Social Networks are dead, long live social networking
Here’s a point of view to which I can subscribe, but for which I cannot take credit. Social networks will die. This was one of the assertions put to me by Sam Sethi of Blognation last week over a coffee. But how will they die, you ask? Let me elaborate.
Social networking is as old as time, ever since our primitive ancestors formed the first social circles we’ve been social networking. In fact the term wasn’t coined until 1954, but we’d been at it for thousands of years by then.
Social Networking Services (SNS) are characterized by the well-known sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Bebo, etc, etc (wikipedia’s growing list is here), and so far most of us, if we have wanted to develop our own computer-based social networks, have had no choice but to use one or more of these. But here is the rub, which one do you choose, most likely you’ll need to be in several because your friends are all on different ones. Personally I use Facebook and LinkedIn, the others I’ve just played with and its really just FB and LI that keep my attention and keep me investing time in updating my stuff. OK, so I also use Blogger, and that as a social media platform you might also say that blogger has some SN elements (but its not a SNS). Anyway I digress, back to the original point, why will these services die.
Well, lets look at what they do for us shall we. My SNS generally allows me to:
- create a network, or several distinct networks, of friends (the definition of ‘friends’ in today’s online social world tends to be wider than our parents may have employed)
- exchange messages and updates with those friends of groups of friends
- share content (photos, videos, music, stories, etc) with them
- get recommendations to and discover places, content and services that may interest me
- be entertained and engage in conversation, discussion, games, debate, abuse - yes even a little mutual abuse and poking is fun
- develop my personal and professional reputation
- find new potential employments
- get connected with new friends, who are friends of friends
- maintain contact with more distant friends despite separation of distance of time
- …
Now, consider if there is another way to do these things. Well, most of the information that I have to re-enter into my chosen SNS already exists in applications on my desktop, think about your email client (PIM) or your IM/VoIP client. Perhaps the only reason that SNS exist as separate services is that your existing tools have been slow to offer these features.
What will happen is that there will be a convergence of communications tools and SNS. Either we’ll all give up standalone email and IM/VoIP and do it all through SNS, which would mean that SNS need to adopt a set of open standards to allow messaging and exchange of data between them (perhaps OpenID and OpenSocial are a start). Or we’ll start to leave behind silo SNS as the social tools start to appear in our PIMs and IMs.
Of course you also have to consider that more and more of us are mobile these days, and the number is growing. I don’t really want to have to log in to a special website (especially multiple of them) to catch up with my friends, use a separate calendar for my meetings, use a separate email client for my email, and a separate IM client for my IM. I want it all to be right there on my Treo (or whatever mobile device you use). So far My Treo does all my appointments, all my email, and IM is just about doable. But it also already has all my contacts in, most of them already organized by category (or as a SNS may call them ‘networks’). So, how about a mobile app, with a PC/MAC based partner that gives me a larger UI (and replicates all my data) when I am sitting down.
Now there is of course the alternate view, that my local apps will disappear and all this will migrate online. You know what? I actually don’t care which way it goes, and it almost doesn’t matter, what’s important is that we will see a convergence and we’ll tend to come down on one side or the other, but the notion of a SNS as distinct from other services will start to die - it will all just be about the natural way I communicate and organize myself with my friends.