Marc Canter, founder and CEO of Broadband Mechanics, is in the business of building social networks. In 1984; he co-founded MacroMind which became Macromedia in 1991 and since then the company has continued to pioneer multimedia authoring and standards. Now at Broadband Mechanics Marc Carter is merging his multimedia heritage with social networks. He is now busy creating what he calls ‘digital lifestyle aggregators.’ Broadband Mechanics’ open platform People Aggregator is a white label solution that allows people to create their own social networks and integrate them with any other software via internal APIs (Application Programming Interface) and external Web services.
Excerpts: What exactly is the concept of white labeled social networking? Most social networking brands offer their products directly to users. I was a Part of this group of people who didn’t like the idea that every time you have to start a social web, you need to hire programmers, write the code and spend millions of dollars. And this has gone over million of times. This means that billions of dollars have gone in building social networks. We felt that there was a need for a platform that enabled companies to build their own social webs and tailor these networks to a range of purposes. This is what the concept of white labelling is. The idea is to provide the building blocks for a social network where the platform provider is as invisible as possible to the social network’s users. There are two models we follow — source code (the business model of Red Hat and other open source companies) or Software as a Service (SaaS). Our earliest clients were 1UP.com and tribe.net. How can this be beneficial for a company? There are various ways in which a social network can help a company. I will tell you how some of our customers benefited. Bell Canada had a movie download site from where users could download movies. What we did was to add social features to their plain page. Now, users can rate the movies, write/read reviews, etc. This gave the company a vibrant community as well as enhanced the user experience. Another customer of ours — Telecom Italia — which has some 72,000 employees — wants all the employees to talk and interact with each other. They want all of them to have fun together. So it’s an HR function here. But how would it help a company gain in terms of revenue? Usually, organizations see this as a marketing expense. Once the marketing team is convinced that social networks can bring money to the organization; it’s easier to convince the top management. At EMI, one of the biggest record companies in the US, we met the marketing team and created a social web for them where in all the sister brands came under one umbrella. We made them aware of the potential of social networking and how important it was to free the user’s data. The moral of the story is there is lot of money to be made in social networking. And also those who embrace the technology early will be the leaders while the rest will be followers. And remember there is always a difference between leaders and followers. The fact that companies like Oracle and Saleforce have embraced social networking proves its potential. I believe that all software is social. As a vendor, you need to be a parent. You need to know when to let go as well as not only talk but also listen. Why shouldn’t a company go for existing social platform (say from Google when it launches such a platform) rather than building their own? They shouldn’t. Absolutely not. Today, social networking has become a commodity. It is same everywhere. Most sites have standard features — personal page, login page, group page, etc. However, to have a compelling online experience you need to not only differ from competitors but also offer something more compelling. Social networking features need to be everywhere whether a productivity suite or an ecommerce tool. How is Google’s OpenSocial different from existing social networks? Today, OpenSocial mimics Facebook. I feel it should be called open widget. However, this is just the opening move of a chess game. This is not the end but the beginning. The beginning for Google was to identify a hole in Facebook’s strategy. Facebook was great when they opened their platform to developers in May. The site was immediately flooded with several interesting apps. However, in the end Facebook is another closed system. They lockin their customers. In the end, it only works when you go to them. 
