Ever since mass interest in social networks in North America began in MySpace, and since moved to Facebook, start-ups have tried to duplicate its success through specialized and newly feasible social networks. Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare are several of the more popular ones. As much as these sites are discussed in the media as being popular I really believe that it’s mostly hype, and that most of these networks will never become as big as their developers or the experts speculate.
People thought that when the cell phone came out that we would be too much in contact with people to have things to talk about all the time. They had no idea how much that would change with the internet and its many social networks encompassing all different aspects of our life from what we buy to where we drink coffee. These sites are just creating new places to talk about and share things that we already do through a number of channels. We don’t need a specialized network to discuss every individual topic and issue. Having them all discussed in one sphere like Facebook is what allows ideas to jump between the issues and people to create solutions that people wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
Micro-blogging sites, like Twitter, and location-based networking sites, like Foursquare, each have their own interesting ability that make them useful, but they don’t really work for regular people whose lives are too boring to hear every detail about. I think that as Facebook evolves to encompass these specialized utilities, which it is already doing, I think that it will eventually become basically the only social network that people belong to. Right now Facebook offers exactly what Twitter does (Tweets=Status Updates). I just think people are into Twitter because it’s ‘in’ right now, but most will grow tired of having to toggle between multiple networks and will want to be able to access it all through one single channel.
As an aside though I do think that there will always be different social networks based on language and a ‘business’ network like LinkedIn, as it’s purpose is business-related and not to socialize with friends.
Steeves
Nick Myself 