I was talking to a friend the other day about the faddishness of social networks. In the US, Friendster was all the rage in 2003. MySpace couldn’t be beaten in 2005. Facebook is the belle of the ball in 2007. I know that Orkut had overwhelming marketshare in India last year. Facebook is rapidly gaining marketshare there now.
There have been various studies and numerous essays written on how, in the US, Friendster screwed it up and let myspace take over, and how myspace let facebook into the game etc. Considering the nature of the game, and all the billions of pageviews involved, it is natural that folks are trying to understand what causes uptake and abandonment of social networks. IMHO, there could be a really simple explanation to all this – thought I’d put it down on my blog (what else is a blog for, right!?).
- When a social networking service launches, with some interesting feature set, there are early adopters (lets say 1 to 5% of the audience) who sign up immediately, give it a try etc. If the service is interesting enough, they keep going back and using it on a regular basis.
- The early adopters invite their friends to the service, either explicitly (invite) or implicitly (eg: facebook app usage). And so it grows, perhaps relatively slowly at this point.
- At some point, a tipping point is reached, and the subscriber count explodes. This probably happens around the point when every potential user has between 2 and 5 of her friends who signed up for the service, and is getting invites from them.
- And then the service grows at a torrid pace for a while. During this phase, there is a lot of interesting stuff to do, for the users of the service. Like inviting their friends to the new “cool” service, checking out everything you can do on it etc.
- After a while, you run out of friends to invite to the service – they’re all on it already. And, what you can do on the service becomes passe after a point too (or has been thus far – facebook has changed this somewhat – see below)
- The early adopters discover a new “cool” site, with awesome new functionality (music / college-students-only).
- Everyone dumps the “old and busted” and moves to the “new hotness”.
- Lather, rinse, repeat (or close
just wanted to use the phrase) - So, the biggest reason social networks die out and new ones rise is because users get bored, and they have no one left to invite!
Facebook is trying to buck this somewhat, by outsourcing the job of keeping the kids interested and busy to third party developers. Not sure their efforts have yielded “interesting” apps thus far though. Kara Swisher doesn’t think so, at any rate – wondering if facebook apps can grow up. It’d be interesting to see if Facebook fatigue sets in at some point and users flock to some new hotter hotness.
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Interesting post Naveen. Based on how I see people around me use social networks (like Orkut and Facebook), they really use it to communicate with other people, and not just because they are excited to invite new people. As long as there is interesting communication and updates from friends/contacts, people keep going back. However, it seems to me that when a new generation arises, they have different needs than the existing social networks, and they really want to communicate among themselves and not with the older generation. Also, as a generation gets older, they lose interest or don’t have time to keep following their social network, and so the older one starts losing popularity.
Comment by VJ — October 15, 2007 @ 2:07 pm |
Thanks for the comment VJ.
To your point, I do agree that people use social networks primarily to communicate with friends. However my comment was about adoption and abandonment of new social networks. This has been happening at the rate of a new network every two years or so in the US atleast. I don’t think there’s a generational shift every two years! Also, people appear to move en-masse from the older social network to the newer social network – they don’t stop following all social networks when they get older, they just seem to move to a new one.
As you suggest, as long as there is interesting communication and updates from friends, people keep going back. In other words, if the social network keeps the users engaged, they keep going back. One of the ways users keep themselves interested is by assembling their real-life social networks on the service.
Comment by Naveen — October 15, 2007 @ 4:55 pm |
Naveen,
I think facebook has moved on from a simple “social network” cool site.
They are now basically a portal and have the advantage that they just dont have to write a single new application. I have always been a great Yahoo! fan. But, they are simply unable to keep up with all the new utilities available on the net elsewhere. A simple example is the “yahoo notepad”. I have always relied on that feature, but I wish it was more like a wiki or a google docs. It never will be, until they acquire some “abc” company and if they find the needed ROI.
Enter facebook and their APIs. I can use a Zoho. Or play scrabulous. They are basically gearing to be “the operating system” for Internet enabled applications.
Comment by PPK — October 16, 2007 @ 12:07 am |
Yep, I do agree to a large extent. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in reality though. Because in abstract terms, the web is the real underlying platform for all of this stuff anyway. Proprietary platforms such as those of Facebook, however great they are, tend to fade away over time. The one huge differentiating factor for facebook at the moment, is the way it is exposing the social graph its users have built up. I would think sooner or later, there is going to emerge a service that focuses on the social graph aspect alone, and exposes it as a component that can be plugged into other internet services. Then again, there’s been talk of a single sign on service for at least 10 years now. OpenID seems to finally be making SOME headway in that space, so who knows – perhaps we’ll continue to have disparate, disconnected silos of our social connection information for the next 10 years! Thinking about it, that actually seems like the likely case. Coupled with the way social networks seem to work, this will perhaps ensure facebook’s dominance for the foreseeable future.
Comment by Naveen — October 16, 2007 @ 1:20 pm |
email address friendster account friends cancel…
Thousands of poor folk……
Trackback by email address friendster account friends cancel — October 31, 2008 @ 12:37 am |