Deluge of Social Networking Startups
It is silly hour in startupland and it is called “Everything Social”! My inbox is jammed with more pitches of some mutant form of social network that promises to be “totally unique” and “the next big thing” and the “Facebook killer”. Here is a smattering of a few such pitches that can be summed up by the following taglines:
- Social network for shopping (tons of these)
- Social network for pets
- Social dining (in every conceivable way)
- Social network for small business owners
- Social lending
- Social media for the afterlife
- Social network for the unemployed
With Instagram being bought for a cool billion and social video getting hot like a three alarm fire, social media is only getting more exposure, more frothy, and more people looking to cash in. The draw of building a social network totally makes sense in this environment.
On the flip side, social networking seems like this evolving thing. I get that Facebook sucks, Path is only limited to 50 connections, and that Twitter is not really a social network. I understand that social is the flavor du jour of the investor class. And I am hip to the fact that it really just taking what we did offline into the online world and making it easier for like-minded people to connect.
That is the issue however, we are simply taking an offline model and assuming an online social model is suddenly a vast improvement. We have been down this road before in the first dot com boom when everyone was clambering to be the next eCommerce site for this or that industry. Amazon and eBay got some traction, and then we got the ecommerce gold rush. We saw how well that worked for the likes of Webvan and Pets.com and we might be heading for the same result, but this time with social networks leading us down the falls in a barrel*.
There is no great leap when you take a niche market and simply build a derivative product. We already have Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr, we really do not need another variation for this market or that. If what you are doing is truly innovative, then it will create its own category and own terminology. For what it’s worth, social is no longer a differentiator or a unique entity, it is merely a feature of something bigger. Instead of building something that is like Facebook or some other social network, build something that stands on its own merits, adds immediate value to users, and integrates the elements of social media if it truly makes sense to do so.
* Note that going over Niagara Falls is extremely dangerous and is not recommended, but does sound like tons of fun if you live.
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