Webware 100: Too many social networks, the sequel
Right before we closed the nominations for last year's Webware 100 awards, I wrote a post about there being too many social networks in the running. Apparently, all you genius Web 2.0 entrepreneurs skipped school that day, because for the 2008 Webware 100, we have, again, way too many social networks competing.
Of the nearly 5,000 distinct Webware 100 nominations we have, more than 1,000 are in the social network category. A few are social network subapplications that run on the Facebook platform, but really, too many are just little teeny social networks.
Now, It's cool if you want to run a network for cartoon watchers (Nicktropolis) or for collectors (iTaggit), or sports clubs (SportaVista). But I question the need for clubs such as these to set up their own network when there's a good general-purpose social network platform like Ning around to do the heavy lifting.
Social network sites, as a group, may also be in business trouble. While users turn a lot of pages on social sites, general advertising programs are apparently not delivering the goods.
Not to say that there's no room for innovation and growth in this space. As I wrote from Demo 2008, while I think it's a bit daft to launch yet another new network now, there's room for a new kind of social network: The implicit network--one that connects you without requiring you to recruit your friends yet again.
Further reading on social networks: The Social, CNET News.com's Caroline McCarthy's blog; and Mashable, a superblog devoted to the topic.
Webware 100 voting starts on February 25.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
I can sympathize with your exhaustion with sorting through so many sites but I whole heartedly disagree that passion-centric community sites that have goals of growing a real site and business out of it should use a general purpose service.
A passion-centric online community can only differentiate itself by reflecting their users passion as much as possible. Using Ning or someone else allows for decent customization, but very little differentiation in the end. It allows for a quick path to revenue, but less options for high-end revenue. Would sneakerplay.com or mychurch.org be as good if they were on a general platform? Would flixster.com or streetfire.net have gotten funding if they were on a 3rd party platform? I know neither would have worked for dogster and catster. Worse if you build on a general platform you are bound to their platform. You can't simply add a killer feature your community is begging for as you are locked into the limitations of their current offering. You can't create a Facebook or OpenSocial App that shares a common backend because you don't have external access to your data. And if your community takes off you can't move it to your own platform because all your users info is locked to the platform. The general services do not offer export features to migrate their entire profile, diary entries, videos, etc. Everything would have to moved by the user one by one to the new service.
I do agree there may be more communities than the net can support, especially if they intend to grow and be a break even business. Ad networks will almost never cover your costs unless you are serving millions of pages a day, and direct sales is expensive and displeasing to most web developers. But many more of them than anyone expects can be successful so they all should go for it if it's what they truly think they could really go big. If they start on a general platform they are almost guaranteeing they'll never be as big as they could be.
Also regarding implicit network isn't that what the Google Social Graph API will be offering to every service? There are also many other start-ups hoping to be this middleware service. I think in a year every web community will be able to deploy this functionality ... unless of course your profile usernames map to people's dogs and cats and not their profile creators ;> We'll have to work on an extension to the FOAF and SocialGraph to include pets ;>
Another way we're going to see networks integrated will be via developers linking networks through the back door, as it were. For example, if iLike has a music preference widget for both Facebook and MySpace, then it could link all its users together through the widget. See http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9866036-2.html
http://bizcast.typepad.com/clients/2007/08/social-networks.html
kablolu net
- by googlefrog September 21, 2008 6:06 PM PDT
- <dd id="body_746489">like every great idea on the web, in few days (my space, online games ,etc..) many imitators will appear...that the way is goes, social networks also... <a href="http://www.twizl.com/" target="_blank">Free Games</a></dd>
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