I’m a big believer in Social Networks. I realize that they’re not perfect – and I admit, I’m no active Myspacer. But I do believe they have a place in our daily lives – and will become as common place as email. That being said, I think we’re going to see an explosion of what I call Micro Social Networks over the next year or so.
Micro networks will mesh together people and affinities in a much more succinct fashion than today’s Social Networks such as Friendster and Myspace. Social Networks 1.0 really start to bring people together in a collaborative fashion based on our social ties – which is how we largely operate in the offline world. They start to begin to model some human behaviors: the need to fit in, the need to be liked and feel important, the natural voyeuristic tendencies and the need to be part of something. I’ve heard recently from a number of people that the year 2007 will be the year of “Social Networking Fatigue“. I think this is partly true. I think at the level of MySpace and others who have attempted to overly commercialize their bases, this is probably a more than accurate assessment of what will start to take place.
What today’s Social Networks tend to misunderstand is that their constituencies are largely exportable. Not fully on a mass scale today, but with time and technology – this will start to happen. When the only compelling factor your offer is purely your address book of friends – as AOL found out – you’re in trouble. What MySpace and others lack are compelling features and value that address specific needs of interests. They’re largely cultural right now – it’s fun, it’s new, and it’s trendy. Everyone’s doing it so I will too.
I think 2 major things have the potential to rock the Social Networking 1.0 world – and start to create the Social Network 2.0 world:
- Federated Identify and Friendships
- Micro niche content
Federated Identity and Friendships
Part of my experience and personal fatigue with these systems is the need to create profiles, invite friends and do the work necessary to create presence in the system. Essentially, Myspace is capitalizing currently on the fact that people have friends connected and that they’ve invested time to build those links. That is also part of the problem. If the only value they create is that they have the connections – they’re not going to have staying power long term. AOL is a perfect study in this. Early on at AOL, as the Internet was in its early days, they offered easy access, high quality content, a point of collaboration and an ability to manage your social network – at least, others that were connected to the proprietary AOL network. They made it really easy to get people on board – I probably still have 10 AOL CDs in my basement – and they provided lots of great content when you arrived. They were the first to really make instant collaboration (via AOL Instant Messenger) across space – popular and easy. However, like a bullet train, as more and more people got on the public Internet – more and more value (from content to services to connections) was created – and AOL quickly lost its way. In an effort to protect their user base, instead of embracing the free and open Internet and the leverage they had with their user base, they instead tried to monopolize and hold hostage the very users who gave them the power. I personally spent many many hours trying to deactivate my AOL account at one point many years ago. I have so many friends that have had similar problems — they capitalized on the fact that they had the users, and the recurring revenue — and they really flubbed the chance to continue to create value and turn that into a Google-size business. Among a lot of other things they did wrong that I don’t have time to even mention, they failed. What I think AOL believed was that their user base, and their address books and email addresses, were non-exportable. They couldn’t be changed, moved or relocated. Until recently, the phone companies has a similar stance before Local Number Portability. They thought that the best offense was told “hold a gun to the head of the customer” – which never works. Eventually, people will leave and they will never forget.
Federated Identity is not a new concept. It is also not a practical solution today – at least not yet. I think this is partly because of the complexity of trying to create global standards such as the Liberty Alliance or worse, Microsoft’s Passport efforts. And this is precisely the opportunity that I think exists in this space. OpenID is a very interesting effort and something that I think could have a huge impact on Federated Identities. Federated Identity and Relationship should be lightweight, yet secure, distributed and decentralized. They should not suffer from ten-year standards efforts of complicated specifications – although they should be well specified and implemented. And, hopefully, they will start to address our relationships as well. Yet, there is a more qualified person I’d like to hear from blog about this topic more specifically. We we need the analogous to blogging for federated identity. Something, simple, easy and technological doable by everyone instantly.
Micro niche content
Myspace and Friendster are largely horizontal platforms that service everyone – and no one – altogether. I think what we are starting to see are vertical, niche specific networks that cater to smaller communities and have much more productive, effective and long-lasting bases. They also tie smaller cross-sections together on stronger bonds of affinity. My wife is very, very involved in a private professional photography community – and it’s not free, although available on the open Internet for a fee. It’s very active and very exclusive (not only do you have to pay, you have to be invited and you have to prove your skills to have the chance to give them money). She spends most of her online life in this community. But it’s not a traditional social network in today’s definition – you wouldn’t know about it if you were a Myspacer. And, from what I see, they are just fine with it being that way.
Flickr, while it is not a social network in a traditional sense, is just exactly that. Flickr groups, especially very niche specific groups, are very active and influential. People with similar interests in photography are meeting through Flickr and forming photography communities around interests – and they share something often lost on Myspace: common interests and valuable content.
What stands out with these two simple examples are that they put more emphasis and value on their content – and the members follow. They create value – of which a big portion of the value is the network of people itself – in ways that are sustainable and defendable. They service most, if not all, of the human social and behavioral needs we have – but in a way that serves us better. They’re not going to rival Myspace in their size, but their quality will always outweigh their quantity. And, while those users can easily use other micro networks, they have less to worry about a wholesale exodus when the next new trend comes along.
While I don’t think Myspace is going away and most likely will still tend to trend upwards, I do think you will see new types of Micro Social Networks that will start to take a more prominent role in our lives – even if they’re not called “Social Networks”.
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