Predicting which companies and software are going to prosper and which are going to fizzle and disappear is a notoriously unreliable business, but it certainly looks at the moment as if Facebook, Myspace and Bebo are pretty well entrenched as the major social networking sites not only in the UK but also in many other countries, including (perhaps crucially in terms of predicting the future) the US.
Possibly this trio will change slightly in composition, having one of its members replaced or being joined by a fourth or fifth, but at the moment all three seem set pretty fair and currently have between them 85% of the UK internet traffic to social networking sites.
One challenge may come from niche services which mix social networking with other purposes, such as Twitter, which is a micro-blogging tool with some social networking aspects thrown in.
A different source of change may be from a proliferation of many small, specialised social networks leaving these big beasts looking clunky and crowded by comparisson. (The replacement of one-stop do it all services with specialised niche services is something the IT world has seen in many guises already.)
Tools such as Ning already allow people to set up their own social networks, but they are currently relatively little used.
What may change all that is BuddyPress, and if I had to bet I’d say this is the most likely prospect at the moment to really shake up the social networking world.
Still in development, it is a collection of WordPress plugins and themes which would convert a WordPress multi-user blog into a WordPress multi-user blog with a social network. There are an awful lot of WordPress users out there and this would make adding on social networking facilities to a site relatively easy. (At least, it would if you use the multi-user version, but then BuddyPress in turn may make that a whole lot more popular).
Rather than having to go away and learn a new tool that gives you a social networking service that is not integrated with your site, BuddyPress could make it fairly easy to add on one, using skills people are already familiar with. And what becomes easy, frequently becomes popular.
(If BuddyPress finally launches in a blaze of success, please remember this post as an example of expert prediciton. If on the other hand it fizzles and never gets beyond version 0.8546, then you imagined ever reading this.)
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What next for social networking? People get lives?
On that note Martin, I wondered if I could pick your brains about something (I don’t have an email for you though)?
“What next for social networking?”
Hmm. Well, here’s my take.
Most people will continue to use the famous sites in the slightly confuzzled way they do now, essentially as a sort of colour supplement to email. But they will find the various mutating technologies too dull, confusing and inefficient to actually run their lives with, and will remain stubbornly resistant to any attempt to get them to e.g. post hustings questions on YouSpace, or link themselves into 10,000 alerts a day from MyTwit which are composed of three pieces of “news” which has been multiplied a thousandfold in the mirrors of the various updates/groups/RSS feeds they find themselves entangled in.
They will, of course, become Fans of various things on Bibblebo, make themselves amusing avatars to use on Friendfood, because that’s fun, but they’ll spend the rest of their lives fighting a nagging feeling that they should be answering an email, and they certainly won’t be moved to any kind of practical action as a result of any of this activity. Not a single extra penny will enter the party coffers as a result, not a single grassroots campaign will be generated, and not a single vote will be won.
A small minority of people will however remain utterly convinced that MyYouFizzleTwitSpaceo is the future of political communication against a mounting wall of evidence…
You get my drift? I’m sorry if that sounds negative, and I’ve probably over-egged the pudding, but this piece more properly belongs on a technical blog, and I think all that needed to be said.
I think there’s certainly a place for the use of new technology in campaigning (as someone who works with that kind of technology on a daily basis), but there has to be a very clear analysis of the benefit derived from any of it. “Build it and they will come” does not necessarily apply.
What’s far more important than the technology is the human factor. Who’s going to run these things, provide advice on how to set them up, and check up on whether they’re working? There’s a bit of a problem with techno-enthusiasm in that we often end up assuming that technology is a magic bullet. Need to produce a document or create a strategy for something? Let’s set up a wiki and wait for wiki-magic to cause a document to emerge! Need mass support for a campaign on green issues? Set up a Facebook group!
Technology’s great strength is in lowering barriers to participation, but this is often quite unevenly spread. A wiki that anyone can edit is, in theory, a very low barrier to entry. Except for the fact that a lot of people don’t know what a wiki is, or how to use one productively, or what standards may be expected of them. And if mass participation is achieved, it may end up being just another eternal September.
The focus needs to be on people and what use they can make of the technology, and that means a focus on emotional appeal, usability and usefulness to the people using it. Having a purpose matters more than having a whizzy social networking tool, because ordinary people simply cannot identify with a website.
I agree that face-to-face communication is both far more efficient than anything you can do on facebook, but if we can continue to learn from our experience of political efforts on social networking sites I think there will some accelerated value from new and refined tools and applications on them at some point in the future.
At what point it will be possible to say that the growth of presence more than compensates for the wasted efforts it is hard to say, but every single new member is an extra potential body on the ground.
It shouldn’t be forgotten that there are many for whom social networks (whether online or offline – ie gossip over the garden wall) are the primary or only source of new political information or comment, so we neglect it at our peril.
Online services will never replace real world activities, but they should add to the spectrum of active outlets to form a more complete and naturally balanced complement.
Everything productive is positive.
The future? Open Social protocols, OpenID/shared logins (like the new Facebook Connect feature) and interoperable nodal points.
I strongly predict that ISPs will go back to the idea of giving you your own homepage when you go online, but it’ll be an aggregator of your friends SN/SM activity from all over the place.
Tools like Twitter, YouTube, blogging, etc will get ported to one place by each person, and then friends can pick up on that feed and put it on their homepage, all done so easily they don’t even notice they’re doing it.
In the meantime, the media will continue to hype about the Next!Big!Thing and projects like BuddyPress will continue to develope as open aggragating nodal points.
But then, I’ve been using an example of such an aggregating nodal point for so long that people forget it’s even possible. Shame the tech and usability side is so horribly out of date.
Summary: There won’t be one NextBigThing, or if there is it’ll be transient. Aggregation is the key, and people will set up disparate, small, interoperable networks using Livjournal, Facebook, DreamWidth, BuddyPress and similar, and for the most part those networks will talk to each other with increasing user friendly privacy controls.
A couple of thoughts:
* The quality of traffic from most social media sites is terrible. Too often surf-in surf-outers in pursuit of the latest pic of Paris Hilton with a waffle-iron in her cleavage.
* The MSM seem to be chasing the traffic, which is reducing the quality of THEIR audiences (planning to blog this but have not had time).
* If we stick to our content knitting and pay attention to social media, there’s some potential there.
* I think an important one may turn out to be Wikio. They are small enough to be responsive to customer needs (and do respond – look at the phalanx of Welsh blogs marching up the rankings after a bit of listing work by Ordovicius a couple of months ago), and have a well-integrated system.
Matt
OK.
4 thoughts.
That’s within the tolerance of web stats.
While I think there isw a place for the big-3, I have a feeling people are going to start reverting to niche networks.
I think people are going to do somewhat of a 180 and realize that it is easy to get lost in big sites.
People want content which is vital to their lives. Just a hunch…