The future of online networks: Big vs Niche
Posted on January 8, 2008
Filed Under Interviews / Leaders, Social Networking / Media |
The year 2007 was the story of social media: networking sites got bigger than ever, and attracted valuations one could not have imagined. But is being big the way to go in the future? Or will smaller, niche sites be able to offer greater value to users, especially for those looking for professional gains? To shed some light on this issue, TechGazing has the following following guest post by Avneet Jolly, Founder and CEO, Insightory, - a knowledge sharing, collaboration and networking platform for management professionals, academicians and graduate students:
In my view, mega social networking services (Facebook, MySpace) as well as professional networking services (LinkedIn, Xing) have grown big simply because they provide the ‘basic’ tools such as online profiles, message boards, alerts, ‘connects,’ social graphs etc. These never existed before – certainly not in a big way.
However, in the future it won’t be enough to just provide these tools – people will join and stick with networks that add more value – or they will drop into and out of networks based on their situation. One will have to decide on the tradeoffs between ‘big and clunky’ networks and smaller more intimate ones. You may want to be able to reach an expert quickly, but if the expert is in a network of millions, the chances that he/she is ‘tuned in’ when you need an answer is pretty low. On the other hand, if you don’t use the network at all, then the chances of you finding an expert may be zero (if you want something for free.)
On the other hand, you may have seen sermo.com - the ‘MySpace for doctors.’ And then there’s another one: careflash.com. This isn’t specific to a profession; rather it is specific to a particular situation that people find themselves in i.e. a hospitalization. So they would drop in to this ‘network’ and drop out when the situation passes. I think this ‘more-than-a-blog-but-less-than-a-website’ type of entity may catch on in many manifestations – college, wedding, pregnancy, hospitalization, and perhaps even terminal illness!
I don’t think the mega-networks will roll back – rather, they will grow. But there will emerge (is emerging) another set of profession-specific/ situation-specific such as the ones I have mentioned. So if you are not getting your specific answer from the big clunky mega network, you can go to the smaller network of – say – airline travelers or marketing gurus. The probability that there is relevant expertise within the network increases as you go from a ‘Facebook’ to a ‘LinkedIn’ to an ‘Insightory’ to . . . the individual level. But the chances that you can get them to do something for free reduce as you go along that same direction – because in the smaller network, the expert has a smaller audience. They don’t get their 15 minutes of fame by responding to your question. In the smaller network, the ‘karma points’ balance is between the expert and you – not between the expert and the community; hence the chances of getting ‘paid back’ are very low.
Profession-specific/ situation-specific networks will probably live within a broader environment. What remains to be seen is if that broader environment is a Facebook/ LinkedIn type of environment, or a more simple/ generic email-calendar-online profile type of environment (such as Yahoo or Google are promoting).
There are some interesting but crude ‘experiments’ swirling around in the area of micro-tasks and micro-payments (e.g. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) and ‘human powered search’ (chacha and mahalo) – these may change the way social networks are constructed and ultimately used.
If you want a really provocative thought: I think in the really long run (may not be in my lifetime), there will be a single ‘mother of all networks’ (let’s call it MOAN) which contains information on every human being. Every other network will be a ‘satellite’ or ‘value added’ service around the MOAN. By its very nature, MOAN will have to be managed by an ICANN-like body or by a UN department.
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The idea of a MySpace or Facebook for doctors makes sense. My father was a doctor, and I have some insight into the profession. The problem is, most doctors these days (at least the ones I know) would have very little time for it. When they’re working, it’s constant activity and even in today’s medical environment with highly advanced technology all around (CT and MRI scans, and other space-age diagnostic equipment), doctors in the USA are amazingly, incredibly computer illiterate or ignorant, because they have very little time for P2P interaction on the Internet.
Nonetheless, can I see the advantage of social networking for doctors. If this can somehow be worked right into the medical school curriculum, so all doctors become familiar with a single, universal social networking platform for the medical profession — even a global one — that would be an incredible way to knit together the profession, share knowledge in real-time, and keep abreast of the latest information.
In the USA, medical internship and residency training entails not just patient care, but frequent “rounds” with other doctors on the hospital wards, where patient diagnostics and treatment are discussed in great detail. Additionally, there are so-called “Morbidity and Mortality” conferences for the hospital interns and residents (specialists in training), which take place weekly in conference halls in the teaching hospitals.
If these educational conferences and meetings could be combined with a universal platform for the sharing of new information, the medical profession — and the teaching of medicine — would greatly benefit.
Sharing knowledge is a big time saver. And saving time saves lives. But this kind of thing has to be worked into the curriculum, and seamlessly integrated into the way doctors are trained, otherwise it will be rejected as a time-waster.