Multiplicity, Niches & De Facto Social Networks

social network multiplicity, niches, and de facto networks

The horror Terry Semel must have felt when his bid for Facebook was rejected… His company’s “me too” social network Yahoo! 360 never became popular and then he couldn’t even buy his way into the hottest web trend. The internet titan failed on both attempts because of too little technology, too little sociology, and absolutely no phenomenology.

Yahoo!’s new product, Mash, will try to learn from past mistakes. With an avid user base for its email, instant messaging, and integrated1 acquisitions, Yahoo! couldn’t possibly fail again… right?

Social networks are launching everywhere. Whispers about Google joining in are growing louder. Four types of communities are forming:

  1. Social for Social Sake Communities: communities built around nothing more than the desire to be social online (like MySpace, Facebook, and lots of other forgettable sites)
  2. Niche Interest Communities: communities built around a central interest (like music, photography, physical fitness, etc.)
  3. Application Communities: online applications with a social element (like del.icio.us, digg, YouTube, etc.)
  4. De Facto Communities: “communities” built by websites with large user bases that don’t particularly care about being social in regard to the reason they use a site

Competing in the social for social sake market is challenging, as users don’t want to maintain duplicated lists of friends. A caveat may be for social sites that specialize in an online persona, like LinkedIn for professional networking and Second Life for alternative reality2. Niche interests and application communities are potentially endless and have the advertising advantage of a targeted audience.

Yahoo! and Google want to be a popular social for social sake networks, but they won’t motivate their users to connect with each other just by adding a friend list feature. So the obvious question is: How will Yahoo! or Google innovate to become a social network destination?

1 Horrendously, awkwardly “integrated”. A single sign-on they have, but true integration they do not.
2 i.e. people who don’t live real lives.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 5:00 and is tagged .

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