Today almost a third of the most popular sites on the web are, in fact, dedicated social networking hubs. Although there is great potential for success, entry in this overly saturated market can now be extremely tough.
These past few years witnessed a real surge of social networking websites, starting all the way back in 2003-2005 with the likes of MySpace and Facebook. Following their success and traffic booms - with MySpace receiving more page views than Google at one time according to Alexa - countless similar services were launched with various degrees of success. Today almost a third of the most popular sites on the web are, in fact, dedicated social networking hubs. Although there is great potential for success, entry in this overly saturated market can now be extremely tough.
Apart from the multitude of choices, as a regular user I am faced with another major dilemma - keeping it all together. Let's say I have an account on Facebook where I make small chat with friends, I am using LinkedIn to manage my professional contacts, keeping a photo collection on Flickr, I am also uploading the occasional video on YouTube, blogging on WordPress, and posting updates on Twitter. That would seem like a fairly common scenario these days. Add in to the mix a Hi5 or MySpace account for friends that aren't on Facebook, maybe a couple of other more focused networks and one or two forums, and my online identity is now spread out on about ten different platforms. Talk about a handful! Updating and keeping in touch with everybody just started to look like a whole lot of work. I am not even talking about the dozens of comments and discussions I carry on over on other blogs and sites. Those are a part of my online identity as well.
Now imagine this: what if there would be a way to keep track of it all? Steps are already being taken in this direction but they are still baby steps. We have Microformats, OpenID, we can integrate our Twitter and Flickr account feeds in our blogs, but that's about as far as it goes right now.
The tools are already available. Older browser versions are no longer keeping the developers shackled. Years of preaching the power of web standards and semantic coding helped us get to the point where it's just a matter of somebody putting it all together and making all those separated accounts and bits of information scattered around on dozens of sites play nice with each other. That would be the real Web3.0 revolution.
On a slightly different level, there has already been a precedent, and a successful one if I might add: Mint. This web application communicates with all your online financial institutions to help you manage all of your assets in one place. In essence, it is the same concept just applied to a different environment. You still don't get all the tools that are available within the different online accounts but you do get a great general overview of your finances as a whole.
It could be the same for the rest of your online activities. Just imagine setting up yourname.com as a place that completely represents your online persona, automatically following your activity across the web and presenting the content you choose to who you want - blog posts, photos, videos, twitters, updates, comments, and so on.
Integrate all that with a more desktop-like approach for creating new content and you've just simplified the whole social networking experience by a huge degree. Making it easier also means you're encouraging users to actually create meaningful content. In term, better content and faster interaction equals success. Some of the most successful new comers have partially followed this recipe: Twitter, with its focus on speedy interaction, and targeted social networks (Ning comes to mind) that encourage the creation of better content.
In the end it's all about the swiftness of interaction and the rewards it provides, usually through content, and that's one of the most important rules of usability. We already came a long way in that department but, as the market reaches its saturation point, new approaches must emerge.
Oct29 08Dor Dansays:
You’re absolutely right. Nowadays , Social networks are more than just popular and trendy, and are evolving into something that might turn to be part of Web 3.0.
I strongly believe that the future of social networks will be some kind of online ID, something that represents yourself, your job, your life, and almost everything. I myself started to join this whole social network circle and it’s certainly very fun and quite useful.
Nice post.
Nov06 08Seansays:
i was thinking this exact thing the other day, how i could keep track of everything i have across the net.
i stumbled across netvibes which allows you to create a “private” section were you can show emails from hotmail, gmail, pop3 accounts aswell as google analytics, RSS feeds from sites and loads more, but you can also create a public page which can show various social networking apps, like facebook, flickr and so on. its still limited somewhat as you update anything on the various sites like facebook your still required to go to the actual site and login but its getting there!
and by the way, im in no way associated with netvibes so its not a shameless plug :P