Tag Archive for 'social networking'

Let’s give up pretending that "friends" means friends…

Published by Ben Kepes on June 19, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, Society and Web x.0. 3 Comments

Over on Newsweek there is much concern and hand-wringing over the number of “friends” one can have on social networking sites. The author points out Facebook’s 5000 friend limitation and MySpace’s no-holds barred, bring as many as you like mentality.

They even drag out the obligatory expert, in this case some guy that has written a book (believe it or not) all about social networking. It’s like people are trying to continue this charade that in fact people we friend on social networking sites are actually friends. Newsweek finally comes out saying;

Maybe by now you’re getting the idea that a friend at Facebook or MySpace is not necessarily the same as a real friend, the kind who brings you chicken soup when you’re sick and posts multiple favourable reviews about your book on Amazon

You don’t say!

In this respect the business networks have an easier path than the social networking players, no one thinks for a minute that a contact on LinkedIn is a friend - rather it is a business connection with a specific level of connectedness. On Facebook however their is no distinction between my wife (who is a friend of mine) and the guy who left my suburb back when we were seven years old (he’s a friend as well). Newsweek gets back to hand wringing saying;

But such online linking does have deep social implications, and as one’s friend list grows, so do some problems. People judge each other by whom they list as friends. Inevitably, human noise finds its way into a collection of friends, because people tend to cave in and agree to friendship when asked by someone they barely know, or in some cases don’t know at all. In real life, we are spared the explicitness of a bald request to be a friend, but there’s no such luck online—even ignoring someone’s friend request doesn’t gloss over the fact that you’re rejecting him or her. “It’s socially awkward, and very hard to draw the line,” says Danah Boyd, a researcher at the UC Berkeley School of Information.

I can see it now - we’re going to spawn an entire industry of psychoanalysis based on social networking friend envy - oh please. So in an attempt to minimise the neuroses of an entire generation, I’d like to suggest a new descriptor that once and for all removes any suggestion that these people are friends - lets call them connections and then chose how closely we classify them - friends is just too much of a misnomer.

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Social media on a slide, what’s next?

Published by Ben Kepes on June 15, 2008 in Business, Efficiency, IT, New business, Society and Strategy. 0 Comments

Much has been made of the latest ComScore figures which show a plateau has been reached in the major social media sites. GigaOm gives us the litany of social media sites folding saying that in the U.S. Last week, Revision3 cancelled “SocialBrew”, Monster killed Tickle, CondeNast’s shuttered Flip and Verizon decided to close up its virtually unknown network, which had managed to garner a mere 18,000 members.

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If you accept for a moment that this plateau is in fact a permanent trend, then there are two questions to be asked;

  1. Will the plateau threaten the service itself?
  2. What will be the next hi-growth area for traffic?

Does plateau = death?

Not necessarily - in the physical world there are many examples of business remaining viable with flat levels of revenue growth. But web business tends to be a little different. Social networks tend to monetise via advertising. As we all know web advertising is an emerging market and as yet somewhat unproven. It also feeds off increasing traffic rates. The result of all this is that any site with flattening traffic will generally see a fall in advertising revenue. Given the marginal (at best) financial viability of the social networking players - any fall in revenue can see them into oblivion.

It’s hard to argue therefore that a prolonged flattening of visitor numbers to these services will threaten their very existence.

What’s the next killer app?

Many, more luminary commentators than myself have spent countless hours trying to determine this - I won’t add (much) to the information out there. What I would like to do is have a look at the typical late adopter to social networking. These are (generally) people who check their email and Facebook feed maybe a few times a week. The Internet is a communication channel only - it doesn’t replace their physical world, it’s just another way to do things. They don’t live in their browsers (and don’t wish to) so the likes of micro-blogging services just don’t resonate with them.

To see where the next high growth area is, we need to look at what these late adopters are doing along with email and social media - commerce. The growth of online auctions and the like is an indicator that these users will easily be shifted to increased use of these types of offerings. What they’ll be looking for however is a service that creates the content, the community and the directness of social networking, but blends it with the ability to actually achieve something palpable on the site.

The social media offerings that will continue to prove successful are those that provide an opportunity to create a very specialised, niche forum - they’ll probably be paid networks for two reasons;

  • people are prepared to pay for a highly specialised offering
  • niche offerings have very limited monetisation pathways - pay to use being the easiest

How many of us have heard from these late adopters “but what’s the point of Facebook?”. Look for the openings where “the point” is self-evident - not just to early adopters but also to the mass market.

Summary

So - where are we heading? A number of factors are conspiring here to change things. A plateau in traffic for social media, an economic downturn and a marketplace with ever more increasing requirements in terms of relevancy, efficiency and speed.

Look for exciting new transactional models (horizontal plays) and highly specific and customised offerings (vertical plays) - both though need to provide some real value to users to be viable on an ongoing basis.

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Facebook and first mover advantage…

Published by Ben Kepes on June 13, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, Strategy and Web x.0. 1 Comment

I’ve said before that Facebook has pretty much lost it’s relevance for me. Other than old friends, I’ve moved most of my dialogue onto micro-blogging or other such services. On my infrequent returns to Facebook however I’m seeing an interesting trend. It appears that many of the early adopters to Facebook, those who jumped in a couple of years ago and who are also signed up to other social networking, life-streaming and micro-blogging sites, have pretty much stopped using Facebook on a day to day basis.

The interesting thing however is in the middle to late adopters. The people that read about Facebook in the newspaper, or heard about it on radio talkback. These are the people that, rather than seeing Facebook as the next great experiment, see it as a good way to stay in touch. Let’s face it here, some of the stuff that early adopters jump into is very much a case of building it because we can, not because there is any good reason for it (whatever happened to user-centric design).

So I’m seeing a number of friends of the late adopter variety who have been on Facebook for a few months and who are still using it frequently and connecting with more of their ilk.

And maybe this is where first mover advantage comes in. Now I know their where social networking sites before Facebook but I’d argue that Facebook was the first that had a look, feel and function set that attracted the more conservative user. The previous offerings were a little edgy or focused on the youth market. Facebook brought to market a nice, clean offering but most importantly got first mover advantage.

The fact is there is no compelling reason for the middle to late adopters to go anywhere else now - which at the end of the day is the most important strategy that a web 2.0 company can have, make it sufficiently sticky to discourage users for looking elsewhere.

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