I’ve seen social networks grow from the zygote stage to the infant stage.
The biggest question I’ve always had with social networks is the “why factor?” As in, why use it?
When Friendster became the first network to really become popular I also took a look at MySpace, which was then owned by a small public company and trading for a fraction of its value today.
Those were the days (2003) when Friendster had all the presidential candidates with their own profiles and pages, and the site was very popular in the media.
At that time I noticed there wasn’t a social network for colleges (this was 2004). Facebook hadn’t got going yet. In those days most college students used Friendster, it was the network du jour. I expected someone to come out with a college-focused network and that eventually happened.
Yet all the early efforts at a social network were really more like “Geocities 2.0,” personal pages that were stagnant with information. Publish and forget. There was little reason to read a friend’s profile over and over.
MySpace has since been acquired and looks to have refocused somewhat on its music and hip roots. If you recall the early MySpace it was all about music, bands, gigs, parties.
Facebook has since opened its doors to allcomers and seen tremendous growth, over 100 million users worldwide.
And I’m now beginning to see signs that some social networks are becoming more than personal vanity pages. You see status updates, link sharing, photo sharing, etc.
In China, tencent’s QQ network is the world’s largest and most vibrant community so far with 355 million active accounts (source: tencent). Web and mobile blend in a continual flow of conversation among users. In many ways it is ahead of Facebook in functionality.
Despite the large user bases the challenge has been for social networks to become revenue generating businesses. At least that’s been the conventional observation.
Advertising so far has been anathema to social networks, similar to a billboard being paraded through your living room while you and a friend talk on the couch. If you look at the ads on Facebook and MySpace they are irrelevant, untargeted and resemble the kind of spam you get in your email box daily.
Which is surprising given that social networks have so much demographic data on each user. Name, age, location, likes/dislikes, etc. are all there on a user profile and in the social network’s database. This is the kind of uber-data that advertiser’s love.
If we step back a minute and look at social networks objectively, to me they’re just the Web, foreshadowing the promise of what the Web is becoming. And it’s bigger than the term “social network.”
I think this is an interim moniker for the connections people are making and that people, including the original Internet surfer Vint Cerf (who was part of the Internet formation in 1969) and Tim Berners-Lee (CERN hyper geek), had in mind in a connected world.
If we fast forward I think we’re on the way to “me networks” where information streams every which way but in a relevant and targeted way — not the random rumblings seen today on social networks.
In the future I think we lose what we call TV networks, radio networks, newspapers, and information from all sources, professional and personal, friends and others, blur into our “me network” where the information is organized and presented based on priority, context, relevance, and value to each of us in real time.
About Steve Harmon: Steve is a veteran of the Web industry as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. His report began in 1994 and is read worldwide by the leaders in tech, finance and media from Microsoft’s Bill Gates to Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, and people all over the US, Europe and Asia. Reach me at steve@steveharmon.com