Social Network Site Overload?

The Wall Street Journal reports that social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are losing visitors and speculates that there is also an increase of users deleting their pages. Market saturation, guerrilla marketing tactics, and an increase in too many “creepy friends” are all sited as possible reasons for the decline of new visitors and page deletions.

I believe that another very possible reason is because there are so many choices now, people are dispersing. The fact is, various social networking sites are popping up almost daily now. For example, Vox offically launched their site yesterday, and many of these new sites are aiming at more exclusive target markets.

In addition to the ones everyone knows about, (i.e. MySpace, FaceBook, Friendster) we also have (to name just a few!):

• MOG, (a Musical Nudist Colony???) for the music purists
• Jobster, for employment seekers
• YouSuckIRule, for those that want to go “evil”
• TagWorld, for those with tag addictions
• Downtown Women’s Club, for professional business women
• Tribe, for those wanting to network in their local community
• Maya’sMom, for the social parent
• and the list goes on and on…

With the plethora of choices, it is no wonder people are deleting pages in one site and jumping onto another. But now the dilemma… I have friends on MySpace, Mog and Tribe. I can’t keep up with maintaining a page on all of them, but I want to stay connected and keep access to some of the great media content that they generate or find.

In a post by Byrne Hobart, he ponders “Whats next for ‘Social Networking’ sites?” Hobart states, …”These sites host a few kilobytes of text and a much larger volume of movies, pictures, and music, but the only reason all that content gets centralized on a single page is that no one has found an effective way to decentralize it… (hint: It’s a matter of getting people to comply to standards, not making up a new technology)”

Yes! Media syndication for the rest of us please.

Widgets or A Whole New World of Publishing?

Haydn Shaughnessy writes that the future of blogging is in the sidebar. He corrects himself in the comments, stating specifically that the blog will change quite a bit in the next year. That seems far more true.

Om Malik provides a bigger picture of what widgets mean. Widgets are on the web. They’re on the desktop. Apple has built widgets into their OS. Widgets, Malik wrote for Business 2.0 “are part of a movement that’s exploding the Web into millions of tiny chunks and reassembling it for a new generation of Internet users.”

I’d argue that what we are really seeing is a whole new world of publishing that channels across the web. RSS is the transport for these media pieces. It is the syndication format that is under the hood, providing what it does best, horsepower and fast delivery to people wherever they may be. Most people may not know about RSS. But that’s not important. They’ll get the feeds that they want.

For instance, I check out Kris Krug’s flickr stream because his photos are so rock star. His photos are the main show. But what if I want to post his photos on my web site? I can use a widget from Flickr to get his photos posted on my blog sidebar as he updates his photo page.

Over the next year we’ll see photo feeds like the ones from Kris not just appearing in sidebar flickr badges. They’ll be seamlessly embedded into the blog entries themselves, no different than traditional static images. They’ll also be part of shows that mix the media from Kris and other talented people into micro channels, syndicated all over the web. In other words, they won’t just be sidebar fun. They’ll act as the next evolution of micro-publishing, where millions of tiny chunks of media get distributed to places where they are not just a sidebar gadget but serve as the main show themselves or as integral media elements within a larger HTML context.