Om Malik on Social Networks And Scale

Om seems to be a luddite at the top of his social network sanity check piece, but he quickly gets down to what he advocates, after reviewing and analyzing comscore numbers about the supersized networks like Facebook and MySpace:

[from Social Networking Gets a Sanity Check - GigaOM]

[…] the market has shifted its focus onto niche social networks, such as those dedicated to sports, music, automobiles and pets. You know, sites like Dogster! They have focused, engaged communities, which means they can attract a higher amount of advertising dollars.

[…]

Not only do they have a purpose, but they don’t depend on hit-or-miss behavioral targeting-based ad systems that many hope will one day turn social networks into a gold mine. After all, if you sell dog food, then everyone on Dogster is a potential customer. As for the rest of the sector, it’s only a matter of time before more companies go the way of Tickle, Verizon and CondeNast’s Flip.

The ‘market’ — by which I think Om is referring to the people formerly known as consumers, we, the Edglings — we are finding the Facebook and MySpace experience less interesting as more people stream onto it.

Note that this suggests that these social networking applications are dumb, since smart applications get better the more that people invest in them (the O’Reilly Rule).

But Facebook and MySpace miss on social scale, which is what Om is getting at. Dogster and the myriad other human scaled SNAs that are gaining traction are based on some affiliation more tightly focused than being alive on Earth at this second in time.

I like Brightkite for its attention to geographical and social scale [and yes, I do have a few invites]. I can discover people, and their comments, relative to where I am currently located. What are other Brightkite users within 2000 meters doing? Or alternatively, what are my personal contacts up to right now: where are they?

As Brightkite grows in overall users, the essential social scale of geolocation will continue to keep it relevant. After all, there can be only so many people sitting within 2000 meters of my apartment, or having dinner in a specific neighborhood.

The same social realities don’t impinge in large unfettered SNAs. That was the undoing of Orkut, from the very start. And although MySpace and Facebook weren’t as much of an echo chamber as Orkut, the flaws in their social scaling have led to them feeling like a mall filled with overly talky people wearing gimme caps. Like Yogi Berra once said, “It’s so busy, no one goes there anymore.”