An Interview With Zheng Xiaoyun of Linkist on Social Networking

(photo by wenxin) Zheng Xiaoyun is a veteran in social networking. He has just joined Linkist with a key operational role (aka COO). Before that he has worked for Shanghai based social networking company Wealink for a year. He is also one of the earliest Chinese bloggers, one of the chief organizers of Chinese Blogger Conference.

China Web2.0 Review interviewed Zheng Xiaoyun on his new job. We also took advantage of this opportunity to discuss some questions of social networking, as 2006 is sort of year of SNS.

One of the interesting questions we discussed is about how 3D world like Second Life will affect social networking. As of this writing, Sony has launched a Second Life killer based on its popular game device. It seems to be inevitable that such kind of virtual world will be adopted by more companies as an approach to build the community.

Before making your hands dirty to dig into the conversation, you probably want to review the Wikipedia definition of Social Network. Social network operators might want to pause and think again where the future direction is, for the rest of us, we will find why Microsoft originally limit MSN Messenger buddy list to 150 people.

Following is the our interview. Thanks, Zheng!

First, can you briefly introduce your work at Linkist? What’s the biggest opportunity you see in this new job?

Zheng: For me, it’s very lucky to join Linkist. The reason I left my job where I have worked for 11 years in the beginning of 2006 is to find a place to work on something of social networking. Unfortunately Wealink is no longer an idea place for me to do what I want, so I left. At the same time, Linkist was exploring new directions for future growth, and they were hiring. Thanks to Zhan Bin for his introduction, so that I have a chance to talk to Linkist. We exchanged our ideas in this business, we both think highly on the vision of how social network should help people to connect to each other, and the executive team of Linkist shows great support to the new approach, so I joined.

Now in Linkist, I am responsible for all internal operations, from implementation of product strategy to logistics for other team members. I am sort of jack of everything.

Gigaom has a post said that social networks has become a feature not separate services. What’s your view on this? Will pure social networks like Linkist and Wealink treat this as a threat?

Zheng: It must be the trend that social networks has become a must have feature. In the same reason, lots of portals have embraced blog as a feature, this is because “social” is the basic character of human and its behavior, sooner or later, it should be reflected in web interaction. I am fond of seeing more and more services include this character, and this will make Global Brain (an intelligent network composed of wisdom of crowds from all parts of the Internet through SNS) more complex and more intelligent.

Human interactions have different types and levels. The approaches of Linkist and Wealink are different from those services including social network as a feature. That said, they won’t treat this as a threat.

Can we say that in the future every Internet service is a social network, but they have different focuses. Some of them are more general like Myspace and Linkist, others are more professional, interest driven social networks, where aggregates people with similar tastes?

Zheng: Community websites will embrace SNS features and finally become social networks themselves. Of course, lots of content websites will turn into communities, thus, to add SNS feature is no brainer. This actually reminds me the concept of Social Web.

Let’s talk about a bit more about the future of social network. People Aggregator provides bunch of tools for everyone to have his own social network. For ones that are not techie, Ning has made this process deadly simple. Do they represent the future of social network?

Zheng: People Aggregator is excellent in theory, but it’s too complicated. Ning seems to be on the right move.

After social network becomes a must have feature, we will see lots of tools and services which can be used to build our own social networks.

But the problem is: if there’re not enough nodes in a social network, it is not that useful; And the boundary of different social networks has not been broken. On the contrary, in offline society, people form a united social network.

So I am looking forward to future social networks which have no boundaries, interconnected with technologies like OpenID.

Service like Profilelinker provides aggression service to pull data from different networks. Further, Oreilly put forward the idea of address book 2.0. What do you think of this kind of services? What’s the key factors for them to success? What sort of role will OpenID play in this field?

Zheng: This is an inevitable trend. Lots of people are looking for opportunities in this field. The best way to predict the future is to built it.

But the efforts are still in lab stage, most of the existing applications won’t have a promising future. This is because social networks themselves are still changing and evolving, thus applications based upon them are not stable.

OpenID will be a key factor. It adapts to one of the basic characters of Web2.0 that everyone has a URL, and it is flexible enough so that people can navigate between different services freely. When there’re more services supporting OpenID emerge, people’s behavior will generate the requirement which will determine the future of social networks. I believe this won’t be too far away.

We know you are an expert of Second Life. What sort of effect it will bring to social network? What do you see the future of Second Life clones in China, such as Hipihi? Are users of Second Life really producing anything useful or is this merely advanced virtual fun?

Zheng: I am not an expert of Second Life. I just keep observing it closely.

Second Life builds a society, it’s like the real one but they are also different from each other in many aspects. If social networks are useful to real society, in the same reason, it should be useful to the one in Second Life.

As to service like Hipihi, I don’t know if Chinese people will have enough imagination and patience to build a new world, a new society from chaos. I have the feeling that attentions to Second Life form China are more targeting to its economic aspect, not imagination or future.

Regional products and services will reflect the culture of the society in that place, such as Internet in China, it has its distinct characters. The thing Hipihi is going to bring us must be different from Second Life. It will have its distinct characters.

What’s more, Second Life has the patience for several years of silence. Will service like Hipihi has the same patience?

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