I’ve posted numerous times about niche or vertical social networks, and how I think that Myspace and Facebook will lose traffic to them over time.
The WSJ has a story today talking about a slowdown in traffic for these two combined with anecdotal stories of problems and negative experiences. Essentially those problems boil down to it being too popular, too much spam, too much advertising, and “creepy experiences”.
Beyond these, I think that these sites still lack some utility for a large percentage of the population. As a married guy approaching 30, the only real use I have for Myspace is really to maybe find some old friends and send messages there instead of email. However, this doesn’t mean I’m a boring guy without any interests, it’s just that Myspace is so vast and large that really finding and interacting with my core interests while I’m in the mood to do so doesn’t happen.
Instead, I still find myself visiting community and content sites that are specifically focused to my interests. Most of these sites still operate in the older web model of content and comments or content and forums, but I’m already starting to see the shift towards making these sites into niche social networks.
Is it a pain to participate in numerous social networks instead of one or two big ones? Not really, think of all the various accounts we already all have at numerous sites. So instead of idling around Myspace, I can participate in a basketball social network, wakeboarding social network, or whatever else my interest at the moment may be. This is far more compelling to me, and I think we’ll see a shift towards people fragmenting their networks in this way. There’s a reason these niche sites exist in the first place, and it’s because an all-encompassing website can’t service every content area. The same holds true for social networking, Myspace can’t be all things for all people.
If I’m right this doesn’t mean Myspace and Facebook will die, far from it. I think we’ll just see their growth and influence slow and perhaps decline into a phase of maturity.
Some people view social networks as Forum 2.0. Forums are great for being affinity-based – connecting people from around the world around a similar interest. Given this community, is there room for social networks built from the ground up? Seems like existing forum software can easily incorporate some light social networking features (some already are as you pointed out).
I think vertical and niched social networking will have to address community dynamics that aren’t met or addressable by forums. Face-to-face interaction is key imho. A real-life network that gets represented online.
This is a very different dynamic from a social network of say wakeboarders or cigar afficienados – both of which existing forum software with some light social networking features is more than sufficient to meet the affinity-based discussion.
While I would love to discuss wakeboarding with my fellow wakeboarding enthusiasts, I don’t really need to network with people I’ve never met in real life (and never will). I think a social network woefully misses the point if it tries to create a community around an interest and not a network.
Hi Joe,
Great comment, and I like your point about the social network really being about your network instead of people who share interests. That is one point I missed a little bit, however most serious forum users start to really get to know and feel connected to other forum posters in a way that they’d list them as a friend in the normal social networking sense.
Perhaps that’s the way it will shake out, Myspace and Facebook remain your personal network, while “interest networks” can form as well.
Thanks Pat. I just can’t imagine a “social network” for wakeboarders popping up and replacing wakeboarderforums.com (or whatever the popular forum for this interest is).
Some believe forums will be obsolete thanks to social networks. Forums aren’t going away anytime soon. I think they’ll just evolve to get a little more social (very easy to do). Social networks will carve a new niche for communities that are actually networks of people. Launching a social network from the gound up to compete with existing interest-based forums is an exercise in futility imho.