Distributed Social Networks – OthersOnline

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of people tagging.  I remember how excited I was when somebody first showed me the Facebook feature where clicking on a people tag displayed a list of other people with the same tag.

Up until now, the only service that I’d seen built primarily around people tagging was a site called Tagalag, which allows you to tag acquaintances with keywords, thereby helping to build a Meta layer of people connections.  Sadly, Tagalag never got traction, though it does have improbably impressive search engine clout (for my name anyway).

Enter OthersOnline.  OthersOnline is a distributed service that promises to drive targeted traffic to your blog or site based on keywords that you select yourself via your OthersOnline profile.  It appears that eventually the service is going to get into the people search business, but this aspect is not live yet.

The service is executed in two different ways – via a toolbar, and via a widget. 

The toolbar acts as the profile / person / site discovery tool, pushing relevant OthersOnline profiles to you as you browse the Web.  Built into the toolbar is the ability to chat or email with other users without disclosing your personal information.  There are also contextual ads served by Kaboodle that show up in the toolbar’s dropdown profile display.

The widget displays the OthersOnline profiles that have been tagged with your keyword, and serves as a new user acquisition tool for the service with its invitation of “Tag Yourself.  Be Found.”  There’s also a friending type feature called “favorites” that allows you to add other OthersOnline users for easy access to them from your toolbar.

As you can see in the right sidebar, I tagged my profile with the word “widgets.”  The OthersOnline widget is showing my profile and that of Ivan from Snipperoo.  One interesting thing to note is that although I have tagged myself with a variety of words (burritos, basketball, San Francisco, etc.), the only word that’s triggering related profiles is “widgets.”  This must be because of the content of Sexy Widget, though I’m not sure how the service is drawing that connection.

There are a couple of things that I like about OthersOnline.  It’s able to pack a lot of information in a small footprint by using what they call a “fly-out window” that’s triggered when you mouse over a thumbnail in the widget (unfortunately this fly-out window disappears under Sexy Widget’s middle column, but I’m sure they’ll get this sorted out soon).  Clicking on a user’s URL takes you right to the site, and does not bring you to an OthersOnline profile.  I also like how the service uses both a toolbar and a widget as a means to achieve a distributed presence.  Widgets alone are not the only way to achieve distribution – just ask StumbleUpon.

In other posts, I’ve talked about the importance of having a value proposition in order to earn sidebar real estate.  While the value proposition of the OthersOnline service seems simple enough – tag yourself and drive relevant traffic to your various websites – it’s not as clear to me why I should add the actual widget to my site.  Referrals are triggered by the existence of an OthersOnline profile, not by the existence of the widget.  For example, Ivan is showing up as a related profile on my sidebar, yet he has no widget on his site.  This disconnect between the widget and the service’s core value proposition may slow widget adoption.

So if the Explode widget’s value is to show the blog owner’s friends, and the ShowYourself and Wink widgets’ value is to aggregate profile links, what exactly is in it for me to put the OthersOnline widget on my site?  I guess it’s a marginally nice service for Sexy Widget readers to show the sites of folks with similar interests.  I’m just not sure if that’s enough – especially in the early days when there aren’t that many users.  For this type of value prop, it would appear that the Criteo auto-roll might be a better fit.

It looks to me that OthersOnline is on a collision course with Wink, with both in a race to accumulate user profiles complete with Meta data so that they can offer a people search service.  Wink is a little further along in terms of offering the destination site piece of the puzzle, while OthersOnline has a toolbar up and running ahead of Wink.  The real differentiator that I see so far is Wink’s use of landing pages to generate organic search referrals.

After playing with this neat service for a while, I’m left wondering where the users are going to come from.  Having a toolbar centric service slows down the rate of adoption, and as powerful as toolbars are in providing a distributed user experience, they don’t do much for you in terms of enabling viral adoption.  The widgets are neat, but as of yet, aren’t solving any big problem for my blog.

It’s still very early in the game, and OthersOnline is rolling out new stuff very quickly.  No doubt they are working hard on how to solve the user acquisition challenge.

For more on OthersOnline see TechCrunch. 

 

Comments

[MikeD]

Thanks for the great post.
I've fixed the overflow:hidden issue with the sidebar of your blog. Most blog templates clip the sidebar to prevent mis-behaving widgets - I like to think of our widget as well-behaved ;)

Mike

[MikeD]

Regarding why only the phrase 'widgets' is pulling up profiles - that is due to entering only 'widgets' in the wizard used to configure your widget. If you re-run the widget, or manually edit the snippet of code, you can include many more keywords if you like.

[MikeD]

Oops - I meant 're-run the wizard'.

Also, one interesting thing is that initially only two profiles showed up. But after viewing this blog, the toolbar auto-tagged my profile with 'widget' and now I'm showing up in the widget. This auto-tagging behavior is transient - keywords fade away as you surf elsewehere - but it really helps to show people that are immediately relevant.

Which is why bloggers should use the toolbar and the widget - those two inputs can both auto-tag your profile and increase your ranking/relevance.

[Jordan Mitchell]

Hi Lawrence, thx for the post. Outside of showing people based on whatever tag you like, and other nifty features we're working on, the widget will help drive traffic to your blog. We don't have the pieces in place yet to deliver on this promise, but will soon.

In the meantime, users really appreciate the fly-out window information and the fact that they can click directly to that user's site. They also like having some control over who shows up -- for instance, a distributed group of bloggers supporting a common cause (2000Bloggers, for example) can all display people pertaining to that tag, thereby benefiting each other.

Oh BTW, your right column appears broken in IE.

[lawrence]

Thanks for the added info guys. That transient tagging is especially cool. Did you see that Wink announcement on TechCrunch? What do you make of that?

[Jordan Mitchell]

Yeah, the transient "auto-tagging" thing -- that's what makes us more like medium than wink.

I read that about wink -- not sure what to make of it actually, other than it sounds like a helluva distraction. You can be sure they're burning a lot more money than us while they figure out their biz -- and I doubt very much they'd be doing this if their investors felt they had it figured out.

I don't agree with you that we're on a collision course with Wink, but I can understand why you'd come to that conclusion. Time will tell though, won't it! I'm feeling more and more like I should just shut up about what where we're going. :-P

[Jordan Mitchell]

Hi Lawrence, wondering if you got our recent email about some features we added. Most notably, we now:
-- show you a graph of how often you've been shown to others
-- made our auto-tagging process better, more transparent and 100% user controlled.

So it's like the Web's first person-to-person contextual ad platform. You:
- add your blog URL
- tag yourself (we tag you too because adding keywords is such a pain)
- promote yourself and discover others
- see reports (intros, views, clicks, etc.)

BTW, we have users already getting 500+ intros per day which is generating double-digit clicks to their blog.

Gosh, I actually see you online now in my toolbar, so you must have received my email and are looking as I type!

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