Life After Facebook: Alternative Futures for Social Networking

I had an interesting discussion today about the future of social networking. It got me thinking that this functionality is being applied in two opposite directions. One you might call the Facebook-style umbrella approach. The other is more a la carte.

Sites such as Facebook are aggregating every social connection and sharing feature they can think of under one roof. Everything you’d want to do with your friends, relatives, business contacts, and other acquaintances—or even people who aren’t yet acquaintances but whom you’d probably like to know—is facilitated or enabled under a single social networking brand. It’s very efficient: create one profile, upload photos and videos to one place, enter one friend list, etc. More important from the business perspective, the brand gains tremendous insight into each network member, information that can then be used to target advertising or in other monetization schemes.

In the Facebook scenario there are only a few winners and many losers—similar to how EBay is on top with online auctions, Google wins web search, and Amazon corners the market for online book sales.

At the same time, though, there’s an alternative trend with many winners. These are the sites that are picking and choosing social networking features to enhance businesses across the spectrum of online services: media, e-commerce, financial services, games, informational sites, and all the rest. They aren’t Facebook rivals; they just want to harvest some of the engagement, loyalty, content creation, cost savings, insight into user preferences, and other benefits that various social strategies have to offer.

Sites that use these features well will enhance their businesses. Also, there are significant opportunities for third parties to provide software-as-a-service functionality to customers who lack the technical proficiency to develop applications themselves. While the universe of possible interactions online expands, the user experience paradigms converge. Business opportunities multiply. Sometimes the sum of the parts exceeds the whole.