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March 05, 2007
Next for Social Networking
There was a piece by Brad Stone in Friday's NY Times on social networking that caught my attention. The punchline: quite a few players are trying to figure out how to make the most of the (presently hermetically differentiated) social networking services available at more and more sites.
They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.The new social networking players, which include Cisco and a multitude of start-ups like Ning, the latest venture of the Netscape co-creator Marc Andreessen, say that social networks will soon be as ubiquitous as regular Web sites. They are aiming to create tools to let ordinary people, large companies and even presidential candidates create social Web sites tailored for their own customers, friends, fans and employees.
The questions that folks are grappling with are fairly common. Since the mulitudes that head to YouTube have, the article suggests, little in common, what does a "deep" community look like? Smaller for sure. Purposive? Unifed by a common theme (the article suggests common interests such as a fondness for C.S.I. as an example).
A link between this and what we're up to with Prospero is that we imagine that interactive displays would work well in bracketed contexts such as a campus or corporation, a place where membership to a certain extent frames what is expected from other members. Stone's piece suggests a similar inclination among folks exploring with networking:
Several former employees have left Tribe.net to start their own firms offering social network tools. Alexander Mouldovan, who had been a product manager there, started a company called Crowd Factory to design social networks for large companies.
Posted by ckaylor at March 5, 2007 09:27 PM