Another week, another social network – part 2

I realized that I did not mention Yahoo! Kickstart in my last post about social networks.

Yahoo! has had clear success in injecting social components in its offering, most notably through Yahoo! Travel and Yahoo! Answers. Interestingly, the portal did not try to create yet another generic social network and went for a niche approach with Kickstart.

The service aims at establishing bridges between two worlds are not strongly interconnected from a social computing standpoint: the business universe where LinkedIn is the social network of choice, and the academic universe where Facebook established its initial stronghold.

Linkedin offers amongst other things to put job applicants in contact with company insiders that they are connected to, and Kickstart follows in those footsteps. Kickstart is in fact probably closer to Doostang than Linkedin. It inherits a few things from Yahoo! … its enormous traffic, its brand reputation with young adults, and its legitimacy on the job search segment through HotJobs.

There is undoubtedly a need for this service. The HR department of one of my clients recruits a lot of graduates every year and was interested in a similar application as part of the redesign of their web site. In corporate marketing, as the war for talent intensifies, brochures have no longer the same impact as word of mouth and peer conversations – just like in consumer marketing.

The key question for the future of Yahoo! Kickstart is whether Facebook (or an independent third party Facebook developer) will offer a similar service to its fast growing user base. Which in turn brings us to the larger topic of the professional credentials of Facebook – so far, the network has been mainly synonymous with frivolous time-killing activities like games and quizzes.

Can Facebook become a force in business networking? Is an exchange protocol a la OpenSocial the answer? What do you think?

Another week, another social network

Everyone seems to be jumping on the social network bandwagon these days, and things are unlikely to slow down given Microsoft’s valuation of Facebook at $15 billion.

There is certainly what Gartner calls a hype cycle at play with social networks – not just in general, but with each of them individually. Friendster was the first social network to falter into oblivion, and MySpace’s growth has considerably slowed down.

I remember reading a post a long time ago that was comparing social networks to trendy bars and restaurants: the people motivated by exclusivity move on to a new spot as soon as the crowds start to show up in the current one.

Social network fatigue will grow in parallel with, if not faster than the number of solicitations. Like for email newsletters, there is a finite amount of user time and attention available. Each new network brings dilution and accelerates the path to saturation. In that regard, Google’s somewhat ballyhooed launch of OpenSocial is a timely announcement even if it does not address the core issue of proliferation.

Behind the generic term “social networks”, I feel that there is in fact a number of different approaches. Here is my take at a quick and dirty classification of social networks.

1) In the first category (“connection networks”) you can of course find the most popular names, from Myspace and Facebook to Hi5 and Orkut. At the core of those services there is a “connection engine” and initially the main activity of the users is to accumulate contacts. Sharing becomes most gratifying after they reach a certain threshold in terms of network size.

2) Services like Plaxo Pulse or AIM Pages are built on existing connections like email address books or IM buddy lists. They are mainly adding a content sharing layer to communication tools, and that is why I nickname them “communication networks”.

While these first two types are intentionally generic, the other types of social networks are focused on narrower purposes. I would call them “topic networks”, “demographic networks”, and “media networks”.

3) Social networks like last.fm, LinkedIn, Xbox Live, and sermo.com gather users around a specific interest topic – respectively music, business, gaming, and medical research. Sites like Bebo or MySpace still very much reflect their original focus on music, but they have become less specialized over time.

4) Any topic can be discussed on social networs like eons.com (for people past 50 years old) and cafemom.com but membership satisfies specific demographic criteria.

5) Social networks on sites like usatoday.com or ESPN Sports Nation aim at increasing audience engagement, and as such remain secondary to “journalistic” content.

I would love to hear other opinions and comments on this: would you classify social networks differently? Do you see other categories? Can you think of other examples?