When Will A Social Network Hive Swarm?
- Posted by Jim Tobin on September 19th, 2007
filed in Social Networking |
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Social networking is fascinating. Simply looking at the membership in the popular social networking sites is mind-boggling. 50 million visitors to MySpace? 80 million? 200 million? That many people doing the same thing? Without anyone really (perceivably) planning for it? For a control freak (like me) or at least someone who has spent their life planning and running businesses, this kind of force is daunting and humbling and fascinating.
But then I look at Friendster, the darling of the Internet in 2003, with 20 million visitors. But suddenly, and inexplicably, its visitors started dropping like flies. The popularity, and sudden unpopularity, of a site seems serendipitous. No surprise, when you consider that most social networking sites are driven by teens and young adults.
Even those who develop and deploy social network sites can be puzzled by their success. Piczo is a Canadian social networking site that burst on the scene with over 10 million visitors last year. Its founder, Jim Conning says “I didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’m going to start a Web site for teenage girls.”
There is no question that teens and young adults and more older adults are gathering on social media sites. We humans are busy as bees, creating our hives. And like our apian brethren, we sometimes inexplicably swarm and buzz off to a new hive. Fascinating.