Social Networking Differentiation 2.0

Dan Farber has run an interesting “State of the”-like post about the new crop of Social Networking applications that are spawning everywhere. He notes that there are many new sites, offering increasingly similar services and features with expanding and contracting audiences.Towards the end, Dan makes an interesting observation:

But something deeper inside the wave is forming beyond social networking infused products multiplying like mice.Some of this gelled for me during a meeting with Fred Krueger and Evan Rifkin of TagWorld. The startup is building a comprehensive communications and media platform, not just a social networking site with profiles, buddy lists and photo sharing. Krueger says his goal is to allow users to easily build complex Web sites with sharing and a social network as the underlying fabric.The so-called architecture of participation is slowly gestating in the bellies of hundreds of startups and established players, and the social Web, made by humans for humans, is taking shape on top of the grid. Sharing and collaboration is not an afterthought bolted onto email or deployed in a separate server for workflow.

» Less than six degrees of social networking and Web 2.0 goodness | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

It brings me back to 2004, when I was addressing some of these same issues with the first crop of Social Networking applications. I've previously, in what now seems like a past life, discussed these issues in detail. Here's a flashback:

One thing remains clear, they all CAN’T survive and consolidation is inevitable. I’m going to skip any attempt to explain the financial motivations for this upcoming aggregation, but I do think that the user perspective is particularly telling. The most influential source of change, and eventually consolidation, will be users’ attitudes towards the various SNS applications. In a widely public race, the SNS with the most USABLE features will come to rule, not necessarily the one with the “best”.

Socialtwister 2.0 » Blog Archive » The SNS Differentiaion Challenge

So I would have to agree. There's barely the sliver of differentiation these days. What will make the difference?

With choice comes evaluation and comparison. With experience comes knowledge. Both of these forces are working against the current crop of SNS applications. It is, purely from an economic point of view, simpler to build bigger and better when someone has done the research, development, testing, and education. Programmatically, its often easier to write new code while refactoring existing code than to mend an existing infrastructure. With users more informed, their ability to discern the good from the bad grows.

Socialtwister 2.0 » Blog Archive » The SNS Differentiaion Challenge

I've argued the ability to switch between social contexts with ease and ultimately usability will be the key differentiators between the survivors and the vanquished. It's already starting to look that way - but we'll find out more soon enough.

technorati tags:sns, social+networking, dan+farber