Social Suicide

8 January 2007

According to Valleywag, TagWorld is having major problems, with both of its founders having gone awol.

This really comes as no surprise.

The social network market has become incredibly densely populated, and not populated by well thought out, interesting, innovative companies; it’s densely populated by MySpace clones – note for note, feature for feature MySpace clones. Tagworld was one of the worst – it really is pretty much identical – but there are hundreds out there; some of them slightly better, with one or two interesting features, but all of them missing the point.

A social network is all about people – nothing to do with features, design or anything like that. All you have to have is that critical mass of people, and to do that you have to have a genuine differentiator, something that truly sets you apart. Not some “innovative” feature tacked on the side of a MySpace rip-off.

And a social network without people is worse then nothing.

Although, a social network without people (but with claimed people, like Tagworld) really is much worse then nothing for a certain set of people:

Bands.

You’re a struggling band, trying to get signed. You’ve got a MySpace page (obviously), but you want to get your music out to as many people as possible, so you start creating accounts on Mog, Bebo, iMeem etc.

Where do you stop?

How are you supposed to update all of those different accounts?

It strikes me that all this talk of a “Web 2.0 Bubble”, and that we’re heading for another crash maybe slight misplaced. Yes, we could be heading for another crash and yes, we could be in another bubble but this time round it only really affects the social network space. It’s seen massive growth over the last couple of years, with massively hyped up, overvalued sites vying for the limelight.

Now hopefully this little bubble can burst and we can all get on with our lives…

From: Articles

8 January 2007