Louie Mantia’s post on social networks gave me something to think about.
Ultimately these networks may grow or expand around their core differentiating strengths to accommodate popular feature requests, perhaps to prevent members from leaving or to encourage spending more time within the network.
At that point, the networks may look similar to each other, serving similar purposes and people would begin to think, “why bother?”
Already we’re seeing that sort of response from Facebook users regarding Google+. Many of those who enable location sharing on Twitter don’t bother checking in to Foursquare. A lot of Indonesians opt for serial tweets instead of blogging. Gowalla fell victim to Foursquare already. Indonesians also eschew sites like eBay in favor of selling things on Facebook or BlackBerry Messenger Groups.
Most people hop on to a social network because their friends (or friend), who happened to be quite persuasive, are there and can’t stop talking about it everywhere (guilty as charged).
Ideally you would have one home on the Internet in which anyone who wishes to know about you can go there and see for themselves all the online activities you’ve done.
These could be your status updates, short thoughts, songs you listened to, movies and TV shows you watched, articles or posts you’ve written, locations you’ve been to, food you’ve eaten, and so on.
Sometimes though, you may not want all of those updates lumped together in one place because you want some sort of privacy. The cynics would say, “then don’t say those things online!”, but some do want to post them on the Internet.
Some people have an inherent narcissistic tendency that they think would need to be satisfied. Whether that translates to sharing particular things publicly, privately to a group of friends, or fully private, just to have a record of their thoughts and activities, that remains the right of the person but I think they should be able to exert some rights into the things they post on the Internet.
I don’t think that there will be that many similarly purposed social networks in the next year or two. However, those who can maintain their core strengths and unique selling points will remain attractive and will have their own members. There are enough people sharing particular traits to find specific features attractive and they will ensure the existence of niche networks.
Smaller networks that serve similar purposes to larger ones may end up being swallowed or shut down, leaving devoted fans upset and move on to the next network. There will always be resistance to using Facebook. Some people may be registered to Facebook but it doesn’t mean they use it.
It’s gonna be a matter of how these networks will be able to keep themselves afloat.
AuliaSays 