feature for their browser that integrates the social space with the webspace. The project called “The Coop”, symbolic of chickens in a farm, is a mapping of your real world contacts on to the browser. You all will definitely remember flock, one of my favorite browsers, built on top the firefox engine. Mozilla’s Coop reminds me a lot about flock and seems like a direct competitor to the social browser.

The project evangelizes scenarios where people can share login and see what their other friends are upto online, have one touch sharing of photos , bookmarks, blog posts, facebook status and others. I don’t remember exactly but there is already a plugin which does almost the same things ( will update when I remember or find it) . So mozilla is in, I suspect MS also to be working behind walls on similar concepts, thanks to their Social Computing Group, who I am a big fan of.

But its clear that social space is gaining in prominence and people are realizing that a wealth of applications can be built around these social concepts. If you have still not seen my slides from Barcamp then do so here, there is definitely something for everyone.

Some screenshots of how the Coop will look

My discussion: Socionet Trends 3.0 : Evolution of Socionets

Slides: Click here to view the slides

Evolution : Social Networks have grown pretty mature in terms of its outlook. The amateurish streak of wannabe entrepreneurs has made way for a rich set of networks each with its own niche and userbase. Its almost certain that almost every web service allows you to either share or collaborate over a certain functionality and users expect to share their online presence with their near and dear ones.

With such a strong inclination towards collaboration, a concept which is inherent in social networks, why not let socionets become the base for any application. Build you ideas on top of a social network, that will save you the trouble of designing for collaboration, inter user communication etc. The network phenomenon will also guarantee that your existing users will bring in more users to your service and help market it by sheer word of mouth. Make socionets pluggable into your browser or your OS , in a way adding 1 touch sharing, commenting, collaboration right from ground up. How easy would it be, if you could right click on a file and press a single button which read “Share/Collaborate with my friends”.

Evolutionary angles of socionet also expect socionets to become intelligent themselves. A socionet being able to relate to you at a personal level, that helps filter unwanted information and helps you in your everyday activities would also be good. Imagine a socionet that could find like minded people without you looking for them, what if it could give you updates on information that matters to you the most, like gigs, seminars and other events. What if socionets , which are becoming information repositories in its own right, could semantically link topics and autotag articles and other information. That day is not so far.

More later…….

Some pics from the event :

I am spending this weekend at Barcamp Bangalore, an unconference, a gathering of people who share and discuss technology. I myself gave a talk on the evolution of social networks. You can find the the presentation at my home page or just click here.

The next couple of articles will basically center around things I learnt at barcamp3 . There are a lot of topics that are being discussed ( click here to view the list of topics ), Im unhappy i couldnt attend them all, but whatever i could attend ,I shall cover.

Whats more interesting is that many are still planning to invest wisely in these technologies to benefit out of these technologies. There is a significant change in the way people perceive 2.0 technologies over the past couple of years. I know many folk who still consider it a fad more than a necessity. Given the background of enterprise level applications, which look more into security, scalability and other aspects more than the functionality itself, its just understandable that enterprise folk don’t take kindly to their information lurking in some third party website. The inclination towards 2.0 concepts have improved after seeing dramatic improvement in productivity and revenues of other enterprises.

Out of the survey, many even claimed to be extremely satisfied with their 2.0 investments. Stuck up old folks, its time to wake up and realize the 2.0 dream.

click on the image to enlarge.

People from many states, colleges, districts and minorities each have their own support group for Obama. This is a good move by Obama to gain trust in people. If not anybody, Im sure the Bay Area folks will be glad to vote for him for his sheer ingenuity in leveraging technology as a medium for campaigning. Just goes to show how much social networks will /have become a part of everything human.

This is something that I couldn’t even imagine. Such use of socionets were unheard of before this. But its a good ploy. What else could social networks be used for ??

Just more evidence that more and more people are adopting social networks for the benefit of their community. Cisco is said to buy Tribe.net , a social networking site.

Quote from InfoWorld :The paper, citing anonymous sources, said that Cisco is purchasing the “underlying technology” assets of Tribe, an early mover in the social networking scene, but will not take over management of the Tribe.net social network.

Cisco will combine Tribe’s technology with software it acquired in February with Five Across to help its customers — such as TV networks and cable TV companies, create online environments for their employees and for their customers.

Cisco’s acquisition has not been announced but people are expecting the news in SVP Charlie Giancarlo’s speech at the VoiceCon conference, next week.

Clearly Cisco purchasing a social network doesn’t come as a surprise, I have been saying it over and over again, almost ever company that wants to leverage people power and need to build/(benefit from)  a community, will invest in a social networking solution. Almost every product has a forum or a billboard site of its own for users to come back and write about suggestions, improvements, problems, faq’s etc. Adding a social networking flavor to it will just be taking it a level further. Imagine your support site for your operating system being plugged into a socionet. You can interact with support staff after looking at his/her profile, make sure you don’t assume wrong things while talking to the person, get a good grip on their credentials and what more, if he/she is not available talk to one of their friends. Cool eh ? The impact of introducing social networking in enterprises is really big. What it has to offer in terms of collaboration and togetherness along with a feeling of belonging to a community is plus which people fail to see. Clearly more work is needed to leverage this concept and realize its pros and cons.

I shall be back with an article on how social networks can be used to improve enterprises  and also discuss on its pros and cons, If you have points of your own regarding this, please be kind enough to share them with me.

Obviously you can donate to the Changes by credit card but for those who aren’t really the donating types, you can donate time by participating in certain events that happen in your locality. Finally I see a positive angle to social networking   , do you want to change the world ?

Even enterprises are embracing social media and are looking at it more as a boon than a bane. Last year most of the companies blocked social networking sites and also blogs, their excuse being low productivity from employees who would while away company time and bandwidth on such services. Rather than barricading such trends it would help to leverage it from a productivity point of view. How far fetched is an idea of a social network for a company or a wiki of some sort that helps employees to collaborate. These enterprise level social media companies are going to change the way enterprises operate this year. Wikia, jotspot( now Gspot ), collaboration suites like Zoho will be used extensively in enterprises. Blogging will be a good thing, Sun already has its own blog suite for employees and I know a lot of Googlers who blog extensively.

I found this article in Prof Sadagopans blog which shows figures from a survey of companies adopting social media and its forms. The values are self explanatory. Great to know social media is gathering mass.

Robert Young of the GigaOm team predicts this year to be the year of monetizing. Social netowrks will try getting more ad revenue and also more hits. The neccesities are done, its just good marketing that will take it forward. CPM’s will rise , the network effect will make already big players even bigger.

Author of the article also goes to mention that there will be convergence of social networks and OpenID will bring about the change. If you look at what Robert Young says, its pretty hard to imagine services which allows you to access socionet services without hitting the site. Since Ads serve as the primary revenue source, the integration service must somehow lure socionet execs to adopt such technologies by providing lucrative alternatives and marketing options. This is bound to happen, but it will take time.

What do you think are the predictions for social netowrks this year ?