Tattertech Blog

Nothing particularly amazing here, but it is more validation to my thoughts that you’ll see social networks appearing related to particular interests. Finding networks with niches you’re interested in is simply a means to filter out the noise. We’ve seen the trend with major portals, and it’s no surprise that the trend would occur to some extent with Social Networks.

Now a network that can properly guide people along the “long tail” (or for that matter, a major portal) may be able to fight off some of the fracturing pull. As they are, I don’t know that any of the major social networks are in set up to truly guide their users into their niches. The next big move will be who can make it easy to flow between niche network to niche network (OpenID perhaps?) - and how they manage to monetize against it. It will also be interesting to see just how much room there are for different smaller networks (and how much money each can earn).

I was going through a stack of old magazines today, and I got to a recent Time.  The closing article was a humorous take on social networking sites (here).    While the article was written in a fairly light-hearted manner, it touched on something I’ve been talking about with some people for a while now.

Today’s social networks (such as Facebook, MySpace, etc) are fairly immature examples of what social networking could be.  There’s no real deep group aspect to most social networking sites, rather as the article hammers home, they’re simply ways to promote one’s self.   Sure, there’s some group stuff on Facebook that simulates a forum with some extra features, but the primary focus is the profile page.  I’ll admit that the feed does help to create a social atmosphere, but ultimately it’s just a way to draw you into everyone else’s profile pages.

My theory (and I know it’s not just mine) is that social networks will evolve into more collaborative affairs.  I suspect we’ll eventually see networks where the profile page is minimalist or at least ancillary.  The interaction between users will be the key focal point - not just a list of friends and favorite movies.   I think as people start becoming more comfortable with relationships online and see online interaction as somewhat meaningful, this kind of group focus will become possible and more popular.  Or maybe people really do only want to show off themselves.

It looks like things might actually start moving here, although our project won’t be under the “Tatter” brand name, rest assured it’s plenty fitting, and all the key tattering will be involved.

Related to that, I believe it’s time to start actually maintaining a blog (all the cool kids do). To start with, I’ve decided to give the newest version of WordPress a try, we’ve had disagreements in the past, but that was several versions ago. I’ll work on upgrading the default install over time, and with any luck, WordPress has evolved into a useful platform.