What will be the next big thing in social networks? What are your thoughts?
Local neighbors network? No-interface social networks? Peer-to-peer? Anonymous social networks? Video based (YouTube/Twitch)? Messanger-only? No central news-feed?
Local neighbors network? No-interface social networks? Peer-to-peer? Anonymous social networks? Video based (YouTube/Twitch)? Messanger-only? No central news-feed?
Reasons: - Local/OSS/decentralized social networks will not work for the common population because their friends and updates will not be there.
- Video based is already a success, see Twitch, but people sometimes prefer text and likes.
- Messenger only is also a success, see Whatsapp/FB messenger, but some people have the need to expose themselves to people outside their groups.
- Pinterest, Instagram and Google+ have their own public which mostly likely are also in FB. They use it for difference purposes.
- Twitter, well this one it's difficult. First of all most of the communication is public and some users are not interested in that. Also there's a lot of self promotion messages which does not mean it will engage users to communicate. Finally Twitter tries to reinvent itself and the features are not consistent. i.e. For several weeks they enabled translations and after it was disabled. Twitter might have a chance to engage more people with Tvshows, movies, music and personalities.
Facebook after all is the social network which is easier to get started, makes a balance between public and private/groups, lot's of features available (games, messenger, groups etc...) and families and friends in the same feed. I guess it's pretty hard to beat that currently for other social networks.
It has slowly become the centralized place for connecting with people, especially when not considering the minority of very tech-savy people.
I am at a party and I met somebody I want to hang out with? He/she's probably on facebook then we'll communicate on that. Wanna look up for my old class-mates? Let's search for them on facebook.
The timeline will be empty/boring/spam, but the messaging app will be full.
FB is basically AOL, which was basically CompuServe, which was a combination of DEC networking and BBS culture. (Kind of, if you squint hard and wave your hands around in the right way.)
There is always niche for this kind of all-in-one social/messaging/groups/etc. It's a very big and profitable niche, and someone always owns it. But the incumbents change over time, and there are disruptions whenever the underlying technology changes.
FB is likely a safe bet until something new appears. The obvious near-term move is 3D social/gaming, which is why FB bought Oculus. Longer terms that may not be enough, because it's not obvious head-mounted 3D VR is going to be pleasant and friction-free enough for everyday casual use.
My guess is the something new will have strong elements of AI and social and perhaps VR too - but I could be wrong about that.
Social networks are only useful to people if the other people with whom they want to communicate are ON those networks.
Right now, Facebook has that massive directory. This can change, of course. The Internet does not have permanent favorites. But today, Facebook is where you can easily find and interact with people.
I think that WebRTC will deliver a lot of opportunities in that arena.
I don't think news feeds are going away, and I think that Twitter (if they can clean out the bot accounts) is one of the better resources in that gateway.
As to messenger systems... no idea... right now it kind of sucks... it was bad enough with yahoo, icq, aol, and msn messenger... now it's even more networks with even more disconnect outside facebook, and fb's app is about as invasive as it gets in terms of device privacy.
My observations are that people don't care about being social, they want a place where they can post their frustrations, Facebook is a good platform for that.
Twitter, Instgram, Snapchat and others all have their user base, but it's way smaller and less relevant than the people using the services believe. If you and your circle of friends are only on e.g. Snapchat, that's platform will seem much more valuable and relevant that it really is. Same with Twitter, the tech world sees Twitter as way more relevant and valuable than it really is, because that the platform that many of us use (I don't, Twitter is in my just a way of following celebrities in the TV/Movie/politic or tech- world).
Some for of group chat might be handy, but there's room for a ton of these services. Although users will tend to cluster. Videos and voice is unimportant, text and pictures are not.
FB:Path::Reddit:HackerNews I think.
Then again, fb will probably just try to acquire them.
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