Author: Dora Varvarigou

• Introduction

Social Network (SN) environments are the ideal future service marketplaces. It is well known and documented that social networking users are increasing at a tremendous pace. Web 2.0 and (SN Sites) SNSs are attracting more than 125 million regular users within just 5 years of existence. The number of the potential customers is huge, coming from almost every societal class, cultural backgrounds, and ages. The requirements are simply a computer, a browser, network access, and the natural need for socializing. The latter results in a great number of SN service consumers who, through their interactions, create complex social schemes that are valuable to them.

Taking advantage of these social dynamics as well as the vast volumes of content generated every second is a major step towards creating a potentially huge market of services. Application developers can be anyone from an individual home user who plays around with Facebook, to a company exploiting the SN spaces to deliver its services. Providing developers with tools that enable them to manage the dynamically generated content and complex social interactions in a service application platform that allows them to build applications disregarding the underlying SN platform implementation will create an agile and profitable market of services and will bring the Internet of Services concept a step closer to realization.

Of course the basic question is why this hasn’t happened yet. Why SNSs haven’t turned into a prospective market of services? It is clear that there already is some business action going on in the SN framework. However, there are some characteristics that weaken the current case which are analysed below.

• Lack of application interoperability

Many social networking platforms are aiming at providing different types of social networking services, yet their customers overlap to a great extent. This is indicative of the need to provide a wealth of services in a common target group. This scales even more if we consider the potential that is created if we mix and match these services along with the content that they are associated with.

However, the core services provided by SN that can be used for building larger workflows are limited in number and functionality since they are platform dependent. Google’s OpenSocial and Sun’s Zembly have attempted to deal with this issue by providing a common API for the application development and deployment in various SN spaces. Even though this effort has met significant success, it has also encountered the following major issues: Weakness to incorporate all services that the SN provides, leading to almost standard workflows with few variations and platform API-dependent services; poor usability thatleads to the exclusion of the home users and the creativity that they can bring; and, specific social networking platforms not opening their APIs because they do not have the business incentives to do so.

• Support for Business-oriented Services

Modern SN platforms provide a range of utilities and services ready for consumption by the user with the purpose to entertain, educate, inform, collaborate, etc. Apart from these core functionalities, SN platforms also offer tools to allow the users themselves to become application developers and content providers. Facebook applications are a typical example of an API being provided for developers to freely build SN services given specific rules. The related Wiki* states that over 650,000 developers are using this API for contributing applications, however, a closer reading will reveal that there is a clear distinction between these developers and SN users. An evaluation of SN profile applications will soon lead to disappointment with regards to the quality, functionality and design of the application. These characteristics are not fitting for business services, which are expected to satisfy functional and non-functional requirements in an efficient way and with quality.

The reason for which this is currently happening has been summarised above: lack of adequate APIs for service composition across SN platform, lack of tools to manage content and social behaviour, and lack of social capital monetization mechanisms. The notions of QoS, trust and security, reliability, confidentiality and all these non-functional requirements, that are so important when building business services, need to be better explored in the context of social networks. Quantification of social capital in SNs implies that these concepts need to be revised and supported by appropriate mechanisms such as SLA managing mechanisms for ensuring QoS levels, reputation systems, and trust platforms, that will make it possible to evaluate and reward a good service.

SN platforms as they currently are do not provide the necessary support for developing and deploying business services. They do offer basic APIs and software libraries to allow for the development of applications but they cannot support sophisticated, high quality and business-oriented SN services since fundamental notions such as QoS, trust and security are not quantified and incorporated as mentioned above.

• Lack of tools to manage content

Social Networking platforms contain an abundance of content that generates value and hasn’t been modelled yet. 3D Virtual Worlds and microblogs are typical examples of how text, pictures, movies or even scenes can attract the interest of users and create critical mass and trends. This, plus the volume of content generated every second, lead to a challenging management problem that needs to be resolved if we are to take advantage of the content wealth.
Current social networking platforms do not possess adequate tools to manage this content in a combinatorial manner. They only deliver core services for content representation that mostly fail to incorporate the user’s reaction when invoking them. Content in social networking is a raw material that, when used wisely, can create a service market on its own.
Yet, the lack of tools to handle content ownership, consistency, confidence and privacy keep this opportunity far from being seized.

• Lack of instrumentation of social dynamics models

Most users of social networks aren’t exhibiting commercial behaviour; they are there just for having fun. Still, there is a great potential in making money out of SN and Virtual Communities. This potential has managed to generate a 130% increase on Facebook’s annual growth, escorted by 300M$ for the 2% of its shares in its first steps. And this success story follows many SNS of different types. But now that the hype around SN is starting to wear off and the SN technologies are entering the “Trough of Disillusionment”, is the time to investigate their real-world applicability and benefits and identify the actual sources of revenue. The volume of potential customers, service and application providers as well as the generated social capital and the wealth of actions and content available in these spaces are indicative of the technologies’ worth, however, we still lack the understanding of how their combination is generating value.
As a first step, we need to build utilities that capture the notions of social network dynamics and human behaviour so as to be able to build business on top of it. Identifying the actions that bring value is utterly important in supporting business models within social networks. What is more interesting is the modelling of the interactions among humans through the social networking core services as well as between humans and the virtual environment. Each action in a social network triggers a series of reactions. The reactions generate events that affect both the environment and the users. This process represents the user’s social networking behaviour and is indicative of how a critical mass of individuals might behave as customers (social network economics).
It is necessary to materialize in a tangible manner, the notions of actions, events, behaviour and trends and encompass them in a service provisioning platform operating in a service networking context. Incorporating these utilities and delivering them to users will permit them to build applications that maximize their effects and range by taking into account the social networking context.

• Incentives for Development of Business Services

By dealing with the abovementioned weaknesses, we will pave the way for building qualitative, functional and usable business applications. By providing application interoperability; support for SLAs and QoS; tools for content management and tools for materializing social behaviour; and most importantly, a usable framework to build services in SN spaces using all the above capabilities, we can provide incentives for the development of business applications, while utilizing the full potential that the openness that SNs provide as well as the wealth of content available in an efficient and intelligent manner.

Author, Csilla Zsigri

Dear Cloud Expert,

I’m a potential cloud user. Ongoing technical discussions about what cloud computing is, do not help me much in understanding what clouds are useful for, they rather confuse me. I guess I will never fully understand what you really mean when you use all those expressions like on-ramp or bursting or runbook automation. Also, my feeling is that not every company that bills itself as a cloud player has the experience or domain knowledge to back that claim. What I really want to know is why I should use a cloud, how to get started, how the different models work, which vendors I should be considering, what their competitors are doing, if there are deployment experiences and best practices I can look at, and so on.

I would appreciate if you shed some light on this.

Posted by
The Customer

Dear Customer,

I´m glad you posted your needs and concerns. I´ll try to walk you through some important business drivers which can help you understand the benefits of the cloud.

I see cloud computing as a way to use technology rather than a technology itself. It’s a logical endpoint for some combination of activities including grid and utility computing, virtualization and automation. With clouds, enterprise IT is not organized neither wholly in-house nor entirely outsourced, instead it is located at some optimal point between the two.

Cost reduction is a key driver in the short term. For instance, you can run simulations in a day and then have more time to write a report. This translates into cost savings that would otherwise have been spent on provisioning new hardware. Cloud computing eliminates the need to procure and manage hardware and you pay only for what you consume. You reduce capital spending without negatively impacting operations.

Operational flexibility (scale up/scale down) that clouds offer, the ability to more quickly respond to changing needs and faster time to market are often more important in the long term than lower cost. You can expand on on-demand and pay-per-use, scale fast and if it doesn’t, fail it cheaply.

Business agility, flexibility and execution enable you to effectively start over with new projects and reuse components between projects. This drives better utility and community across your organization or organizations. You can also support your developers by addressing their needs to create their own applications or do simulations as cloud computing allows them to quickly develop and deploy applications and services.

Automation is another key driver for using clouds. Provisioning automation is a force multiplier for overworked systems administrators. The benefits are immediate in terms of both time and money.

Faster time to market is a key enabler of innovation that gives you competitive advantage. It provides you with the ability to more quickly respond to changing needs.

Using the cloud, you can make your revenue grow and shrink your operating costs at the same time. You can quickly deploy and scale your services along with reduced administrative overhead and achieve higher total ROI.

Green issues are climbing the corporate agenda and legislation will reward them in IT as elsewhere. Choosing third-party cloud services means that you are able to reduce your own phys¬ical IT footprints and power consumption and pass along responsibility for the associated carbon use to a third party. By the same token, the use of internal cloud mechanisms enables organizations to better manage underutilized resources.

I hope you find this useful. In order to answer all your questions, let me invite you to our next event, a half-day program, where industry experts, cloud providers, financial professionals and end-user companies will join together to learn, understand, network and develop strategies for today’s cloud marketplace.

Posted by
The Cloud Expert