The Conversation: Next Generation Social Networks

Val Landi's Weblog, November 16, 2006

Ellen Lee, Business Reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article recently that examined the growth and evolution of social networks.

WiredBerries, Realtime Publisher's lifestyle destination and social network for healthy living launched this September, was featured as an example of how next generation social nets will be evolving, reinforcing our fundamental assumption that in the history of media, niche platforms drive out the early-stage general, mass-market platforms.

Here are key excerpts from Lee's article:

Social networking took off in 2002 with Friendster. MySpace, which has since reached critical mass and was acquired by News Corp. last year for $580 million, and Facebook, born out of a Harvard dorm room, followed. And in the past year, the space has turned into a packed, wall-to-wall party: SnowboardGang for snowboarders, Pearl Harbor Stories for survivors and their friends and family, Zebo for people who like to list what they own, even Hamsterster for hamster owners.

Val Landi, co-founder of WiredBerries, a new site for women interested in health, predicts the next step will be networks splintering off by people's interests.

"We're in the first-generation phase of social media," he said. "My sense is you're going to find more niche sites rather than these broad, general, catch-all platforms."

But success depends on whether members feel like their friends and the people they want to meet use the same site. If not, they can move to a new one. When Friendster began experiencing technical problems and enforcing certain rules a few years ago, many members migrated to MySpace. In September, Facebook faced backlash after it introduced features that raised privacy concerns; the company responded and appeared to quell the uproar.

One in four who sign up for Catster, and its companion site Dogster, become long-term members, said founder Ted Rheingold. But fostering an online community is more difficult than many entrepreneurs think, he said. "You can bring a person to a Web site, but you can't make them click" and interact, he said.

MySpace isn't immune, either. In recent months, Stephanie Chow, a 15-year-old junior at Menlo School who used to spend hours on MySpace, has started to cut back.

"It was fun doing it at the beginning," said Chow, who now prefers Facebook over MySpace. "But it started getting time consuming. I was changing my layout instead of doing my homework."

She still maintains her MySpace page because not all her friends use Facebook. But the blinking advertisements on MySpace have become a turnoff, Chow said.

Her complaint is echoed by those who fear that, as large corporations such as News Corp. and Google take over independent sites, they will strip away what made them attractive.

"I just feel like it's becoming another way for companies to advertise their products," Chow said. "I just feel like I'm being used."

Her older sister, Tiffany Chow, a senior at Vassar who interned this summer at San Francisco's Six Apart, which runs the blogging site LiveJournal, also has curbed her use of MySpace and other sites. She has been a member, at one time or another, of MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Vox, LiveJournal, deviantART, Mojizu, XuQa and Friendster. But she has canceled her account on Friendster and XuQa, and doesn't bother much with deviantART, Mojizu or MySpace.

"Weird people started messaging me," Tiffany Chow said about MySpace. The messages came from people she didn't know, asking to be friends and making comments about her looks. "That's when I made a decision. For me the best way to use these social networking engines is to keep track of my friends and people I know."

That's not to say members are abandoning MySpace. On a weekly basis between September and October, comScore Media Metrix, an independent source for tracking Internet traffic, showed its audience going back up.

"MySpace is an integral part of our members' lives," MySpace said in an e-mail response to questions. "There will always be anecdotes of people that love MySpace and people that don't, but we always like to rely on the numbers -- both internal and third party -- to show our continued, extraordinary growth. We are still experiencing enormous expansion domestically and abroad at an average rate of 320,000 worldwide new profiles added daily."

MySpace is also evolving beyond social networking by offering song downloads, movie trailers and television shows such as "Prison Break."

"It's already so big that even if people start abandoning it, it's still attracting new people," said David Card, senior analyst at Jupiter Research.

So where to next? Six Apart is betting that as the MySpace generation grows up, they will want to be more discerning; MySpace profiles are public unless users designate them as private. On Vox, which Six Apart launched last week, users determine what their friends and family see.

"I'm not sure MySpace is going to satisfy the needs of the next wave of your life," said Andrew Anker, executive vice president of Six Apart. "I'm not sure MySpace is the place where you want to post a picture of your kid."

The general expectation is that consumers ultimately will settle down with one or two social networks and that they will become a feature incorporated in more and more sites. YouTube, the popular online video-sharing site, and Flickr, an online photo-sharing site, for instance, include social networking.

"I think it's been both overhyped and underestimated," Dogster's Rheingold said. Although some lofty expectations about how big of a business it could become won't pan out, "in the end it is going to be so much bigger than what people are seeing now."

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