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Picture credit: MichaelMarlatt
It will be interesting to see how things pan out, as users reach the point of networking fatigue.
Sooner or later, we will have a way of storing our contact information once and connecting it to our chosen networks. I realise that there are initiatives in this area but they can’t solidify soon enough for me.
Robin Bloor has blogged an interesting analysis: The culling of social networks which reviews the burgeoning plethora of networking options.
Robin Bloor uses the history of the word processor market as an indicator of competitive survival, viz the observation that Microsoft Word gained momentum and achieved dominance.
I recall that WordPerfect was for a (relatively)long time the de facto market leader but I believe that it lost out to Word for one simple reason: integration.
Like many other single-purpose software products of the time,WordPerfect was positioned as the biggest beast in its own chosen jungle and very often assumed that it had absolute control not only of the commercial market but also of the operating environment on the host machine.
This latter point was the key determinant to WordPerfect losing out. Microsoft Word’s position within the Office suite offered corporate IT a great advantage, through integration of suite elements.
This fairly quickly saw the personal productivity stack in the enterprise move away from 1-2-3 + WordPerfect to Office. Game over.
As far as the present day is concerned for social networks, integration and interoperability will again be key for survival. The networks that integrate best will thrive, those that simply want to be The king of their own castle will not.
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Interesting perspective and I agree that fatigue is just around the corner for many.
The key word is value, or perceived value and that is where this cookie will crumble.
In my view the forum was the thing that made the web successful and then usenet dominated it to the point where every mail client accommodated it. It has taken a long time for ecademy, Ning, Linkedin etc to replace it and tell us they have a new product, but the value is no different.
When a group of friends becomes a crowd of friends it diminishes in one are and gains in another. When it becomes just a crowd, it is no longer of value.
When I can rent a mailing list for a few hundred pounds that outdoes a social network, I will go back to day dreaming in my spare time.
Colin, you’re right that the proliferation is a problem, and I restrict myself to two – LinkedIn and occasionally Facebook for exactly this reason. And you’re right that integration will be a major factor in determining which social networking tools survive – but only because integration will become a key differentiator in user adoption – and “Web 2.0″ is essentially about integration.
I think your analogy with Word and WordPerfect is wrong – Wordperfect was slow on the uptake of the windows GUI, and implemented it in a much less user-friendly than MS Word, meaning that during the early adoption of Windows users found it much easier to achieve their desired document formatting in Word rather than WordPerfect or WordStar for Windows. It was this, rather than integration (which in the early releases of MS Office was very weak) that turned the masses away from WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase and the other previously market-leading packages. So it was not the value to corporate IT departments of integration that changed the world, it was the ease of use perceived by end users that made the difference. The corporate IT departments fell in line with the new world later (as they almost always do!).
Cheers, Steve
I agree that interoperability and integration is key bus as important is good a job they do at making these service available through mobile devices. I use my iPhone for most of my social networking these days and some do a really good job whilst the ones that don’t I find I don’t turn to as much.
Integration is an interesting question. I too have a LinkedIn and Facebook profile and most certainly don’t want them integrated. They represent work and play aspects of my life that I would like to keep seperate.
A bit of a plug here I’m afraid but, Karen Lawrence Oqvist in her BCS books ‘Virtual Shadows: Privacy in the Information Society’ also suggests that integrating networks is not always such a great idea. Given that these networks contain highly personal information that we may otherwise want complete control of, integration can lead to an increased risk of privacy breaches and much more effective identity theft.
At the moment there is a great deal of concern over integrating data collected by the government on various databases. Many of these concerns still exist when the data is collected by us and put into various different databases.