Social Network Fracturing
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).
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