Adams Rants

Yesterday I wrote about how Bebo had unleashed its greatest feature yet, Bebo Bands, which is enabling the infamous social networking phenomenon tackle the MySpace giant head on. But as it stands Bebo is currently on the verge of looking cluttered because its interface wasn’t designed to accomodate a full scale social networking site and instead was set up purely as a contact sharing site. This means that there are only so many features that Bebo can add to keep its userbase immersed and eventually users will bore of Bebo in search of the latest social networking site to arrive in town. What will this killer site be though? Well over the past while I’ve been tracking the progress of several up and coming sites which show a lot of promise as well as keeping an eye on the older social networking sites who are looking to reinvent themselves!

Now as you can imagine, it’s difficult to predict what the masses will want 6 months down the line but I reckon there will be an attempt to move away from the current trend of semi-static profiles whereby users enter in information manually and select a video manually. In essence, the future of social networking relies on a degree of automation. Picture this, you download an app which interacts with Winamp alá LastFM which then fetches your most played songs and fills in your favourite bands section and recommends other bands to listen to as well as suggesting other members profiles based on musical taste. I know that LastFM does this and does it very well, but a truly successful social-networking site would have to be much broader than this and not rely on nichés therefore appealing to the largest possible audience. Of course finding users with a similar taste in music to you would grow tiresome after a while and would also result in many false-positive matches being made. You need more diverse fields that can be compared with other users.

This is where I come onto the popular StumbleUpon plugin. Stumble Upon is a very, very promising plugin which is steadily growing in terms of popularity. Like LastFM, StumbleUpon also matches users based on tastes all integrated into a social networking frontend. In this case, the plugin comes in the form of a simple toolbar with several key buttons; “Stumble”, “Like” and “Dislike”. When setting up the plugin, you select what type of websites you like, ’sport’ and ‘movies’ for example. Whenever you click on ‘Stumble’ you will be directed to a site, based on your preferred categories, that someone else liked. After a while of ’stumbling’, the site builds up a profile of sites that you like and dislike and as stated earlier, matches you with other likeminded surfers. If something like this is implemented it opens almost endless possibilities with the ability to check out what sites your friends like being the first idea to spring to mind! Logging data of what sites people like and dislike would also be very useful for potential advertisers.

Advertising is one of the major obstacles that needs to be overcome when operating a social networking site. Advertisers are known to be hesitant to be associated with social networking sites where questionable content often arises which may harm a companies reputation. This means that it’s difficult to monetize these sites. If a feature akin to that provided by StumbleUpon was introduced to a social networking site, webmasters would no longer have to bombard users with ads and instead could simply deliver one ad which is chosen based on that particular members surfing history i.e if I like Sports sites then it could show me one ad relating to a sport which I’m known to like. This would be much more effective than the current systems in place on sites like Bebo which display ads based on popular keywords on the particular page you are viewing. This means that if I view someones profile on Bebo, I’m being delivered ads based on their profile whereas really I should be delivered ads based on my profile! It would result in a much higher CTR (Click Through Rate) and less intrusive ads for the members who are responsible for generating revenue for the website!

New social networking sites spring up almost everyday, some with new and totally out of this world ideas (eg: Zebo) while others just aim at improving on an already tried and tested formula (eg: hi5.com). I feel that the next successful social networking site will be one which strikes a balance between the two. People don’t want to see more MySpace clones but at the same time they don’t quite fancy the idea of having to familiarise themselves with something completely different to what they are used to and given the fierce competition in this sector of the internet, if a site fails to strike that all important balance, then it will almost certainly die off and be forgotten about.

Lets not forget about security though. The issue of security has been well highlighted throughout all forms of media and Bebo and MySpace are often the subject of sensational newspaper headlines or the topic of chat shows. The Bebo phenomenon even warranted an investigation by Primetime! Thanks to this media coverage, most sites have tightened up their security and now employ a dedicated team of moderators to monitor flagged content. Unfortunately, the internet is synonomous with anonymity which means that administrators will always be fighting an uphill battle especially when the intelligence of some members is questionable. Bebo has done an excellent job in making it’s members aware of the dangers of accepting people you do not know and any other large social networking site should aim to follow Bebo as an example. If a site should suceed in surpassing the standards set by Bebo then it will be well on it’s way to large scale domination!

The type of site that I have suggested above would be massive. It would undoubtedly be a massive drain on server resources having to maintain a massive database of popular music and websites - in realtime! One option would be to attempt to integrate the existing services into one site like Bebo has been doing with its Bebo TV option which is integrated with VideoEgg. It may be the quick solution and for now it seems to be working, but it’s main disadvantage is that it’s a closed format with little room for in-house development in the future which would hurt the site in the long-run!

So are there any existing sites which fit the bill? Well one site of particular interest is Orkut.com which is a Google-backed social networking site. It’s current policy is one that promotes organic growth. This means that you can’t sign up yourself, instead you must be invited by someone that is already a member. Given the infamous resources of Google, if they were to prioritize the development of the site, the sky would be the limit to what they could achieve! Until they open it to the general public though, Bebo and Myspace have nothing to worry about!

Lets not forget about Microsofts offering, MSN Spaces which is integrated into MSN Messenger and looks set to be integrated into the delectable looking Live.com. Given it’s current popularity with bloggers, MSN Spaces is not to be ruled out especially with the imminent official launch of Live.com - a Web2.0 portal.

TagWorld is a site that I actually feel sorry for. It’s features far surpass those offered by MySpace.com and lots of money has been spent on advertising its superior customization potential yet it fails to win over the audience of its competitors. I don’t think a reinvention is on the cards with its current owner owing to the fact that everything they’ve tried thusfar has been fruitless!

There are two new players to the social networking scene though and I’m happy to say that they do have the potential to be the future of social networking. GoingOn and PeopleAggregator both started out as one, however in December of 2005, the two creators split having come to two different conclusions as to how the site should operate. The basic ideas of the two sites are very similar. The sites in themselves are social networks where you can write blog posts, create groups, upload media and add friends, but they allow you to create your own social network within the site which offers users the chance to create their own Bebo like site. From what I can gather, the same username and password can be used throughout all of the created social networks. Cross-site compatibility is something which has astronomical potential. GoingOn.com is not open source, but is far more slicker than “PeepAgg”. Whether or not these two sites will indeed surpass Bebo.com and MySpace.com in the future is a tough one to call. PeepAgg and GoingOn have an interesting business model and plenty of new features as well as improving on existing social networking features which could just be what the people need.