Once upon (5-6 years ago!) a time, online communities and sharing common interests meant, at most the newsgroups or Yahoo groups, at their highest level of sophistication. Discussion forums were at their peak usage.
Since then there has been rapid growth of social networking phenomenon fuelled by the ones born after 1991 - an interesting fact I heard Bebo’s president make. She noted, when Digital Natives were in their nappies, the SMSs were just hitting the roads and when Digital Natives went to high school for the first time, iPods were already in market. Natives flocked Myspaces’ of the world to freely express themselves and live the parallel digital life.
However, it is seems these audience are hard to stay with one site. Churn has become major issue at Yahoo! and Myspace. The question in the industry is – how to survive as generalist. Many specialist social networking sites have also sprang up recently e.g. last.fm for music, orkut for networking and so on.
No one site can claim sustaining viewership in 2-3 years term like in case of YouTube, Bebo has more than 35million users just within 2 years of its existence. Will Orkut keep its appeal as facebook storms the social network world as preferred site? Or will die the death of Friendster? This may be the first incident of Google experiencing death of one its brands.
I have tried Orkut, LinkedIn and facebook. Today, I have decided to move from Orkut to facebook. Orkut has become very boring and I don’t see any fun in visiting orkut site just to respond to a scrap or keep scrapping each other. Search and networking tools are absent from orkut.
LinkedIn is good and 6 degree separation concept has been well implemented. LinkedIn is still a sound business networking tool. However, I wish there was a bit fun into it and it seems facebook is filling that need of social networking. May be its time for LinkedIn to use facebook’s API to provide social networking features.
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