Did Web-assisted social networking die?

by philg

In the Fall of 2003 the idea of Web-assisted social networking, in the form of Friendster and Orkut, was still sufficiently fresh in folks’ minds that we were able to use Friendster as an example for a class (see http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/6171/2003-fall/friendster ).  Going through the email that accumulated during the Alaska trip I noticed that (1) I had one new Friendster request, and (2) a spam email from Friendster noting that I hadn’t logged in for a year or more and inviting me to return.  So I logged in and the site is now pretty responsive but very few of my friends had logged in within the last 12 months.  I’ve not heard anything from Orkut in at least a year.


Do we pronounce Web-assisted social networking dead?  Or is it just that nobody wants to be friends with me?  🙁

17 thoughts on “Did Web-assisted social networking die?”

  1. It’s dead, at least in a “someone else owns the data” sense. The whole premise of Orkut, Tribes, Friendster, and even LinkedIn, is “associate your identity with us, and by the way we’ll give you these limited blog like tools”.

    The success in this market is LiveJournal: “Here are some kick-ass tools for making your personal site, and by the way you can make this site your identity, too”. I wish that LID or a better identity system had caught on first, but there’s no way to ignore OpenID, and part of implementing that is being aware of FOAF, and suddenly you’ve got a decentralized Friendster/Orkut/whatever where the end users own the data.

    And if there’s something we’ve seen, it’s that companies which try to keep a hard lock on content that end users are voluntarily creating won’t last.

  2. I suspect that people have moved on to sites that have a purpose *beyond* just social networking, like Flickr. There’s a strong social thread running through Flickr, but the whole basic point of the site is sharing photos with people.

  4. The impression I’ve gotten is that each SNS has found an appeal to a different social segment. They’ve become social scenes, of sorts, and if you’re not part of that scene, you won’t hear about what’s going on unless you dig a little deeper. MySpace is the one I’ve seen that has the most activity among teens and 20-somethings in the US (and maybe elsewhere, but I’m not connected to anyone else), and it’s morphed into a subculture with its own styles and protocols that baffle me, even though I’m 25 and ostensibly part of that demographic. I’ve heard that the stereotypes for the others are that Tribe is popular among Burning Man folk, Orkut is big with the Brazilians, etc. — though I don’t know how much any of this is true. The sites are all set up so that if you’re not within a degree or two of the segments that are keeping very active on them, they’ll seem completely dead.

    As for Scott’s comments that sites have moved “beyond” social networking, those kinds of sites have existed since long before Friendster ever hit it big — websites centered around communities and socialization are nothing new. I think they’ve just become more informed by the tools that SNSes built.

  6. A few years ago I thought Friendster was a neat idea and I looked around to see who in Burlington Vermont (my town at the time) was on it — and I saw all these people whose faces I knew, and I explored the online identities they had set up. And that was pretty gratifying and interesting. And I dug up some people I’d lost track of, and looked at my good friends’ good friends who I didn’t know, and that was pretty interesting, too. I even got Friendstered by an attractive woman I didn’t know, and we went out on few dates, and that was pretty neat too. But eventually, I had looked at everybody I wanted to look at, and found all the old friends I’d lost & wanted to find, and also found a girlfriend — and *poof*, no need to go on Friendster anymore…point is, I think a lot of its appeal was novelty. If I want to meet new people, I could become active again, but for now I’m busy doing neuroscience, and I’m happy with the friends I’ve got. I did have one idea worth doing, I think: write a crawler to get the data about all my friends & all their friends etc. and then generate a connected graph of the whole thing, so I could explore my network visually, and do things like query, “who on friendster is one degree of separation from both of these two of my friends who don’t know each other?” Chances are, that person would be someone I’d like to know. But really, trying to assemble the connected graph between neurons in the brain is more interesting to me right now.

  7. The success – of sorts – is MySpace (http://myspace.com), which just got bought for something like $580M.

    I have a teenage boy and a second boy who will be officially a “teen” in a few months. MySpace is *hugely* popular with that age group, with a small number of older folks – usually pulled in by their kids. The minimum age for the site is supposedly 16 years old, though it appears that a very large portion of the users are younger.

    As an example implementation of a web application, MySpace is clearly run by rank amatuers. Still, they hit some sort of (rather tacky) sweet spot.

  8. flickr does a great job of connecting people – a much better job than friendster (even though that’s not flickr’s raison d’

  9. Philip, You are right. No one wants to be friends with you. 🙂 I agree with Scott Laird. Successful social networking communities are likely to evolve more from sites such as Flickr.

  10. Besides mySpace and Livejournal, college students have been big on theFacebook.com. It gives them a way to search people just in their school instead of the entire world. Many use it as a friendly way of stalking – “who was that girl in my english class?” Or they can use it even before they attend class the first day. With their online registration system, they can see the list of other students in class and go look them up on thefacebook and see if there are any potential friends.

  11. People are turning to sites like namesdatabase.com much more now. They are lightweight social networking sites, and have excellent people search tools. By watching the numbers on their front page, you can tell this is exploding.

  12. New kid in town – https://www.linkedin.com/ – a network of IT professionals. A good idea – finding a good job in industry involves a lot of networking, why not help people with an online service?

    It seems that with social networking there is this effect that the ‘new kid in town’ is grabbing The Collective Attention Span. What happens with it in a year? who knows.

  13. No, there is no netwerk of nerds that comsume
    brandwithith…

    you r doing a good kjob of it… >?

  16. No- I think they just evolved a bit. More of social networking groups are out there now, and with many websites the pattern from an idea to the actual site lacks. Mainly due to the amount of work involved – time and money needed to make them successful, and gain users.

    I use LinkedIn – and that seems to be a pretty good network. But just like exercise – you need to “go and do it” every once in a while.

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