Socialopoly : Too much networking could kill “open” social?
With all reorganizations from past weeks (partnership Facebook & Microsoft, the new platform MySpace, Google OpenSocial) the universe of Internet communities, specifically social networks, becomes a playground very interesting for future branding communication campaigns. Why today more than before? Abundance, density, and fashion effects from social networks ask many questions for and by users. Further development from emarketers will give more relevance to these networks or on the opposite, too much teasing and promotion aimed on users could give negative effects : bored members and cannibalization of the future projects before their release.
2 major issues: Interest for these future networks / Advertising market on the social networks.
All of this great transformations created great excitement in the development of applications for social networks (third-party applications, widgets, Integrated Services partners …) and also a great competition between the networks themselves to place leaders in their respective niches and get in millions membership. That means more and more networks to create profiles? The abundance of social networks stresses the growth of this sector, the arrival of a standard for services demonstrates maturity, we must now begin to think what will be signs of saturation of social networks that will drop this multitude of subscriptions and accordingly deflate speculation of advertising.
Google certainly did not suffer as much competition as with the breakthrough of Facebook (3.3 million users in 8 days!). This is surely one of the causes of such a ferocious attack with the standard OpenSocial proposal and the big partnership (which could be a sign of a Web 3.0 - the 3rd version represented by the universality of services, like widgets code for example). All issues of social networks seem to interest Google as never before, profits from advertising with the content pages have a direct link with Adwords advertisements. Here is a new global web order : Facebook and Microsoft on one side and the rest of the world in front to capture the windfall of users information and for sure a better placement advertisers. It will be necessary to play subtle in order that the ad market inflated with heluim did not deflate…
Let’s see typology of these networks and their challenges, the OpenSocial standard does not have the same potential:
Social-Interest : Surely the model that represents the vast majority of networks, the community of interest. Whether business networks for job seeking and linking, music, personal dating or any other interest shared by a group, the social-interest gives meaning to the consolidation and networking is relevant to the members (the initial idea of social networking). In this case, the provider of the network becomes a social services provider platform and a sometimes moderator. Users and their various collaborations often generate more animation that site platform provider, as seen in the forums model (Effect very well explained in the book Wikinomics). We are witnessing in these communities auto-promotion, broadcast and spread very fast (hyperfast!), the traffic depending on the kind of interest that makes some networks highly prized by advertisers (important sites are business relations: LinkedIn, Viadeo, Elance, AgentSolo and Facebook too!). This type of service providers networks will enjoy having any effort to standardize codes for their widgets and services 2.0 (giving the use of their networks even more efficient and optimal for the users). Nothing surprisingly we find LinkedIn and Viadeo within the OpenSocial group!
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