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 :)
Nice article! Now if someone could find a way to answer my email, voicemail, gmail, yahoo mail, facebook, myspace and Twitter I'd be a really happy man!!!!
ReplyDeleteRick