Why niche networks will flourish and Facebook will flounder
It was just a couple of months ago that I was naively lobbying my friends to join Facebook. I envisioned creating a place where I could find out what everyone -- especially people who were more acquaintances than friends -- was doing, without the burden of keeping in contact with them individually. Joe was going on vacation? I'd know not to be looking for him online. Corye was studying for a law school exam? No sense inviting her over to play cards this weekend. Then came the applications, and then came the pirates. And the vampires. And the causes and the superpokes and the invitations and the ... well, and the noise. I started to wonder whether some of these people actually had jobs, and I started to visit Facebook less and less. I felt a glimmer of hope when Facebook offered what seemed to be the ability to silence some of the noise, but no matter how much I clicked to hide useless News Feed items, they persisted with a vengeance. Then it occurred to me: I'd blithely assumed that everyone would want to use Facebook the same way that I did -- as a source of information. When applications made it a source of entertainment, its value to me as a source of information collapsed. Instead of being the general social networking site that I'd wanted it to be, and that I think it sought to be, it became a niche network for people who like to spend their time with pirates and ninjas and movie quizzes; in the process, it stopped appealing to people like me who had come to it for the information service it provided. It makes sense that this happened: the internet has been groundbreaking in the opportunities it provides for like-minded people to gather and share their common interests. And that's why, when I was asked the other day what I thought about social networks, I said I believed the future is in niche networks that target specific interests, rather than general networks that try to make room for any and all interests. The concept of critical mass dictates that general networks will become specific, sending the dislocated people packing to search for networks that provide what they want. It's why I'm spending more time on LinkedIn; why an avid reader might gravitate toward Shelfari; why a music lover might head over to Last.fm; and why my game-playing, time-killing acquaintances are still pirate-ing and ninja-ing each other over on Facebook. These niche networks will have more value to advertisers than general networks, too, as sites figure out how to leverage data contained in a person's network to target content and advertising. That two people have established a relationship on Last.fm says far more than that two people have established a relationship on Facebook -- membership on Last.fm indicates some degree of passion for music (which can serve as a sort of prequalification), whereas membership on Facebook indicates little more than ownership of a computer. Just as RSS transformed how people interact with information, allowing people to remix and repurpose websites (or avoid them altogether via an RSS feed reader), the next step in the evolution of social networking -- be it OpenSocial or something else -- is going to transform how people interact with their people. It's going to put the focus on the data, not the presentation, and allow users to remix the data and the presentation to suit their needs. The quality and interesting-ness of the data will dictate which sources a user chooses, and the user will be able to trivially tie together as many of the sources as they want. Facebook, Shelfari, Last, LinkedIn, and all the rest will continue to be destinations for the niches they cater to, and the real competition will be in offering the best data. Choosing a one-size-fits-all site -- and naively inviting all of your friends, hoping they come for the same reasons -- will be a thing of the past.
