Whither Friendster? Whither Facebook? Whither the next big thing?

[samedietc]

when the rubble clears from the great friendster crash of '04, i will have nothing. ben will have nothing. none of us will have anything. no more friends. no more testimonials. no more instant self-assurance nor affirmation of life's few treasures. nothing. zero. abcess. lack. waste. enemies.
Danny Gibson wrote that testimonial for me in 2003, and

Comments

[jundai]

I've never read Snow Crash (or any of his books, actually).

Incidentally, while Counterstrike wasn't really a networking experience for us, it was on some minimal level a social interaction (and a creating of shared experiences). For others, however, it was more of a networking experience as people set up guilds and in doing so took the game more seriously than I was ever prepared to. I've certainly known people that have met other people through CS. The networking aspect of WoW is, of course, much more pervasive than that.

Ravelry (hobby-specific) is another niche SNS that I forgot to mention. If there isn't a good one for cooking, I'm sure there will be before long. workingwithrails is a rudimentary, but very-specific SNS (professional->industry-specific->technology-specific) that I've gotten at least five e-mails through asking if I was available for hire. There's also last.fm and now Pandora.

Then there are sites for online/offline social networking: meetup.com and a million online dating sites.

I wouldn't say that Facebook even comes close to being a major landmark in the development of online social networking (certainly not the way sixdegrees, friendster, mixi, etc., have been). More than anything else, it represents the current status of SNSes, and if the founders are lucky and effective enough, it will manage to gain a long-lasting status as the de facto SNS. For the future of online social networking, however, I would look to WoW, Second Life, Linked In, GoodReads/Ravelry/etc., and the nascent world of mobile social networking that will inevitably become the dominant mode of online social networking (5-10 years is my guess).

I think that the concept of SNSes will eventually die out as it starts to become second nature. We will come to expect social networking aspects in everything we do online, and we will find companies looking to integrate networks so that as we go from site to site we are still in the same social network. The biggest step in this direction was the feature wherein SNSes can suck in our address books and tell us if any of our gmail/aol/etc. contacts are already in their network. Before long I think we can expect a merging of the SNS and IM concept. Something like meebo and Facebook merged into one site. SNSes themselves can't do much, but when they are integrated over the backbone of an IM system that will be a pretty significant development, I think.

What do I want it to be like? I'm not really sure. WoW and Second Life scare me, but I don't see any fundamental problem with them. They are simply a logical step in our technological evolution, and I'm curious to see what the next two or three major projects in the development of online virtual reality.