Social Networks Growing Up
You know an idea is successful when large corporations get into the mix. Also, spin-offs of a great idea also tell me when the idea has arrived. In this case, we have social networks.
A history lesson is seeing Facebook geared toward educational communities, Friendster for dating (sort of), and MySpace to fill in the holes and allow companies to cover as individuals. LinkedIn has been highly successful because of their niche in professional development.
Welcome Disney to the mix. Xtreme Digital is geared toward pre-teens, pushing Disney content to those of interest. It’s early to tell if this will be a successful portal for Disney, or more importantly for the kids.
From Australia, FatSecret has been launched to help those trying to lose weight. It includes communities by diet or region, polling information, and friend networks.
Are these going the way of portals from 5-6 years ago? Not in my opinion. The failure of portals in their height of popularity was the need to be the next Yahoo. The difference for Disney and FatSecret is their focus. Disney, although overly commercial, stays in their sweet spot. FatSecret isn’t for everyone. One of Facebook’s failures, to me, is when they opened up the community to everyone. Although the number of users have grown immensely, I think they’ve lost a little of the close niche that they used to enjoy. Now, the only difference between Facebook and MySpace are policies and an innocent beginning.
Social networks are dependent on social policies. My personal friend network is by commonalities. I have friends who love hockey, I have friends in higher education, and I have friends that are technologically gifted. When they intersect, that is wonderful, but I would never mix groups.
Social networking is here to stay because of one word…focus. Find your communications vehicles that intersect with interests and you can use social networks to your advantage.
