Tales of a Designer

Everyone Wants a Social Network

It seems as though everywhere you turn, you hear something about a social network being set up, or how someone is apart of a social network. How many social networks do there need to be, and why does every company claim that theirs is better?

Now, it was interesting when there were just a couple of them, aimed at different age groups, but now, it seems like they are popping up everywhere. Take your pick: MySpace, Facebook, the new Microsoft Live Spaces, and the list goes on. There will be a service where people can even create their own social network.

Now I’ve said before that I’m not against trends, and how they can be good for a particular industry, but seriously, how many social networks do we need? How can you be sure that your company’s “latest and greatest” social network will benefit an audience more than the 80+ million people on MySpace who already find it useful.

It just seems that with the few social networks that are huge right now, you would have to be pretty ballsy to spend big bucks on the resources in creating a new network. You would also have to offer the people something brilliant that they aren’t already getting on their current network. That gap seems to be closing swiftly.

So I can’t say that I’d be sad to see some of the social networks die out, or at least merge. How many social networks does the world need that all try to do the same thing? Aside from that, what would it take for a company to be successful if they wanted to join in and create a new social network?