Buzz to Blah: Will Social Networking Sites Really Die Soon?
Over at The Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn is writing about whether or not the “Web 2.0 bubble” is about to burst. Hirschorn quotes Todd Dagres, co-founder of venture-capital firm Spark Capital, told The Wall StreetJournal. “[speaking of the current wave of web 2.0 sites]Lots of incomplete and underexperienced teams, business models based more on eyeballs than cash flow, and a rash of incremental and ‘me too’ deals.”
The article claims that today’s Facebook and MySpace (as the biggest social networking sites) are short lived in their interest and usefulness. Once you have a million friends what do you do?
I can understand Hirschorn’s point. I’ve got memberships on about fifty social spaces, jumping in as they come online just to see how they work (twitter.com being the newest craze of the week). I’ve been excited and then bored by so many great services that I can’t count them all. So, here, I can agree with the article.
What Hirschorn neglects, though, is what will replace the friends-race. We’ve all become too accustomed to being able to connect to just give it up because the sites become boring. We may continually migrate from one useful site to another but I can’t believe that once the novelty wears off that we’ll just go back to email and flat webpages.
What do you think? Is the bubble gonna burst?
March 15th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
[…] (via Techmeme, Intellagirl) […]
April 1st, 2007 at 8:38 am
[…] Original post by intellagirl […]
May 17th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Networking sites really are extremely new in the scheme of things. The boom we see in the varieties and kinds of these sites is exemplary of the novelty of this new concept that web users are embracing, but Im inclined to believe that rather than dying out, its more likely one networking site will come along with the right mix of elements to win out over the all the diverse types out there currently, and will continue to integrate with other web communication elements.
Its all more or less technological darwinism, diversification followed by survival of the fittest. This may seem reductionist, but it does seem to have been the case with search engines and mail clients — there are many as it takes off, then one or two of them become huge because they have the right mix thats most appealing to users, and what we end up with is a few “dominant” species and some others — until the next groundbreaking mix which has something on the others.
May 17th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
….You’re right though, in that I dont suppose that the idea of “networking” itself is at all transient. Myspace etc may indeed slip away into history, but those are just the current conduits that allow us to explore the idea, and if they fade its probably going to be because we’ve found a more effective means to the exploration of the concept of networking itself.