TNL.net

5 reasons why social networks fail

15th
44

I was recently invited by Jason Cala­ca­nis to A Small World, the über-exclusive social net­work (don’t ask for invi­ta­tions, it’s a priv­i­lege I haven’t been granted since I’m a new­comer there). This has prompted me to think about a num­ber of issues relat­ing to social net­works in gen­eral. In this entry, I will try to look at why social net­works fail. Sub­se­quent entries will focus on why they suc­ceed and what oppor­tu­ni­ties they create. 

So with­out fur­ther ado, here are five rea­sons why social net­works fail: 

5. Pri­vacy concerns 

The first rea­son I would high­light, and part of the rea­son why social net­works have not really gained much trac­tion out­side of a self-selected group of peo­ple is the amount of pri­vacy con­cerns that exist within cer­tain age groups. Younger peo­ple are gen­er­ally more immune to those but older peo­ple tend to worry about what the social net­works in ques­tion do with their data and are wor­ried that they will either be data mined or that they will suf­fer from iden­tity theft. This anx­i­ety has largely been dri­ven by media empha­sis on how your data on the Inter­net is unsafe and how there are “nefar­i­ous char­ac­ters” run­ning around the net. 

4. No real reward or penalty system 

Most social net­works are putting a heavy empha­sis on how many con­nec­tion a user have. A user’s worth is based on his/her num­ber of con­nec­tion, not on the qual­ity of those con­nec­tions. This tends to drive a lot of peo­ple to try to con­nect to as many peo­ple as they can. Mary Hod­der likens this effort to col­lect­ing base­ball cards, an apt metaphor since the num­ber of con­nec­tions you have is no guar­an­tee of the value of those connections.   

How­ever, few of the social net­work­ing sites are doing any­thing to gate the amount of con­nec­tion. One of the nice thing on asmall­world is that it actu­ally penal­izes peo­ple for send­ing out invi­ta­tions that were declined. I believe this is a good thing as it makes peo­ple rethink whether they want to attempt a con­nec­tion or not. 

The other ques­tion is the reward in social net­work­ing: what do I get for shar­ing my con­tacts? We know what the com­pa­nies get but it’s some­times fuzzier to see what extra value one gets from a social net­work. Some have done a good job at show­ing a sense of mis­sion, whether it is job-related and expertise-related con­nec­tiv­ity like con­nec­tions LinkedIn or dat­ing like… well, this is where it gets trickier.

3. Not gran­u­lar enough

Con­text is gen­er­ally miss­ing from most social net­works. For exam­ple, I may know Bob in a social con­text as a friend but I have no idea of how good an employee he is. Or I may know Joe in a work con­text but not real­ize that he’s not dat­ing mate­r­ial for my friends. The lack of gran­u­lar­ity as to the types of rela­tion­ships is another cur­rent fail­ure of most social net­work­ing sites.

The other thing that is miss­ing from social net­work is a more fine-tuned approach to rank­ing rela­tion­ships. Rela­tion­ships are not binary. It’s not either some­one is my friend or not. The truth of the mat­ter is that rela­tion­ships are very gran­u­lar in nature: I may be a close friend to John, whom I’ve known for 20 years and hang out with on a daily basis and I may have been a friend with Peter in the past but haven’t seem him in 10 years. Yet, to a social net­work, if I added both of them as friends, we have the same types of relationships.

Sim­i­larly, there seems to be a trig­ger miss­ing for evolv­ing rela­tion­ships: what if my rela­tion­ship with Peter has been slowly degrad­ing over time. Do I kick him out as a friend (an option few net­works allow) or do I keep him on my list. This gran­u­lar­ity is miss­ing and it is odd that it doesn’t exist as it would be rel­a­tively easy to cap­ture this data.

Sit­u­a­tional rel­e­vance is another fac­tor that is largely ignored by social net­works today: in what con­text does that net­work func­tion. It’s some­thing that needs to be more gran­u­larly defined than the catch-all approach of exist­ing implementations.

2. Not inte­grated with other apps

Should social net­works be stand­alone apps or is social net­work­ing just a fea­ture? There is really lit­tle value in know­ing peo­ple just for the sake of know­ing peo­ple. How­ever, there is value in inter­fac­ing with those peo­ple, whether it is to find a job, get some infor­ma­tion from a sub­ject mat­ter expert, find money, or get a new date.

I believe the real value of social net­work sites to the end user will even­tu­ally be dis­cov­ered when they start inte­grat­ing with other com­po­nents like email and IM. Pres­ence (is the per­son online or not), loca­tion ser­vices (where in the phys­i­cal world is the per­son right now) and com­mu­ni­ca­tion (can I phone/IM/email/page them now) would add greatly to the value of social networks.

How­ever, at the cur­rent time, few efforts have been made to inte­grate the social net­works with other apps. Which brings me to the biggest rea­son why social net­works fail: 

1. Walled Gardens

At the end of the day, social net­work­ing sites are walled gar­dens. They do not want to share infor­ma­tion with oth­ers for fear that it will dilute their power as THE cen­tral hub for all rela­tion­ships. This lack of inter­op­er­abil­ity is the pri­mary prob­lem with social net­work­ing sites and, I believe, one of the rea­son why their growth is impeded. A net­work that would be will­ing to open up could see bet­ter inte­gra­tion with other tools and could ben­e­fit from other sites con­nect­ing to it and cre­at­ing more spe­cial­ized sub-networks. For exam­ple, a large social net­work­ing site could become a large repos­i­tory of a num­ber of rela­tion­ships with smaller sites look­ing at it to spe­cial­ize across hor­i­zon­tal uses (for exam­ple, cre­at­ing a site focused on dat­ing or job search) or ver­ti­cal ones (for exam­ple, a site focused on infor­ma­tion exchange between sub­ject mat­ter experts within one par­tic­u­lar domain)

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44 Comments

  1. 1Denken Ãœber | Un simple weblog — April 7, 2007 at 6:57 pm

    July 3, 2006 11:31 pm | Categoría: Comu­nidades Online Bas­tante intere­santes los artículos que escribió Tris­tan Louis sobre las redes sociales, uno es 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail y el otro es 5 rea­sons why social net­works can suc­ceed (noten el “pueden” que usa en esta parte) Razones para el fra­caso de una red social 1. Prob­le­mas de pri­vaci­dad; 2. Ningun sis­tema real de pre­mios y castigos;

  2. 2 | networking-social.com | Infos, actus et prospective du networking social — January 25, 2007 at 1:56 am

    Cela fait presque qua­tre ans que le net­work­ing social est un phénomèné de masse (aux US tout du moins). Tris­tant Louis fait le point en lis­tant ce qui marche et ce qui né marche pas… Une lec­ture indis­pens­able. Les 5 pistes pour aller au succès Les 5 erreurs à né pas faire Pub­lié réflections, social net­work­ing, analyse, vie privée, social soft­ware, Réseaux Soci­aux | Mod­i­fier | Aucun commentaire »

  3. 3nextplease — October 17, 2006 at 1:10 pm

    #1 Rea­son for Doc­tor Vis­its in the U.S. Cor­po­ral Pun­ish­ment — 2 Rea­sons For Out­law­ing It The Top 3 Rea­sons to Col­o­nize Space Impeach Bush: The Four Rea­sons for Respon­si­ble Cit­i­zen­ship 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail 6 Rea­sons on Why are You Pro­cras­ti­nat­ing 7 Tips for Nam­ing Your Web 2.0 Startup — Folksonomy.org Top 8 Rea­sons HCI is in its Stone Age 9 Rea­sons To Become an Evil Super Vil­lain Top 10 Rea­sons to Work at Google

  4. 4Joel Cere on Reputation Protection And Brand Promotion In The Blog Era — October 8, 2006 at 7:50 pm

    Tris­tan Louis gives us 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail and 5 rea­sons why social net­works can suc­ceed. I would add that social net­works can fail or suc­ceed depend­ing on whether they attract the right type of crowd at the first place, then bal­ance mem­bers qual­ity and quan­tity. Exam­ple: if you and your

  5. 5WHOLLYDEV — September 11, 2006 at 6:28 am

    5 rea­sons why social net­works can suc­ceed 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail Top Ten Under­served Web 2.0 Mar­kets Posted in Social Net­works, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment

  6. 6Valley of SpiritSeekerS — September 8, 2006 at 3:22 am

    http://www.tnl.net/blog/2006/06/15/5-reasons-why-social-networks-fail/

  7. 7Boinblog — August 7, 2006 at 7:26 pm

    fait presque qua­tre ans que le net­work­ing social est un phénomèné de masse (aux US tout du moins). Tris­tant Louis fait le point en lis­tant ce qui marche et ce qui né marche pas… Une lec­ture indis­pens­able. Les 5 pistes pour aller au succès Les 5 erreurs à né pas faire Mr Boin | Social Soft­ware | [IMG Date:] samedi 1 juil­let 2006 à 10:19 | [IMG Com­men­taires:] 0 | [IMG Track­backs:] 0

  8. 8c h r i s t o p h e r c r o s d a l e . c o m — August 4, 2006 at 1:21 am

    This plays a part in shar­ing per­sonal life expe­ri­ence. This sorted group would have to be pro­vided with the fol­low­ing ameni­ties (although a much more com­pre­hen­sive and well thought out list can be found at TNL.com): Anonymity: One would need to feel safe. All the above infor­ma­tion would be hid­den. No Spam: Noth­ing kills a group faster than spam mes­sages. It deper­son­al­izes the expe­ri­ence. Although ads could be pro­vided in a neu­tral loca­tion to raise revenue.

  9. 9Atlanta Media Bloggers — July 30, 2006 at 7:18 pm

    hyku | blog — com­men­tary by blog and social media con­sul­tant Josh Hal­lett Tech­Links: a Guide to Tech­nol­ogy in Geor­gia Blog Trig­gers | Copy­blog­ger Career­Jour­nal | As Blog­ging Goes Cor­po­rate, It Becomes a Full-Time Job 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail The Rise Of Cor­po­rate Blogs COLOURlovers :: palettes of colour love. Tat­too your Blog only on BlogChalking.com Atlanta New Media Conference

  10. 10 Svejo.net: Един от първите Social Network сайтове у нас? | NovaVizia.com - Издание за мениджмънт, бизне — May 16, 2007 at 5:03 am

    социални мрежи”, вижте тези материали: Десет глупави начина да попречим на пазарното навлизане на нов продукт 5 причини защо се провалят социалните мрежи 5 причини защо социалните мрежи могат да успеят Ситуационна приложимост в социалните мрежи Дълъг списък със сайтове тип

  11. 11For the Socialset of the net. — September 2, 2010 at 9:40 pm

    how Social net­works will pro­vide new oppor­tu­ni­ties to the least desired of our com­mu­ni­ties. If Face­book were to have any  wor­ries about the pos­si­ble suc­cess of their plat­form, and who in their right blog would doubt it ? , they might take a look at 5 Rea­sons Social Net­works fail.  Tris­tan Louis hits on a few more salient points to issues con­cern­ing social net­works, cer­tainly as much as Chris Pir­illo man­aged. How­ever you can ignore the rather obvi­ous ” we are; your not!”

  12. 12Les réseaux sociaux » Une analyse des réseaux sociaux sur “SmartMobs” — June 30, 2006 at 7:26 am

    […] Le site Smart­Mobs nous pro­pose une analyse de la valeur des réseaux soci­aux à tra­vers deux bil­lets : “5 raisons d’échec des réseaux sociaux” et “5 raisons de succès des réseaux sociaux” (atten­tion, con­tenu en anglais)… Voilà une occa­sion de réagir sur le sujet ! Cat:  […]

  13. 13Idearios.com.br » links for 2006-07-01 — June 30, 2006 at 10:21 pm

    […] 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail Análise crítica sobre redes soci­ais (tags: socialnetwork) […]

  14. 14Fabian — July 1, 2006 at 7:33 am

    Dear Tris­tan,

    great post. I espe­cially agree with your sec­ond point (miss­ing inte­gra­tion with other apps), but want to point you to a web­ser­vice that is about to launch in sep­tem­ber. At its heart it’s a browser exten­sion that allows users to build trusted social net­works with other users from which they want to get page rat­ings from while brows­ing or search­ing the web.
    Basi­cally we just use social net­work­ing for the dis­tri­b­u­tion of meta­data (rat­ings, tags, com­ments etc.), that oth­er­wise comes from anony­mous (=not nec­es­sar­ily trust­wor­thy) sources.
    It’s old page and doc­u­men­ta­tion can be found here: http://getoutfoxed.com

    We are cur­rently in a closed beta test­ing phase and I’d love to invite you to it. If you’re inter­ested, just drop me a line!

    Best,

    –Fabian

  15. 15Social Network Essays at Stylishly Dangerous — July 1, 2006 at 11:06 am

    […] 5 Rea­sons Why Social Net­works Fail […]

  16. 16semanticpool :: thoughts :: Social networks fail - because of privacy concerns? — July 1, 2006 at 2:43 pm

    […] Tris­tan Louis lists some rea­sons why social net­works may fail. One rea­son is that peo­ple pay atten­tion to their pri­vacy and are not will­ing to share all their pri­vate data. Tris­tan also says that such net­works have to get more inte­grated with other appli­ca­tions and have to stop their exis­tence as “walled gardens”. […]

  17. 17Princess Sarah — July 1, 2006 at 3:00 pm

    i think facebook.com does the job best.

  18. 18harper — July 1, 2006 at 8:55 pm

    Whats funny — is that ful­fills all these rules.

    No interoptibil­ity, Ran by a for­mer spam com­pany, Not inte­grated with any­thing, too big, and no obvi­ous reward or penalty system.

    Yet it is the biggest and cra­zi­est web­site ever. wtf.

  19. 19Pig Pen - Web Standards Compliant Web Design Blog » Blog Archive » Why Social Networks Fail — July 2, 2006 at 2:31 am

    […] Why Social Net­works Fail […]

  20. 20dave — July 2, 2006 at 1:09 pm

    have you actu­ally looked for any of these sites? you sound com­pletely out of touch with what you are try­ing to com­ment on.. Add/remove friends, pms, email, skype, icq, all these things have been around in social net­work com­mu­ni­ties for years. And you say: “There is really lit­tle value in know­ing peo­ple just for the sake of know­ing peo­ple.” Did you stop to think that the biggest social net­works are friends sites? Peo­ple want to know peo­ple for mak­ing friends, not to use them or sell them out to make money!
    Try typ­ing pen­pals, mail­friends, friends com­mu­ni­ties, or any­thing sim­i­lar into search engines and you might learn some­thing. You sound like some­one telling us it would be a good idea if phones were portable (the things you are talk­ing about have already hap­pened!!!!)
    Regards, dave

  21. 21themaskedman — July 3, 2006 at 3:06 pm

    I think you are totally out of touch too. You are miss­ing the whole point of these things. These AUGMENT real world rela­tion­ships… who the hell wants to have FIRST con­tact with some­one through one of these. Not me nor any of my friends. We use these to keep in touch with peo­ple we ALREADY know or have met. The things that you are talk­ing about are almost all irrel­e­vant to what we actu­ally are using MySpace and Face­book for.

  22. 22Tristan Louis — July 3, 2006 at 9:53 pm

    Dave: I’m actu­ally on quite a few social net­works and, apart from linkedin, most of them have been com­pletely use­less to me.

    The­Masked­Man: If their sole pur­pose is to aug­ment real world rela­tion­ships, then they are not really social net­works (in the tra­di­tional sense of the term). MySpace and Face­book are use­ful as points of iden­tity and con­nec­tion with oth­ers but what “net­work­ing” value do they pro­vide. I under­stand they work as social space but how do they work on the sec­ond axis of the equation?

  23. 23Webmaster Tool Bag » Blog Archive » So you think you can build a social network — July 4, 2006 at 1:36 am

    […] 5 Rea­sons social net­works suc­ceed 5 rea­sons why social net­work­ing fails […]

  24. 24Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Social Networking Analysis — July 4, 2006 at 11:05 am

    […] He links to three dif­fer­ent the­o­ries, here’s the high­lights: Essay One: 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail –Tris­tan Louis 5. Pri­vacy con­cerns (Jere­miah, Agreed, spot on –that’s why folks often cre­ate avatars) […]

  25. 25Duncan — July 6, 2006 at 6:50 pm

    I have been in sev­eral groups over a num­ber of years. It depends on what you put into a group as to what you get back. As my life has changed, I have moved away from some groups and toward oth­ers. It can be a lot of work.

  26. 26kenobi — July 7, 2006 at 12:39 pm

    I’ve yet to visit a net­work where I don’t think ‘what now?’. Okay, it’s a ‘lean back’ activ­ity for peo­ple who want to browse / kill time, but man, I can think of bet­ter ways. Social net­works are noth­ing new — they’re blogs with a greater empha­sis on the the ‘my favourites / related links’. Only now they’re called ‘friends’.

  27. 27dave — July 8, 2006 at 4:44 pm

    “who the hell wants to have FIRST con­tact with some­one through one of these. Not me nor any of my friends. We use these to keep in touch with peo­ple we ALREADY know or have met.”

    Just because i am rude doesn’t make me wrong. The major­ity of peo­ple on these sites use them to make new friends, not keep in touch with the ones they have.

    yes you can meet these peo­ple in real life, and yes those friend­ships can end up being much stronger than friends you met offline, because if you read people’s mes­sage board posts and pro­files you can have much more idea what kind of per­son they are before you start a friend­ship with them, than you do when start­ing friend­ships with peo­ple offline who you know much less about, because peo­ple are much more pub­lic in show­ing their char­ac­ter and have the oppor­tu­nity to do so, much more eas­ily online.

  28. 28Storygeek » Why Social Networks Fail #5 – Walled Gardens — July 9, 2006 at 11:28 pm

    […] From Smart­mobs I found a ref­er­ence to an inter­est­ing arti­cle by Tris­tan Louis a inter­net com­menter on the rea­sons why social net­works fail. Louis lists five rea­sons and I thought I would have a look at each of them in rela­tion to Wikipedia. The first rule is walled gar­dens which is a hot lit­tle meme right now. I have heard it in a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent places. Louis says this: […]

  29. 29GuiM Weblog — July 25, 2006 at 12:56 pm

    Les 5 pistes pour aller au succès Les 5 erreurs à né pas faire Tech­no­rati Tags: net­work­ing, réseaux, social, soci­aux 25/07/2006 dans Lu sur le web, Social Net­work­ing | Lien per­ma­nent | Com­men­taires (0) | Track­Back (0)

  30. 30Nate — July 26, 2006 at 5:12 pm

    Pri­vacy con­cerns are far and beyond the top rea­son why social netoworks fall. Myspace is being con­stantly charged for cer­tain secu­rity issues because nobody tells real infor­ma­tion and peo­ple begin talk­ing to peo­ple they thought were around their age with the same inter­ests. While Myspace now exists as the #1 site, it is going to have to chance some of its sys­tems or else HUGE prob­lems will arise.

  31. 31Newbie 2.0 » Blog Archive » Creating a successful social network — August 9, 2006 at 3:07 pm

    […] Why social net­works fail […]

  32. 32Digitaler Film » Werbung und User-Generated Videos brauchen ein Werbenetzwerk 2.0 — September 11, 2006 at 5:01 am

    […] Alle Aktio­nen im Net­zw­erk tra­gen zum Sta­tus bei. Die Pro­duzen­ten können sowohl belohnt als auch bestraft werden. […]

  33. 33VIABUZZ » Blog Archive » Social Networking hubbub — September 20, 2006 at 3:21 pm

    […] 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail […]

  34. 34Top Ten Lists — October 31, 2006 at 11:26 am

    […] 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail […]

  35. 35PCheek.com » Blog Archive » teet…Fashionably Late? — November 18, 2006 at 10:54 pm

    […] There are a few signs of the social net­work­ing aspect of this new ser­vice includ­ing users, inter­ests, and blogs. After glanc­ing at the screen­shot it seems like there will be some def­i­nite prob­lems with this startup since there are already a lot of social net­work­ing com­mu­ni­ties estab­lished includ­ing some of the most pop­u­lar like MySpace and Face­book. Will Teet be fash­ion­able late in the social net­work­ing indus­try and catch up with the oth­ers or will it join the fail­ing sites? Unfor­tu­nately we will not be able to see any out­come until Feb­ru­ary of 2007. […]

  36. 36Resonance Partnership Blog — November 26, 2006 at 1:23 am

    cure mul­ti­ple web per­son­al­ity dis­or­der” depend­ing upon how you look at it. As an aside, I think they might be miss­ing an impor­tant point, con­text; we have “mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ties” in real life, too. Tris­tan Louis expands upon this in a post about why social net­works fail.  And, as Stowe Boyd writes, “If social net­works pro­vide a value, it has to be con­tex­tual. An SNA con­not pro­vide some sort of blan­ket sup­port for all sorts of peo­ple doing all sorts of things.

  37. 37Social Networks…You’ve Got Birthday | Marketing — November 26, 2006 at 11:05 pm

    […] As an aside, I think they might be miss­ing an impor­tant point, con­text; we have “multiple personalities” in real life, too. Tris­tan Louis expands upon this in a post about why social net­works fail. And, as Stowe Boyd writes, “If social net­works pro­vide a value, it has to be con­tex­tual. An SNA can­not pro­vide some sort of blan­ket sup­port for all sorts of peo­ple doing all sorts of things.” […]

  38. 38Ines Mergel — December 6, 2006 at 9:56 pm

    You can down­load the full paper on the Work­ing Paper web­site of the Pro­gram on Net­worked Gov­er­nance at Har­vard. Also: check out my entry on the Pro­gram on Net­worked Gov­er­nance Blog. Appen­dix: Inter­est­ing post: “Why social net­works fail” over at Tris­tan Louis’ weblog.

  39. 39meish dot org » links for 2006-07-01 — January 5, 2007 at 2:23 pm

    […] 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail (tags: social net­works socialnetwork) […]

  40. 40Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog — March 27, 2007 at 9:36 pm

    [IMG iStock_000000413234Small.jpg] Here are three inter­est­ing essays about how social net­works work. Highly rel­e­vant read­ing for any­one in a social net­work­ing company—or invest­ing in one. 5 rea­sons why social net­works fail 5 rea­sons why social net­works can suc­ceed Sit­u­a­tional Rel­e­vance in Social Net­work­ing Web­sites Orig­i­nal Post: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/social_networki.html Posted by Future­lab at 2:08 PM

  41. 41Strafverteidiger München — April 19, 2007 at 3:57 pm

    […] Tris­tan Louis lists some rea­sons why social net­works may fail. One rea­son is that peo­ple pay atten­tion to their pri­vacy and are not will­ing to share all their pri­vate data. Tris­tan also says that such net­works have to get more inte­grated with other appli­ca­tions and have to stop their exis­tence as “walled gardens”. […]

  42. 42Of Interest — May 10, 2007 at 2:49 am

    (in 2007, I actu­ally did some pro­jec­tions on the growth of Sec­ond Life, one of the more pop­u­lar vir­tual world). In par­al­lel, I exam­ined oppor­tu­ni­ties in social net­works, rea­sons for their suc­cess, and poten­tial for fail­ure. One of the issue I see as poten­tially aris­ing is sur­round­ing what hap­pens when vir­tual and real world col­lide? Along with all the other entries I listed here, I started to develop a new view of the future, which I high­lighted into the

  43. 43Failure for Free « Seth Godin Project — December 8, 2008 at 2:48 pm

    […] Fail­ure for Free Decem­ber 8, 2008 at 6:47 pm | In Uncat­e­go­rized | Tags: Clay Shirky In the 10th chap­ter of Here Comes Every­one, Clay Shirky dis­cusses the many social net­work­ing failures. […]

  44. 44Sociální sítÄ› — February 26, 2009 at 7:33 pm

    I think social net­works can pro­duce rev­enue not only for own­ers of a net, but also for members.

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