Building Social Services

Making a service social means providing a way for users to engage with a product or service as a group. We are specifically interested in groups based on connections that are established using the emerging online social networking tools like Facebook, MySpace, etc. This paper explores the value chain dynamics resulting from the integration of social networks with a given service. The example we will be using in this paper involves social TV applications, with a focus on social discovery. We hypothesize that these mashup social services introduce new control points in a given service's value chain, which complement or compete with existing control points. The paper focuses on the North American experience.