I was recently told by a friend that social networking has hit the roof top. There is little new sites can do to differentiate or take on the bigger and better ones prevailing. I am not so sure about that. Atleast not so soon. I believe there has been no formal definition of an online social network yet. We can talk about saturation of a market, only when we can at least define it.
For my two penny's worth, all forms of social networking sites serve any one of the following four market needs or a combination.
Two Vertical Needs
A. An online platform for offline friends to network (people you know in the real world)
B. An online platform for online friends to network (people you don’t know in the real world)
Two Horizontal Needs
C. An online platform for activities and utilities (like video sharing, blogging, games)
D. An online platform for active based networking (meeting people with similar interests)

On the vertical front, sites like Facebook and Orkut are high as an online platform for offline friends and low as an online platform for online friends – whereas most dating sites (and most Indian social networking sites like ibibo, bigadda, bharatstudents etc. ) are the other way round. Due to the differences in their privacy policies, Orkut is a better platform for online friends than Facebook.
For my two penny's worth, all forms of social networking sites serve any one of the following four market needs or a combination.
Two Vertical Needs
A. An online platform for offline friends to network (people you know in the real world)
B. An online platform for online friends to network (people you don’t know in the real world)
Two Horizontal Needs
C. An online platform for activities and utilities (like video sharing, blogging, games)
D. An online platform for active based networking (meeting people with similar interests)

On the vertical front, sites like Facebook and Orkut are high as an online platform for offline friends and low as an online platform for online friends – whereas most dating sites (and most Indian social networking sites like ibibo, bigadda, bharatstudents etc. ) are the other way round. Due to the differences in their privacy policies, Orkut is a better platform for online friends than Facebook.

Horizontally speaking, Facebook is extremely high as a platform for activities and utilities and relatively low in terms of active based networking. Orkut is high on both. Indian sites especially Ibibo, are extremely high on C, and high enough on D. Sites like Youtube, Picassa, Flickr, Blogger, Wordpress are also one form of social networking sites with only horizontal inclinations.
With all the talk of saturation when it comes to social networking sites, I believe a lot is still to be done – a least from the grids above we know there is no site (yet!!) which can claim to be high on all four needs.
Borrowing the words from Ingvar Kamprad, “Most things remain undone, glorious future!!” I would like to hear more from my fellow bloggers on this.
Forgot to include Twitter and Linkedin!
ReplyDeleteTwitter is most definately high on B and D.
And Linkedin high on A and D..
cheers!
Things are change now, facebook, twitter are the on high they are best media to increase website's traffic.
ReplyDeleteclick on this