DISQUS

The Equity Kicker: The Economist misses the point on social networks - they are platforms not comms tools

  • Rebecca Caroe · 1 year ago
    Nic
    I think you have a valid point here. When I read the Economist article I was also thinking hard about what they hadn't quite got right.

    Your views on niche socnets is interesting - I'm pursuing a slightly different vision that possibly has the same outcome as a niche, VRM.

    Within a VRM "Mine!" [the place where my data and resources reside] I can determine who or what programme is allowed in and which parts they can access and so it will enable the niche grouping to co-exist with a wider group with each accessing only the material pertinent to their raison d'etre.

    Rebecca Caroe
  • Craig Dwyer · 1 year ago
    I agree Nick, and I think its going to be very interesting when the data portability aspects come to play. What happens when the friction is removed from the social graph and it becomes easy to migrate it to wherever you want to socially interact.

    As you point out, the differentiation is building core interest applications (niche) on top of the platform, which in turn allows you to get the community engaged with real value added functions.
  • paulsweeney · 1 year ago
    Gee, I was hoping to get to leave your site today, but just had to comment. I agree with everything you've said here. Here is one more example that hit me this morning: on twitter, people are saying things like "sitting down at Cafe Crust to have delicious Free Trade Coffee". Its like a "personal beacon". The concept behind beacon was fine (IMHO), it was the implementation that screwed the pooch. Commenting and recommendations are incredibly powerful, but so are commentaries about actual consumption.
  • alan p · 1 year ago
    Nic, I thought the Economist piece was pretty much right, but longer term - in the interim I think there will be a number of twists and turns, and a "Mall" phase may well be one of them.

    Big Picture analogy to me though is that Facebook et al = AOL, CompServe etc - closed worlds. The Open "Social Internet" is not quite all there yet, but you can see the components slipping into place - Open ID, Data Portability, Blogs, UM, maybe VRM etc etc. I'm still waiting for Marc Andreessen II to build the Social Mosaic and Sir Tim II to institute the GGG.
  • Scott Rafer · 1 year ago
    Sorry Nick, I think that the phase of walled-garden social nets is all about communication and that monetization will suffer. There are certainly exceptions like WAYN, but that's communications about a valuable, transaction-heavy topic, rather than non-communications centric. By the time social apps are heavily into valuable areas, the walled gardens will have fallen, and we'll be back in a distributed world.
  • nic · 1 year ago
    Thanks for the comment Scott. I agree that we are heading back into a distributed world, but I would think that if Facebook and Myspace play their cards right they could maintain their leadership positions. In this view of the world they are portals for social apps, some of which they will probably own and operate themselves, but most of which will be from third parties.
  • Scott Rafer · 1 year ago
    I can't imagine it happening that way. Too bad -- it would make Lookery's life much easier. they will maintain their leadership as yahoo and AOL did. billions of dollars in profits will fall out of those engines, but the core functionality won't radically expand from the features that got them to the first 100M uniques.
  • Andrew Deal · 1 year ago
    I would like to get some specific feedback on our approach in tackling this issue, as we are about to launch our social media tools within CelleCast. For us, our socnet is our media consumption. We can be considered a Talk radio version of LastFM, but we enable consumption of talk programming for mobile first.

    To put it another way, we combine community with consumption, whereas most of the emerging (and now struggling) social network sites around today are basically an end unto themselves.

    So I basically agree that niche socnets (like ours) are the viable trend because users have other useful reasons for being there besides networking alone.