Are Social Networks Fads?
Friday, 12 October 2007
Posted by austin in: Technology, comments closed
Steve Ballmer warns that social networking may be a fad. Eric Schmidt, on the other hand, looks at it from a page view perspective. Both are wrong about the details. Facebook and MySpace and the like will continue to be important destinations, much like Google, Yahoo, Netscape, and even the MSN homepage have been destinations. They provide value to people.
What’s a fad, though, is how these networks work. I think that the people who are dealing with “open” social networking have the right approach. Facebook will have to adapt to input from outside (opening up the inputs), as it recently did with allowing applications the ability to set a user’s status, as with Twitter. Facebook has already said that it’s going to open certain things to the outside on an opt-in basis; if it can nail the user interface (and that’s a big if, given how many people stick with the standard privacy settings), then we’ll have an even bigger when as the network effect not only deals with people, but with sites.
Social networks as networks are fads; the value they provide, though, is real. The challenges that remain are better classification of friends and a reduction in the amount of effort it takes to allow users to segregate information between groups of friends. That last is important. I’m on Facebook. If I were looking for a new job (I’m not), I might talk about it on Facebook. There’s a problem, though: my boss and some of my coworkers are on Facebook and are friends with me. The moment I started talking about it publicly, they’d know something was up and it might make for bad relations at work (at a minimum).
Now, I’m pretty open, but if I wanted to do something like that, I would want an easy way of drawing a circle around them and saying: they can’t see these updates.
Before it’s too late.
