Niched Social Networks Will Likely Collapse MySpace and Facebook
July 10, 2007
I woke up this AM and checked my e-mail to find the following from my friend Aaron Gladders of 2paths:
Dude - you got mentioned in gigaom!
Ok, in my world that's pretty cool. A-list bloggers rarely link to Q-list bloggers like myself. And they rarely say something so flattering that you actually blush. In his post on the continued commoditization of social networks, Om wrote:
There have been much smarter people than me who figured this out long before I did. One of them, David RD Gratton recently channeling Thomas Vanderwal, recently wrote Beyond communities of Interest, communities don’t exist.
Ok, his "smarter than me" compliment is over the top and undeserved, but I'm still pretty chuffed that he reads my blog or at least a post here or there.
Now that I know Om is reading my posts - I better milk it for all I can. So I pointed out in the comments to his post what really has got me thinking recently on this subject is Dave Winer's opinion regarding our present social network environment.
"What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself. How exactly it will happen is something the historians can argue about 25 years from now. It hasn't happened yet."
I think the the niching of social networks into highly identifiable communities of interest is what is going to cause the implosion of our present social network landscape. Let me elaborate. You are still reading aren't you?
Communities of interest imply niched social networks
The achilles heel in large generalized social networks are smaller niched social networks that service specific communities of interest. If my dominant interest is music, I am going to want to hang out in a music community. If it is cars, a car community. (Groups are neat, but they are insufficient. I can explain why in another post if anyone cares.)
The niching of social networks into smaller well defined communities of interest is, in my opinion, the reason that Facebook released an 'open' API. With it they aim to bethe social network platform and stave off being nipped at the heels by thousands of little but focused social networks. Although it is uncertain how the API gambit will play out, my feeling is that these apps have proven to be little more than diversion-type widgets and any truly useful social tool may in fact wind up transferring users from Facebook to the niche social network that created the tool. Meta network plays like Ning and People Aggregator will only add to the niching of social networks, should they prove successful. They are not the end game in my opinion and I bet Dave Winer's opinion as well. They are also not guaranteed successes regardless of a $44 million funding by Ning.
We belong to many communities of interest and shift effortlessly amongst them
We belong to many many communities of interest:
Broadly, I follow music and I am interested in hearing new GOOD music. More specifically I am a rabid Pink Floyd fan. (One last tour with Waters and Gilmour for God Sake! PLEASE.)
I am also interested in dog obedience training. More specifically I am interested in Wheaton Terriers.
I am interested in Web and mobile development. More specifically social networking application development.
I will gravitate to these specific social networks. However, in regular life I move seamlessly among these interests and communities. In my Web community, I have people who are interested in discussing dog training or Wheatons in particular. We talk about Web development and we can slip right into talking about dogs in little more than a heart beat. I do not change dress. I do not change my seat. I don't meet them in another office. This reality of human interaction is what needs to be reflected in cyberspace. OpenID, attribution exchange, etc is not a solution to this problem.
Blowing up social networks
Ok so what does this world look like?
I don't know. (Yeah, that's a bit of a let down if you have read this far.)
But...
I think it looks a little like "Technorati" tags, (or at least what I thought they tried to do) and a little like usenet. Don't worry I don't mean it literally will look like usenet. And before anyone jumps on me, I say Technorati tags to distinguish them from how tags are generally used on del.icio.us, flickr, lastfm, etc, which are really used for personal categorization. Ok, the idea is still fuzzy in my head, but I think we will not log on or even need to register (e-mail, user name, password) to "most" communities we belong to in the future. We will identify our interest by simply saying so (tagging), and we will participate. What made Facebook so great? I could tag myself as Queen's University 1989 and presto I found all my classmates. (if we have anything to say to one another is another question) Is Facebook as a centralized service necessary for that functionality?
While I agree with you that
While I agree with you that niched social networked will rise I don't believe they will rise as seperate entities but as groups within large social networks.
The problem with large social networks now is that they don't enable the granularity the people apply to their relationships. Fix this and you've go the advantage of high traffic and activity (the lack of which dooms most niche sites) with the granularity of interest and relationship that makes connection meaningful and rewarding.
The reason that large sites will dominate is that activity needs to procede focused connection - and it must be easily sustained or visit frequency declines to the point that the niche site is rarely worth visiting.
This is exactly why large cities are attractive. By having a broad diversity of people within an area that makes movement between them easy you provide the conditions to keep more small groups alive, while providing opportunities for them to overlap as interests and circumstances require.
Guilty of hyperbole
Hi Peter,
I was wondering if anyone would tee off on my somewhat outrageous statement that FaceBook and MySpace would collapse under the 'weight' of small niched networks. ;)
You make a really good point that large meeting spaces are critical to a vibrant and liquid social scene. The city analogy is, I believe, relevant and you may be on to something there. If we extend that metaphor, is community in the broad social network sense a set place like a city? As there is a present and I'd say distinct culture in FaceBook compared to MySpace or to TagWorld. Are these cultures analogous to city cultures? I know city cultures are hard to define but we probably can agree that New York compared to Louisville compared to Montreal are culturally distinct. Within each of these cities music, art, business scenes/communities exist but all with a flavour of their own.
This appears at first glance to fly in the face of a long held belief of mine that communities are not a URL.