The last few days I have been doing research on building a social network. I have uned LinkedIn for several years. But I have never had a myspace page or any of the others consumer sites. I did signup for facebook a few months ago. But in the last few days I have been signing up for many of these and analyzing their signup processes and their features. So obviously I am no expert. But I do have a fresh perspective. Here are my observations:
1) myspace is JUNK! I just hated everything about this site. Every single page I found was ugly and unusable. I remember when I was in collage and built my very first webpage in 1993 at the University of Utah. It had tons of text on the wildest background image you have ever seen. It looked like an iridescent piece of transparent colored paper. You could barely read the text. This is how most of the pages on myspace look. Is this what we are going back to after 14 years of progress? Ok there are some communication tools here that are useful. But I think myspace is on a long walk off a short pier.
2) Face book is the best of the bunch for general consumers. I can see why so many collage students use this to organize their social lives. There are some great tools here. I do not like their home page. If you don’t already know what it is and have a reason to join you would hit this page and just leave.
3) LinkedIN is by far the most useful social network. I have been using this for several years and have 40-50 connections. If you know me and use linkedIn send me an invite and we can connect. This service fills a real need and provides great tools and functionality. But only if you are in business in some way.
4) Digg and other social news sites are great tools. I need to add digg links to my blog. I love how some of the most interesting items bubble to the top by the nature of the product. The problem here is that everything is and everyone is grouped together. So much of the most popular diggs are offensive, stupid or unrelated to my interests in any way.
My conclusion is that social networks will start to diversify into specific niches. People with similar views or interests are more willing to share information that is related and interesting to everyone else. I also think that we have just scratched the surface of the communication tools that these sites use. IM, email, mobile phones, chat, forums, blogs, feeds and more can all be hooked into social networks and used more effectively.
