The Culling of Social Networks
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.
Yes definitely agree on this. Said only last night, at a talk on future of technology, when discussing social computing that we will see a shake-out & consolidation of social network & other social computing sites – especially now with the impetus of #GFC. And any site that makes you go meh when they remind you of their existence clearly deserves to go
interesting analysis, thanks.
One thing that occurred to me was your reference to the word processor market as an indicator of competitive survival, viz the observation that Microsoft Word gained momentum and achieved dominance.
WordPerfect was for a (relatively)long time the de facto market leader but I believe that it lost out to Word for one simple reason: integration.
Like many other single-purpose software products of the time,WordPerfect was positioned as the biggest beast in its own chosen jungle and very often assumed that it had absolute control not only of the commercial market but also of the operating environment on the host machine. This latter point was the key determinant to WordPerfect losing out.
Microsoft Word’s position within the Office suite offered corporate IT a great advantage, through integration of suite elements.
This fairly quickly saw the personal productivity stack in the enterprise move away from 1-2-3 + WordPerfect to Office. Game over.
As far as the present day is concerned for social networks, integration and interoperability will again be key for survival.
Likewise, sooner or later, we will have a way of storing our contact information once and connecting it to our chosen networks. I realise that there are initiatives in this area but they can’t solidify soon enough for me.
I agree with you about integration being the key, which begs quite a few questions. As regards WordPerfect, I remember the point when I abandoned using it was when Windows 3.0 arrived. Wordperfect’s Windows version was far too slow and Word was Windows ready. Microsoft had planned it that way, of course. I also remember that Wordperfect had a really good file management capability that Word never ever provided. C’est la vie.