Everyone likes to come up with a list of new rules. There are the New rules of Marketing and PR, the New Rules of Web Development, and the list goes on. A couple of weeks ago, Ankesh, Grouptivity’s president and CEO, came up with the 5 New Rules of Content Sharing that I thought were worth sharing with our blog audience – so here they are:

1. Comprehensive:
   Content sharing tool must be comprehensive and provide multiple ways for users to sharing content including at least the top three content sharing mechanisms: email, bookmarking, cut-and-paste.
2. Social:
   Content lives in a social context and shared content should be able to drive conversation and community around it. Content cannot live as an island but needs discussion and community to drive it!
3. Personalized:
   Today’s users should be able to personalize the content sharing experience. One size doesn’t fit them all! Online users have a broad range of interests and tasks and content sharing tools and services should take that into account.
4. SEO:
   Shared content needs to, whenever possible, to optimized for search engines so that it can be easily found. Backlinks and permalinks should also be used to allow readers to return to the source of the content and have a permanent reference to it. Obvious benefits to content publishers include return traffic.
5. Monetizable:
   We have all learned that there is no free lunch on the web. Content should be monetizable if we expect quality and continuity of content! Content sharing should take this into account.

Last week CNBC and New York Times agreed to share original content with one another! Though initially limited to business and technology news and videos, the relationship obviously has the potential to flow into other areas. Obviously, this is a response to the surge of competition from News Corp and its recent acquisition of Dow Jones (publisher of the Wall Street Journal) as well as the launch of the Fox Business Network cable channel, but one thing is evident: as competition heats up, more and more publishers are interested in content sharing deals.

This spirit of content sharing is good news to us at Grouptivity, after all we are building a content sharing network aimed helping publishers become more successful in generating traffic. We work with both large and small publishers, some who obviously compete with each other in certain markets, so selling them on the benefits of working together with other partners to building a better content sharing network is something we are always trying to do – so its good to see publishers sharing content with each other!

Yesterday, Webware’s Rafe Needleman compared Grouptivity to “Digg for E-mail” and today Mashable’s Kristen Nicole just posted a piece titled Email Becomes a “Digg” Network with Grouptivity’s iPond. Kristen starts by stating a very important point that publishers sometimes overlook:

Nearly every online publication (and social media, for that matter) has an “email this” option for its content. And considering that email is the most common form of communication on the web, it’s easy to see why emailing something to a friend is the easiest way to get them to look at something you’d think they’d find interesting.

Kristen also does a great job of complaining how iPond.com and Grouptivity work together to deliver value to publishers:

Grouptivity has positioned its new site, iPond, as a launching pad for publishers to further monetize their content, which looks a lot like a Digg for emailed content. From iPond you can see what’s “hot” and you can further discuss and bookmark content from there. The hope is to create an even more active community around emailed content.

A number of posts have come in response to Saul Hansell’s (New York Times) article titled Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network and Wall Street Journal’s Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again . AlwaysOn’s Brad Feld, for example, suggested that Microsoft may have a play by probing your Exchange server for social networking “data” in his post: Where is Microsoft In This Party? Others like Carmen Hughes (IgnitePR) see this as heralding the second coming of Email in her post: Is Email really Cool Again? Obvious because of what we do (allow users to share content via email and the web), we read these with some interest. Here are some of my observations, thoughts and predications on the subject of social networking and email:

• The idea isn’t a new one
  A number of companies have tried to use data in your inbox to create a social network. Spoke Software, Visible Path, and Plaxo are some “old names” you probably still recognize. Unfortunately, given their market focus and other factors, none have become a household name or gained any sizeable market share, just something to keep in mind.
• Data is not relationship
  Sure, social relationship “data” could potentially be gleamed by probing your email or even your exchange server. Other than the obvious security concerns, the idea that “he emails me, therefore he is my friend” doesn’t necessarily hold much water. With more and more “social networking” communication being done through the Web (or via other devices such as cellphone), looking only at email doesn’t give you a complete picture. Also, the WSJ article points out that most young people use the MySpace and Facebook inbox more than they use email.

Here is what I believe is more likely to happen:

• Social networks and email become better integrated
  True, social networks already have an inbox, but one can envision better integration between email and social networks. The WSJ article points to some great features Yahoo! is experimenting with such as profile info within your email and a “friend finder” based on email communications.

• Social networks will become email providers
  It isn’t very difficult to turn your social networking inbox into a full-blown email client. Sure you’ll need a couple extra thousand servers to handle a load, but companies like Facebook and MySpace can easily afford it. All they have to do is give users an email address they can use (john@user.myspace.com or sam@facebook.net). Ironically, perhaps email, not social networking, is the feature.

• You wont’ win the social networking war with an email client!
  Its always fun to get excited about second comings but the hype is probably going to die down soon. What do Yahoo!, Google and MSN have in common? Social-networking envy. None of the them have a thriving social network of their own (yet). Sure you can improve your offering by integrated social networking features with your traffic-leading product (email) but its probably not going to win the social networking war.