Rudy Thurston, COO, Omnifuse

Having the tools in place to capture it when it happens is going to be key. But it still has to have that spontaneity to it. That’s a hard one to answer, because I really know so many marketing companies that have tried to come up with that piece, and identify that piece. It’s just the spontaneity of it.

If you have the tools in place to capture it…

MM
You’ve got another dimension, here. Not only is it authentic, but there’s a poetry. There’s a spontaneity and a freshness to it.

RT
Yes. Again, that leads back to the authenticity of it.

MM
It could be authentic, but it could just be yesterday’s news.

RT
Sure. Good point.

MM
As we wrap up our time here, can you share with us some more forward-looking comments or ideas about the use of widgets and some of these other sorts of things that we read about in these little applets or mash-up kind of applications that you see at FaceBook? And how that ties into some of the things that you guys are doing?

RT
Absolutely.

We work with a company very closely. A company called iLike. There’re a digital, online music company.

What ended up happening was, they used their FaceBook app to add a little widget into the FaceBook profile that. And a lot of people who already had profiles on iLike… To bring their music over into the FaceBook application. So successful, they were signing up like a half million members a month. It just blew up. It was absolutely unbelievable how successful they were capable of, in bringing new members to their site-by just adding a FaceBook extension to their application.

MM
So there I am in my FaceBook profile, and underneath, I’ve got the little interesting factoids about my stuff, and what groups I’m a part of. In that profile, I’ve now added a little visual image of what, as it relates to iLike?

RT
Right. What happens is, you have a series of applications that you can add to your profile. You go to their little list, and you find the iLike application, and you add that to your profile. That gives a little popup-a little window-right there. You can log into your iLike profile, and your iLike profile then sucks in your iLike music, right into your FaceBook profile.

Then you can recommend your music to other FaceBook members. You can recommend FaceBook members to sign up for an iLike profile.

MM
The kind of data that’s moving across there would be like the artist and the song and things like that?

Exactly. It’s really simple. They’re just links to the iLike site.

MM
Right.

RT
They’re basically getting members to distribute links all over the web through the FaceBook application to their content. That’s what’s driving a tremendous amount of their membership building right now. It’s really coming through this tremendous distribution of their content-through the FaceBook application.

What we’re seeing, though-and our idea of the future of social media as a whole is that… We’re getting very close to the saturation point of having a framework that can consume and create and consume profiles from all kinds of different social networks.

The FaceBook application doesn’t just allow you to read into it. It also allows you to read from it, as well.

If you have a FaceBook profile and you have a MySpace profile, and you have an iLike profile and all these other profiles, we believe that the next iteration of this will be a mash-up or an integrator of all of these profiles, into one social media profile. One big profile.

MM
So now I’ve got all of my social media positions integrated almost to a dashboard.

RT
Absolutely. That’s exactly right. A dashboard is exactly how we describe it in our technology meetings.

MM
And all this dashboard is really doing is syndicating in content streams.

I would imagine that in some cases, you’d have a window into MySpace or into these virtual reality things or metaverse things-like Second Life. Or maybe one of my massive multi-user online game things.

RT
Absolutely.

Specifically, our market space is comprised of Fortune 1000 companies. We see it as the ability to expose these profiles that are built within MySpace, FaceBook-those are the profiles that you’re really looking for, when we’re reading in-profile information from these other networks.

We’re hoping that people adopt those as the standard. Then instead of having to type all of that in, there’s actually a company out there trying to create a unique ID for everybody that is your personality and your piece that floats around the internet.

OpenID. Yes. OpenID’s whole idea was that everybody would create these profiles in OpenID. That one profile would then be the profile that FaceBook uses-my Space uses-all these other people consume that profile and can maintain this one profile for the entire web.

MM
Are there progressive levels of disclosure?

RT
Yes. It can set privacy settings and all that good stuff. The problem is that nobody wants to share their data. Everybody wants to own their data. So that idea doesn’t work.

But what we’ve seen is that specifically in the FaceBook and MySpace world-these profiles are primarily these accepted de facto standards. So we’re saying, “Okay. Let’s use those. Give us a nice rich API to read them in from. Keep your profile there and manage it all there. But let’s bring some of that data into this profile that we’re creating for you, here. We’ll tie them together so you can manage all the data in one place. But we’re going to make it visible, too.”

You’re essentially making it visible to multiple communities.

MM
You know, this sounds like the metadirectory of Napster.

RT
Yes. Very similar. The idea really comes from that type of thing. And I have to wrap it up, here.

MM
I want to thank you so much, Rudy.