September 2006 - Posts

• Getting value out of Social Networking websites

  Social Networking websites are all the rage right now.  Even television advertisers are trying to cash in on the hype and connect with younger viewers by advertising their personal pages on MySpace.com.  There are many Social Networking websites out there today, many of them knock offs of MySpace.  Some sites try to take on different approaches, like TagWorld.com where content gets tagged so that you can do key word searches, or other sites like SocialNetwork.com focus on social networking as a way of building relationships. If you haven't heard of MySpace, it's an online community website.  When you sign on you can make your own web page by filling out a form like template.  You can use that page just for fun, or to promote your band or your modeling career.  The website automatically adds buttons to your page so that people can ask you to be your "friend"  or send you a message.  The site also adds a section to your page to show the world who your registered friends are, with photos of those people and links to their pages.  You can also search and browse other members and click the buttons on their pages to add them to your list of friends.  You can see who their friends are, and click on their friends to surf to those pages.  The end result is you can surf from person to person to person, endlessly.  People post links to content they find interesting, pictures, and music.  What really is making MySpace move is the combination of self-promtion and sexy pictures.  But does MySpace really create value?  PC World magazine recently released an article ranking MySpace.com as the #1 worst website on the Internet (see link below).  MySpace may get a lot of attention, but unless you're actively marketing your page with racy pictures you're not going to pick up lots of traffic.  MySpace also turns into a huge spam system, as you get flooded with friends request by other marketers, pages that redirect your browser automatically to pornographic websites, and spam email from people you added to your list of "friends" that bombard you constantly with a list of their scheduled appearances.  For fun, I made a MySpace page.  Look at who my "friends" are on Dave's MySpace page. The web site SMS.AC provides a web based social surfing experience like MySpace but the catch is when people send you messages you receive them on your mobile phone as SMS messages.  You can use your phone to reply to your new friends.  I tried this site and found it to be amazingly annoying.  The problem for me was that I was constantly getting messages from strangers in Malaysia in the middle of the night telling me they like to study English. While some Social Networking sites are fun but don't create a lot of value, there are some that are very effective and very useful.  Social Networking doesn't have to mean a list of friends where you surf from person to person.  That's really social surfing more than social networking.  Social Networking occurs when you meet people and those peopel introduce you to other people that they think would want to know you.  Social Networking also occurs when you have opportunities to meet and mingle.  Another service, The Social Entertainment Network (of which I am one of the founders) provides a free service that is very effective at providing people with more opportunities to be social.  SocialNetwork.com provides free software you can download to meet and mingle, 24 hours a day.  You can look at people's pictures, search and browse profiles, chat, and build a list of contacts.  An interesting feature of the system is that it is real time, when you see someone on you can converse with them right away, or leave people a message if they are offline.  The system gives you a notepad to keep notes on your contacts and even keeps a conversation history for you.  The site also provides features for professional networking. Social Networking sites don't have to be directly about meeting people, they can be online communities revolving around content of common interest.  Sites like Digg.com use online communities as a way of policing content.  The website allows website visitors to post links to news articles.  Visitors to the site can vote articles up or down.  The good stuff rapidly rises, the bad stuff dissapears.  Online communities as a form of content policing creates excellent value.  Imagine a website that provides its visitors the option to upload music created and recorded by the website visitors themselves.  It's going to be 99.999% horrible stuff.  However, with a community of people, each voting up or down on a couple of songs each, the content rapidly gets screened out.   There is a lot of value in Social Networking sites, I beleive this is just the beginning. Relevant Links: Sites like SocialNetwork.com focus on social networking as a way of building relationships between individuals. PC World magazine ranks MySpace.com as the #1 worst website on the Internet.  www.sms.ac www.digg.com Posted Sep 29 2006, 10:54 AM by Dave with no comments Filed under: Technology, Social Networking, Entrepreneurship