It can be argued that Facebook is now the de facto online social network with almost 500 million registered users, with only a few countries such as China (QQ), Russia (Vkontakte), Japan (Mixi) and Brazil (Orkut) left where it is not the dominant social force. Facebook has been especially successful in expanding geographically via local language implementations and is now taking this further by also extending users’ social graphs and activities to the wider web through its Open Graph tools (announced at their F8 conference last week).
These new tools enable any website to become ‘social’ – allowing users to share, recommend and comment on content, while even being able to chat to other friends outside of Facebook. The site is therefore weaving a social fabric into the web, which all leads back to Facebook. This allows Facebook to collect massive amounts of personalised data on its users. Sound familiar? Just as Google uses search and its other products (the Chrome browser, Gmail email service, YouTube etc.) to collect user data to serve relevant advertising, Facebook is building an extensive and massively detailed database of their users’ needs, activities, interests, you name it. This is now no longer confined to only within the Facebook walled garden. For all intents and purposes, Facebook – like Google with search – is becoming an advertising company by winning the social game.
So where does this leave other social networks? Sure, countries like China might just not be a cultural fit for the Facebook model (not to mention insulated and limited via censorship). However, as a general-purpose social network, Facebook is probably unassailable at this point. Which leads us to the question: how does a scrappy social service compete with the mighty Facebook?
In my opinion, there are a few ways for niche (as opposed to general) social services to compete:
- Specialise – focus on a particular social aspect and excel at it (i.e. LinkedIn offers business networking and operates as a ‘stealth recruitment service’)
- Exclusivity – limit access to users of a certain, social, economic or other metric (i.e. ASMALLWORLD is a private network which started out as the Myspace for the rich and famous and limits invitations to ‘trusted’ members)
- Be distinctive – offer a service that Facebook doesn’t (i.e. Foursquare is a combination of a game and social network and uses a user’s location to allow venue check-ins)
Using one or more of the above elements, these niche social networks have been able to carve out successful and sometimes highly profitable positions in the face of Facebook’s growing influence. Some others I can think of are Flickr (for photo-sharing), Last.fm (for music lovers), TripAdvisor (for travellers) and Club Penguin (for children).
Are there any other successful or up-and-coming niche social networks you can think of? And do you think there are other ways for these services to compete other than being specialised, exclusive or distinctive?
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