Exhaustion

A Guardian writer is wondering if all the social networks have not worn us all out and that an exhaustion has set in similar to the post-2004 dot-com bust.

This is a nuanced but, I believe, compelling column.

Read its entirety at http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/jul/26/social-networking-exhaustion-charles-arthur

Here are some interesting excerpts.

So we're back at the original questions: where are all the new social networks? I think they're gone. Done, dusted, over. I don't think anyone is going to build a social network from scratch whose only purpose is to connect people. We've got Facebook (personal), LinkedIn (business) and Twitter (SMS-length for mobile). . . .

. . . The next big sites won't be social networks. Of course they'll have social networking built into them; they'll come with an understanding of their importance, just as Facebook and Twitter know that search (an idea Google refined) and breaking news (Yahoo's remaining specialist metier) are de rigueur. Nor will they be existing sites retrofitted to do social networking, despite the efforts of Digg and Spotify.

So what will they be? No idea, I'm afraid. If I knew that, would I be here writing? Hell, no – I'd be off making elevator pitches and vacuuming up venture capital. Which brings us to business models. Facebook makes its money not just by sucking up ad impressions from the rest of the internet, using its remarkably detailed targeting ability; it also gets a cut from virtual transactions using its own virtual currency. LinkedIn, similarly, can precisely target its executive base. Twitter is different again, selling its user-generated content for big money to Google and Microsoft's Bing, as well as experimenting with direct payment for its EarlyBird sales system and "promoted tweets".

The point being that "ad-supported" isn't the only game for startup revenue. The big sites of the future won't necessarily be about ads as a way to make money, and they won't be about social networks. Now, hunker down and wait. Or get out there and build it.

Of course, I would argue that personalization of some stripe will be the next iteration. And it can be argued that personalization is a form of social media. Not necessarily. If someone chooses "friends" as there primary source of personalized content, then I suppose it is a social media. But if you choose some artificial intelligence, semantic search mechanism for your personalization, that is definitely NOT social media.