Social Networks for Good?

by Sean Blagsvedt, CEO, Babajob.com

If one were to look at the state of social networking today, we are at an odd, pre-adolescent time. While there are over 200 million mobile subscribers in India (and over 2.5 billion worldwide), the most popular Indian social networking site – Orkut – claims just 67 million users worldwide (per August 2007), with just 16.8 per cent (11.3 million) in India. Over half of these users are in the 18-25 age group. In short, the users of social networks are young but they are certainly growing in terms of influence and importance to society. As I look out in the years to come, I see a few trends as well that are worth exploring.

First, social networks such as Facebook and Orkut will increasingly define how we present ourselves to others and thus, have the potential to shape human behaviour in ways that few other mediums ever have. As a software designer, I personally find this scary and terribly exciting.

As these networks 'open up' as Facebook has with their developer platform and Myspace, Orkut, Ibibo, Minglebox and others will do with the upcoming OpenSocial platform, it offers other players – such as BabaJob.com – a chance to make widgets that appear on the homepages of users and are seen by the user’s friends and associates. For the first time, it’s relatively easy to build a small piece of software that acts as a 'badge of identity' that individuals can then broadcast to others they know, who then can in turn choose to place that widget on their own pages. Most of the popular widgets to date are fairly silly though often fun, for example, AttackU is a popular app that allows users to visually 'attack' their friends by overlaying a cartoon kiss or slap on top of their picture.

These widgets can have a conscience though. With Babajob.com, we hope to leverage these social networking platforms to induce 'competitive altruism' and encourage and broadcast acts that help poor people. For example, when an Infosys worker in Bangalore registers and recommends the non-literate sister of his maid to all of his Orkut friends, those friends will see his good deed (and hopefully copy it) and his maid's sister will hopefully land a job, earning more than she would have by simply walking her neighbourhood.

The facebook app, Causes does something similar when it makes membership in your favourite cause (say the plight of Darfur refugees) into a small piece of your Facebook homepage, thereby broadcasting this action and at the least, increasing the awareness of your cause among people you know on Facebook and encouraging them to donate.

Second, social networks have the potential to make markets where social connections matter, MUCH more efficient. Just as the online availability of buyers and sellers, credit cards and cheap shipping made internet shopping sites like ebay.com among the most efficient in the world, it is my hope that socially dependent markets can become that efficient as well. This efficiency in the 'dating' market was the original inspiration behind Friendster.com where John Abrams was trying to make it super easy to discover which friend of a friend would make a good date for his users.

These markets extend beyond dating too; our company was inspired by an insight of Prof Krishna of Duke University, that the use of social connections among the poor to find better jobs may be the most important way they escape poverty. It is our goal that by gleaning social connections from sources such as our own social networking site, Babalife.com, Orkut, Facebook and eventually mobile phone address books directly, coupled with increasing mobile penetration among the poor, we can bring more efficiency and opportunities to the worldwide informal job market. In concrete terms, imagine a Hyderabad home-maker being able to instantly search across all her friends of friends for all the cooks they may have recommended and then being able to simply call any of those cooks on her mobile phone for an interview.

Finally, as mobile phone companies and government regulators work to make ubiquitous mobile payments a reality, it becomes far easier to move money from one person or company to another, simply by knowing their telephone number. When coupled with the knowledge of who your 'friends' are, financial incentives can be easily implemented to further influence behaviour.

In our case, we take a portion of the fee that employers pay us and give it to the person that registered a hired job seeker and importantly, we also compensate those people that socially connect the employer to the employee by recharging their mobile up to Rs 300. It is easy to imagine other schemes that creatively spread money across your social network as well, for e.g. if I put an ad for my favourite video game on my homepage and one of my friends or better yet friend of friends buys it, the video game company sends me a small check.

Of course, we are at the earliest stages of all of these three trends. Significant experimentation and many failures will be in store but I am confident that in the years to come we will see more socially dependent markets radically changed, more of our identities defined by our digital representations and more of our buying and social activities influenced by our phones and digital social networks.

In short, it is an amazing time to be a software designer.