Social Network Fatigue is a Red Herring
Jon Udell and Tim O’Reilly both posted entries recently using the phrase Social Network Fatigue, implying that the friction of joining new social networks was going to slow the adoption of new social networks. That idea is wrong (and it obscures their other point that our social networks could be implicitly calculated from our other internet activities, email and IM).
It’s easy to see that you could improve the social networking experience by creating a way to centrally manage your contact lists or to implicitly generate a social network. I’m not going to deny that, but there’s a lot of things I’m noticing that make me think people who use the phrase Social Network Fatigue don’t have any idea what’s going on with social networks.
1. I look at my own social networks, I’m an active member of Flickr, Twitter, MyBlogLog, LinkedIn, Digg, and netscape. I’ve joined other networks which I now hardly use, not because maintaining my identity is such a chore, but because I wasn’t having any meaningful communication there.
2. I invited my sister and cousin to Twitter (both younger than 23) and they immediately became active users. They’re also both very active MySpacers. I just found out that neither of them invited any friends to Twitter beside me and Sarah. They’re happy to maintain a four person social network and haven’t had any impulse to consolidate networks.
3. I setup a social network for the SoCon conference with a life span of about three weeks (two weeks leadinig up to the conference and one week of followup). I haven’t heard a single person complain about the trouble of inputting yet another profile and collecting yet another batch of friends. On the contrary, attendees seem to have liked the experience very much.
4. The rapid growth of Flixster, a social network for movie lovers, is more evidence that niche social networks are taking off.
Social Networks are communication tools. Some geeks can’t seem to recognize social networks as communication improvement because there’s so much friction around managing friends and identity. They’d taken identity and relationships out of the first suite of communication tools for efficiency, but that’s not what people want. Having identity and relationships are fundamental human activities and fundamental part of communication. Social networks are a big enough improvement in communication that the majority of people aren’t phased at all by the friction of joining new ones.
Tags: socialnetwork, socialsoftware
February 13th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
“Social networks are a big enough improvement in communication that the majority of people aren’t phased at all by the friction of joining new ones.”
In this era of transparency and measurement, we should be able to ask and answer this question: Of the folks who belong to any networks, how many belong to 2, 3, 4, 5, or as in your case, 6 or more?
Common screennames across services should enable the necessary data to be gathered, shouldn’t they?
February 15th, 2007 at 5:10 am
I agree that consumers are not becoming bored of networking, they are becoming bored of irrelevant and pointless networking.. Niche is definitely the way forward but within a common framework, meaning further consolidation in the business is inevitable to avoid users havnig to input the same details for every different network. If you’re interested, I co-created http://www.wehanghere.com - a network that links members through their favourite hangouts; yes I know MingleNow do this but we’re a google maps mash-up - so a niche within a niche I guess!
February 15th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Jon: I agree, that’s a good idea.
Lindsay: Love your site. I’d rather see common standards than consolidation.
March 6th, 2007 at 6:36 am
That’s just it: It’s evolving from social networks for social networks sake, to social networks for a purpose. The SoCon Crowdvine group is a perfect example. The social network facilitated our networking beforehand, so we had an intro to one another, if not conversations, and therefore a running start at making the most of the event. And then after the event it was easy to followup with people we met and find and connect with those we didn’t get a chnace to meet during the (too short) event.
March 12th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Jodie, that’s a good way to put it. In niche social networks the social network is a tool for something else.