The Future Of Social Networks

Fred Stutzman peers into the crystal ball, and (with reference points derived from a close study of five MySpace competitors) lays out a framework for the future of social networks. He looks at these sites:

Cyworld — he characterizes as the “future of social”
Bebo — he thinks it’s “taking on MySpace”, but it seems more of a replacement for Facebook to me.
Hi5 — a contender from India
Faceparty — another competitor from the UK.
XuQa — “what Facebook could become”

And here’s Fred’s trendline for social networking:

Social networking is becoming content-centric. Essentially, companies are building social-enabled sites around content areas - be they cars, music or to-do lists. In this context, social networking adds the logical next layer to content-driven resources. This is an extremely important trend - in the future, all of our content sites will have SNS characteristics. Sites that move early and implement well could very easily steal a large audience pool from established content sites.

Social networking is the vanguard of micropayment. As we’ve seen in Second Life, people are absolutely willing to exchange real-life dollars for virtual accessories and karma. Users vest a good part of their identity into their chosen social sites, so monetization possibilities abound; letting users buy little things that make their virtual live better, or more rich makes these sites fun. Indeed, I think fun is they key part - people don’t want to pay to use social networking sites, they want to pay to make their experience better. I believe we’ll be seeing a lot more of this in the future.

Social networking for the sake of social networking just doesn’t cut it. Put simply, we want more from SNS-enabled sites than association. If we’re going to invest our time into a SNS site, make it worth our while. Make it a game, make it entertaining, make it useful - but don’t expect us to come if you think its enough to browse our friends profiles.

I agree with Fred totally. Content-free, networking-for-the-sake-of-networking is a pointless exercise, now that we have gotten over the novelty of fooling with these sites. He seems to miss the intensely geolocal aspect of social networks: people naturally network with others that a close to them, physically. And he misses OpenBC, which is a big sucess in Germany and Western Europe. While I think he is dead on re: micropayment, he only touches on social commerce lightly, which is the big bang of our socialized future.

Social networks will become the centerpoint of online commerce. I state this unequivocally. The revolution will be socialized: in the future, essentially all online consumer commerce will be conducted through social means. The Web 1.0 metaphor of wandering around in a warehouse, putting gear into a shopping cart and then heading for a checkout counter, that shopworn motif will be replaced by various social metaphors.

Recommendations — various approaches to supporting social recommendations will become the primary starting point for online commerce. Whether buried in the implicit social networks of standalone blogs, or made more explicit in bespoke social networking apps, people’s reviews and pick lists will guide more buying behavior every year.
Experiential marketing — as an increasing social consciousness pervades the online marketing world, advertisers will realize that ads are becoming less effective, even when streaming and animated. One answer is what I am calling experiential marketing: individuals or groups will be solicited and directly compensated to try out products and blog or otherwise chronicle their use. With highly trusted advocates acting on behalf of the community these campaigns will become a mainstay of product marketing 2.0.
Sponsored aggregation — with a universe expanding into a billion tagspaces, every company could be sponsoring an aggregation of the best material on their defining topics. Canon, for example, could sponsor the leading aggregation of information on digital cameras, culled from hundreds or thousands of correspondents, who might be writing in personal blogs or within increasingly open social networks. These “plazas”, as I call them, will become a great way for companies to support communities of interest, and tap into the collective thinking about their products and their application. Candidly, I am amazed that so few platforms to support plazas have emerged, and I am likewise surprised that Technorati and other systems that define tagspaces have not tapped into this multi-billion dollar opportunity. This will soon turn around, and meme trackers (like Techmeme and Tailrank), social content aggregration systems (like The Personal Bee), and indexing/tag systems (like Technorati) will all be competing to be the leading plazas for tens of millions of products competing in millions of niches.