Explode is a distributed network play owned by the folks who market Elgg.org, an open source social networking platform. The Explode widget is a way for (primarily) blog owners to display friends from around the Web, regardless of what communities they belong to. The widget also allows for public commenting (by Explode members). Explode does offer an image based version of their widget that will work on MySpace, but it’s not nearly as interesting as the JavaScript version, and would seem to be unlikely to get much traction. Blogs would seem to be Explode's target market.
For a distributed social network to take off, it needs to provide a compelling reason for blog owners to give up some sidebar real estate. In the case of MyBlogLog, the value prop is pretty clear – it “turns the lights on” so folks can see who’s in the room.
Wink takes a different tack. As opposed to providing info about a blog’s readers, it provides additional info about the blog’s author in the form of aggregated profile links.
So what’s the value proposition for Explode? It displays relationships between the blog owner and others that, in theory, cut across all other communities. Is this, along with the commenting functionality offered by the widget, enough to earn Explode some real estate? I’m not really sure. Obviously, “friending” is a huge deal in the social network space. Most of us in the industry agree that it would be neat to have networks of friends that span across various communities.
However, in some ways it seems that pure, unstructured friending may be on the way out. Most of the self-selecting network tools that we’re now seeing have some purpose – whether they collect data for a recommendation engine, or act as a filter. So far at least, Explode does neither.
One aspect of Explode that I find fascinating is how they structure their widget links. Clicking on the image of one of the people in my Explode network will take you not to their Explode profile (like MyBlogLog), but directly to the person’s blog or site. I love this. It really does have the potential to be a true distributed network, with just a small tie back (through comments and registrations) to the Explode home base. Even the friending can happen through the body of the widget (for registered users). This dedication to being truly distributed is especially impressive given that Explode is sitting on a ton of social media features by virtue of its Elgg roots. The temptation must have been there to drive everything back to their platform.
If Explode were to get some traction, I think that it would be a really neat way to bounce around the Web. Explode widgets would let you follow the trail of human relationships, and see the blogs behind each person. It would be almost like a blog roll populated by humans.
However, my gut reaction is that in order to for Explode to get some traction, they will need to figure out how to give a little bit more to the blog owner. They certainly have the social media tools at their disposal to try some different things.
For more on Explode, see Ivan and TechCrunch.
We're definitely not resting on our laurels with this one - there is much, much, much more to come. One minor improvement will be a Myspace widget that does, with an image tag, everything that the Javascript widget does. But we're going to ramp up the service, allow you to add people as friends who haven't joined Explode, and more. (Think of it this way: how do you find a person or community, wherever they are on the web?)
Mind you, the existing "nudge" feature is pretty fun if you build up some friends. It's worth a play with.
Posted by: Ben Werdmuller | March 15, 2007 at 02:00 AM