I got an email from Furl today. I’d forgotten that I had registered for Furl. I have no idea what my login details (name and password) were. I’d even forgotten that Furl actually existed. Furl just got eaten by Diigo. What the hell is Diigo? I google it and quickly discover that it’s a social bookmarking site – but I’m not going to register. It may be great. Who knows? But life is short.

We are about to witness the culling of social networks. Take a look at this list of lists, none of which are exhaustive. Every species of social networking site I can think of is there, except for RSS reading sites, which I’m not sure qualify as social networks:

• Home Page Sites: Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Bebo, etc. These are sites where you park your identity. I’ve no idea how many of these I’m registered with, but I use only one. Geocities was the early attempt at something like this.
• Business Networks: Linked In, Plaxo, Naymz, Ecademy, Talbiznow, etc. These are sites where you make contact with other business people in some way. I’ve no idea how many of these I’m registered with, but I use only one.
• Messaging Sites: Twitter, Plurk, Pownce, Utterz, CitySpeek, etc. I’ve registered with only 2 of these, and I use only one.
• Content Recommendation And Tagging: Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, Raw Sugar, Simpy, Mister-Wong, etc. I’ve registered with just 2 of these.
• News Tagging: Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, Alltop, etc.
• News Aggregation of Tagged Feeds: TheWEBLIST.net, Addictomatic, etc. I tried these and moved on.
• Video Recommendation: YouTube,  Funny or Die, BuzzFeed and there are probably more. I use only one.
• Community Blog: Metafilter – are there any others? This is possibly a close relative of Twitter.
• Wikis: Wikipedia, Wikileaks, Wikimedia, etc. I use the wikipedia all the time, the others rarely.

The Highlander

In nearly every category there are many competitors. But in most of these categories, it’s a game of Highlander – there can only be one. In some categories, the race is over. It’s hard to see anyone displacing Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Wikipedia. LinkedIn may be immovable too. It isn’t that other sites that do something similar cannot prosper, just as Hulu is prospering because it doesn’t really compete with YouTube. But if you can’t find an adjacent niche you’re dead meat.

Look at it another way. When the PC software market was born there were twenty or more word processors. It was highly competitive. But eventually Microsoft Word got the momentum and the competition fell away.

I’ve been tracking Google for quite a few years, watching its search market share gradually inch upwards. Google has become a habit for millions of people and its market share rises remorselessly without Google needing to do much to drive it upwards. It proceeds almost entirely by momentum.

The same is true of Twitter. It had its “near-death” experience last year with the failure of its initial software architecture and the prominence of the Whale-Fail “out of service” page, but it came through unscathed and is now uncatchable. Even if Twitter turns out to be a fad and its usage falls off significantly, it will still dominate its area.

I can sense a gradual culling of the social network sites as the big fish squeeze out the small ones. It’s happening right now. In recessionary times nobody is going to finance the also-rans of the social networking world.

I can’t even remember what Furl did.