Verticalization of social networks.
The success of MySpace and Facebook has opened doors for plethora of websites targetting niche audiences ranging from cat and dog lovers to web sites for baby-boomers, cooking lovers, sports lovers, professional women etc. Some of these niche websites like catster and dogster are actually profitable and have come up with unique ways of monetizing their traffic (I would write on creative ways of monetizing some other time!!!)
Now back to the topic for this blog entry. My first introduction to social neworks happened over 7 years when I was in college. There was this website called egroups (now yahoo groups), which came up with a solution to create personalized groups. Within a month I was a member of couple of groups. We had a group for our wing, a group for our department and a group for our cricket team. These groups formed over 7 years ago, when the word ’social networks’ wasn’t even coined, are still active. Can a general platform like egroups provide all the functionality that these niche social networks provide? Definitely!!! And yet there seems to be a rat race among entrepreneurs and even the big players to come up with specialized solutions for extremely specific needs, which are very well served by the egroups of the world. How many of these will thrive 10 years from now? Only time will tell. My prediction for the future of social networks is consolidation. There will be two or three big players who would provide the kind of solution that egroup provided 8 years ago. The rest will either get acquired or simply go to the ‘Techcrunch Deadpool’!!!!
If you think that specialized social networks are bound to stay, please share in the comments.