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Mar
2
In my previous post, I looked at how a social network “picks up” an application and “spreads” it to reach the audience that would be interested in using it. And I said that was because social networks make it easy to propagate information, but primarily because people with similar interests have numerous ways of “hooking up” - either via communities or interacting on these in-network applications.
That last point makes social networks a lot of like the communities of old - BBNs, chat rooms, IRC, forums. But since they’re the *new* craze, well, they’ve got to be different somehow. How?
One, profiles. Even as a new member of a group, find out a lot about the people you’re interacting with by looking at their profile pages - where they’re from, who they know, what they do, how they look like, what they like, what they’re up to lately, and a dozen other things. Because of this, interactions on social networks become richer sooner.
Two, you can, with a single profile page, be a member of multiple communities/groups/hangout spots. You don’t have to replicate your profile. With Facebook’s “mini-feed” (a summary of what your friends have been up to recently on FB), you can discover people who share several interests/lifestyle attributes with you. Also, because you *can’t* make different profiles for different communities, you’re the ‘real you’ throughout. Interactions are therefore more genuine, more real, and perhaps more trustworthy.
Three, marketers can build up impressively detailed profiles of users individually (via their communities and behavior), and communities themselves (via profiles of their users in aggregate). That enables far better, more granular targeting of ads than would be possible on forums, benefiting both users and advertisers.
Four, applications! Interactions between members are no longer limited to text-based discussions about action that happens elsewhere. Forum-like conversation and the actual application exist side-by-side.
Five (and this is mostly because of FB), communities are no longer silos but are deeply influenced by (and in turn influence) the rest of the Internet. For instance, the Digg.com application shows your friends your five most recently Dugg stories. Think of the added (and focused) traffic to Facebook from Digg and then from Facebook to Digg.
Social networks need to open their walled gardens to the rest of the Internet, instead of attempting to monetize only interactions within. As we’ve seen above, those very interactions will become richer as data flows into the network from outside (of course, at the cost of profile data flowing outwards in the short term). I think a network’s success will now depend on how much it is willing to open itself up.