OK so it's been a long time...

...apologies, things have been busy. So today let's talk social networking. Everyone used to talk about the revolutionary "Friendster", are you on Friendster, have your "friended me", things like that. The only problem was, it wasn't a great service and didn't attract enough people to gain mass. For example... AIM, owned and created by AOL, based on simple file server "pings", grew to such a mass, that it will always be around. The thinking is, everyone know is on my buddy list, therefore I will use it! MySpace, came along and it really blew Friendster out of the water. EVERYONE got a MySpace account. The problem there was, MySpace wasn't just MySpace, it became, everyone who wants to get at my space, and the social networking SPAM started. I got, on average 5 friend invites from busty blond women who "travel to DC, or NY" every day. I think they worked in a certain area of the entertainment industry! Now as much as I love pretty young things, these were not my idea of "Friends" and I certainly didn't go looking for them. MySpace grew to a huge level, and it looked like they would become the unbeatable "google" of social networking...but along came Facebook.

At first, Facebook was only open to students, but when they decided to open the gates, for some reason, everyone I knew, immediately signed up. Admittedly the UI was much better than MySpace, and it became a very quick addiction to myself and many of my friends.

So why did everyone immediately sign up for Facebook? People abandoned MySpace and jumped ship, it seemed almost overnight? What made this social network (we'll call David) beat the much larger network (Goliath)?? What makes a social network work????

A couple of weeks ago I e-mailed a cross section of people from my address book and invited them to a mobile app called "looped". It's a cool idea, you register and when you want people to knew where you are, you log on, it shows your location and the location of friends of yours, in your network who want to be found. Out of the 100 people I mailed, 4 signed up, and only two used it, and since then they and me have stopped. It just doesn't have the "magic sauce" to attract the mass needed to sustain and grow a social network. IF it did, it would be really cool, to walk down to Union Sq and find other friends in the near vicinity and grab a coffee. But it doesn't.

What makes a social network work. BTW, anyone with the correct answer and formula congratulations you are now very very rich, or should be :)