From Critical mass and social network fatigue:

“One of these days,” Ben said in, I think, 1991, “everyone’s going to look up from their little islands of LAN email and see this giant mothership hovering overhead called the Internet.”

Increasingly I’ve begun to feel the same way about the various social networks. How many networks can one person join? How many different identities can one person sanely manage? How many different tagging or photo-uploading or friending protocols can one person deal with?

A social network is analogous to the Real Internet(tm) in that is an application platform. Early social networking applications, though, where just basically technology demonstrations. For social networks to really become successful, though, they have to have a purpose.

LinkedIn in it’s first iteration didn’t really do much beyond “Hey! We’re a social network!”. They’re starting to develop applications for their platform now, though, like job postings, and this ‘Answers’ app.

Just like people don’t buy the internet (they buy the content and the applications), Social Networking shouldn’t be the primary feature of the application. People will buy link sharing, music recommendations, job postings, etc.

The internet is a proven networking platform (duh), but to become a practical ’social networking’ platform, it needs to add more ’social’. We need things like a common identity platform (like OpenID), and some nice standards (like microformats) to let all our networked nodes interact with each other. The internet could do everything LinkedIn does, it just needs the standards and the effort.

February 7th, 2007 by Jeremy Sisson | Trackback