5 reasons why social networks fail

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)