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The near future of social-networks

MySpace and Facebook are generally considered to be the 800-pound gorillas in the social-networking field and there are social networks springing up like wildfires all over the place.

There’s Virb and Pownce and LinkedIn and Orkut and dozens or maybe hundreds of other smaller sites.

In addition, there are plenty of other sites that have some other specific focus, but also provide the ability to add “friends”, such as Flickr and Digg and others.

It is neat to be able to see what is going on in friends’ lives and to plan parties and easily communicate. Facebook for instance has allowed me to build up and continue relationships with people that I otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance to see for months or years. So from that a mere social standpoint, this is great.

But thats just the tip of the iceberg.

MySpace supposedly has more users than any other network. Between the horrible design, terrible profiles covered with glitter and horrible animation and other junk, the lousy stability of the site, and the prevalence of spammers, using MySpace just feels crappy. The culture of MySpace feels a lot like a race to add friends than a genuine useful tool to communicate and build relationships. MySpace can’t even add features without them feeling like half-assed ripoffs of other sites.

But it will likely survive in spite of all this just by virtue of the fact that there’s so much money behind this and there’s so many users in place already. Oh well. Ladies and Gentleman, these types of graphics will unfortunately still exist many years from now.

Facebook’s recently launched application development platform allows developers to create almost any type of social application to emerge. Facebook can now compete with almost any type of website, at least on a basic level.

With the Photos app, Facebook knocks the utility of sites like Webshots in most circumstances. Why set up a Webshots account if you can just share your photos with your friends with great privacy settings?

With the Notes app, using a site like Xanga or setting up a blog becomes less important to most people. Why go to the trouble of doing that if most of your friends are already going to be on Facebook?

A specialized web-application will always provide more individual value and be better designed. Things like Flickr will always attract an audience due to the specialized interface, but the sheer benefits that Facebook provides can knock out hundreds of potential sites. Believe me, I know.

Before the Facebook application platform was announced, I was kicking around a few ideas I had to create my own social network based around a certain concept. Facebook apps like The Honesty Box and the Compare People one and hundreds of others pretty much ground the value of these ideas into dust, but I do have a few more ideas regarding upcoming projects. The key is to focus on creating personal value for people. That way, even if you have few users, there’s still a reason for them to use it as often as Billy King signs a scrub to an eight-year deal.

But the real future of this is in commerce. Facebook is compiling a massive database of consumer information among the coveted young-adult segment of the population. Having access to all of this information is an advertiser’s dream. Facebook and other social networks could conceivably chart all of this and sell it to the highest bidder.

But there’s even more than that. Through its Networks feature that divides users into geographical regions, they have the ability to directly target local users with products that appeal to the region. They can cooperate with local businesses and figure out ways to market their products directly to the people that use them

CNN had a great interview with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, that detailed a few of the possibilities.

The possibility for commerce is pretty endless with Facebook.

There’s been some buzz lately about the idea of social stratification between MySpace and Facebook users.

I’m unfamiliar with any study that proves that clearly illustrates what Facebook & MySpace socioeconomic disparity exists, if any, so I don’t know how to prove whether or not this is the case. But just based on reputation, this is sort of the stereotype of the typical MySpace user.

I do believe there will be some social divide online, but not really in terms of economics, but in terms of identity. More below.

Social networks in and of themselves provide zero personal value without a mass of other users. Just like the Microsoft Zune’s sharing feature is worthless without a fellow Zune owner nearby, any current and future social-networks that are started face an enormous nut to crack that other sites don’t face.

You can start up a blog and provide value for your initial few dozen readers and thats fine. If you provide great content, there’s personal value for them and despite the limited number of readers they will come back.

You can provide a cool web application thats limited to several dozen users initially, say an application that helps users track their stock information. And so long as there’s some personal value there, there’s nothing preventing somebody from using your site and being satisfied despite the fact that his friends don’t use that application.

But if you’re trying to start a social network from scratch, unless you provide some value, there’s no reason for a user to stick around and convince his friends to join.

Dedicated web applications are what can compete with Facebook’s huge amount of value that their incredibly large network provides. Simple communication and very simple apps like to-do lists would be possible to create within the Facebook environment, but it would be difficult to implement anything that really hits the sweet-spot of complexity. Companies like 37 Signals with things like Highrise and other simple Apps for business and personal use seem to be able to do better by creating simple web-apps with great interfaces that work together seamlessly.

And niche social networks based on some common hobby will probably flourish. Something built around a message board or hobbyist community can work. Anybody trying to launch some social-network without a singular focus or providing personal value will face massive difficulties achieving any type of critical-mass necessary to be the type of behemoth that Facebook is about to become in the near future.

Many active internet users belong to dozens of websites. Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Reddit, etc. It is a pain to try and remember usernames and passwords from dozens of sites. Mac OS X features like Keychain simplify this as much as possible, but it can still be a hassle to deal with all of this.

There seems to be a bit of a movement around Open ID, though there also seems to be some security criticism of the concept. The market will eventually decide if this works or not, but identification and preventing fraud is really important because screwing up in this area can ruin lives.

An extension of the above topic is the importance of public reputation and trust online(PDF).

One of eBay’s key features is the reputation system it has developed in order to minimize risk for users. Based on the reputation they have, the easier it is to get somebody to part with their money. Many other websites have features like karma or a points system or whatever, but there’s nothing out there that spans the entire internet.

Based on the increasing importance of internet commerce and communication in peoples’ lives, it will be interesting to see if Facebook or somebody else figures out how to get some type of internet trust system created.

One interesting experiment that Information Architects Japan did when they designed Das Magazin was they made sure that people had to write under their real name to avoid trolling which increases the quality of discourse.

There’s clearly a time and a place for trolling, but there is also a time for serious discussion, so I think voluntary self-identification is a great idea for many types of sites.

And I think this plays into the idea of social stratification presented above. But I think the real social divide will not be based on wealth, but on anonymity. People who choose not to provide their real identity will be second-class citizens online someday.

Through Facebook’s Wall and things like event notifications and also through things like Twitter, you now have a generation of people that communicate very openly with regards to casual conversation.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the 20-somethings of today are the business leaders of tomorrow. How much business will be performed publicly?

As always, I think the real innovation in this area will emerge among smaller companies that having nothing to hide. Indeed, they might try and perform more and more communication in public through things like Twitter in order to increase the amount of buzz they get. Some companies like Apple take the opposite approach, and both have their merits.

Graphic designers and programmers and math nerds and information designers and others have come up with so many amazing ways to visualize complex relationships between massive amounts of data.

With so many social networking users having hundreds of friends based on dozens of different criteria (similar schools, lovers, similar hobbies, etc) on multiple sites spread across the internet, there’s an amazing opportunity here for individual sites or some type of mashup to innovate in how this mass of data is displayed.

Facebook has a great and clean design, and for everyday use it is fine. But it is possible to create fantastic graphic visualizations of your interrelationships between friends.

Just as a simple example of what is possible, I came across this fascinating email relationship tracking system by Christopher Baker a while back. Notice how the different shades of color represent the strength of the relationship and how you can see what the strongest node of the network is at a glance.

Facebook does have some similar apps, but they’re just scratching the surface of what is possible.

Just a few years is an eternity in the technology industry. Many of these ideas could be so far out of whack that I’ll look back at this and laugh. Facebook is the most useful social-network out there due to the combination of tens of millions of users, the application development platform, and its great design. Facebook will be bigger than Google in a few years if they continue to play things right. MySpace will continue to have an audience, just don’t expect me to use it.

Or who knows maybe this is the future of Facebook.

There’s one social network that hasn’t gotten enough worldwide love yet. Can you guess which one it is and why it is going to be successful? I purposefully didn’t mention it in this article.

Posted on August 17th, 2007 by Chris Papadopoulos.

Comments

1. brooke @ Dec 18

   i like the emo guy and the flashing heart