The Value of Social Networks

The announcement today of ITV selling Friends Reunited for a small fraction of the price it was purchased for should give anyone involved in the development or delivery of web based services pause for thought. The web has a tendency to create a massive short lived buzz around a service and then without a moments thought the attention shifts elsewhere.

It is often forgotten in the moment of Twitter, Facebook and MySpace that Friends Reunited was one of the first social networks to really grab the public imagination. It was the acceptable face of online social interaction. A wonderfully simply concept. Join and add what schools you went too and when and see who wants to get in touch. It really grabbed the attention.

By the time ITV got involved other networks where evolving. One of the biggest differences (until recently) between Friends Reunited and Facebook et. al. was that cost. Friends Reunited was a subscription based model. Although free to join to actually do anything useful (like contact someone) a subscription was needed. Linkedin the professional  social network still uses a similar model to contact people you have no established relationship with. Facebook is fiscally free and that has become the dominate model. Instead of a subscription when you join most networks today you provide advertisers with access to you. Your social interactions are valuable!

There is a tension in the Web in that it does cost money to develop good services but there is a huge reluctance to pay for them. Social Networks can be seen as the hub of the emerging web as conversation, in which are social lives increasingly take place virtually. It may seem like an advertisers dream come true. After all to join most networks, you have to surrender a certain amount of information about yourself. It used to be that for email accounts etc. many people would brag about how they would lie to foil the ad-men/women but there is a problem if you do that on the Social Networks, you need the validity of verifiable information to get the connections. So it would seem the problem is solved. But is it?

The social anthropologist, Desmond Morris has observed that human beings can maintain an effective close network of about 20 people at anyone time. Those are meaningful relationships in which close information and bonds are shared. How can this be applied to digital social networks with hundreds of contacts.

So breaking it down someone might have 5 close family members, 7 close friends locally, 4 remote close friends and 4 close friends from work and other activities. It is easy to fill the quotient.  Some of those friendships may be maintained through the online social networks, certainly some of mine are but beyond that the large networks are loose and easy to break. The network is postcard culture, its nice to keep in-touch with so many people but take the network away and it might feel a bit strange but those closest to you, the 20 will have other ways of contacting you digitally and physically.

This may be why the subscription model for digital social networks does not work. We might wonder what happend to all those casual and old but no longer so close friends but before the digital social networks few cared enough to try the old postal addresses or telephone directories in the library to make contact. Friends Reunited made it easy and Facebook made it free. For those growing up and making their relationships now it is part of the woodwork but the principle of the number of meaningful relationships that can be maintained still holds. Those that are closest too us have the most number of ways of contacting and being contacted by us.

Digital Social Networks allow us to quickly and usefully update large numbers of people (Twitter perhaps being the best example in use) but they are relatively loose networks that shift and change quite rapidly and limits their fiscal potential because at the moment their lifespan is short.

This might change, the web is young and the technology is still evolving at an exciting pace, but for now digtial social networks are like sand dunes in the desert, they shift and alter rapidly. When TV first came along broadcast networks where controlled and closely regulated. It was expensive to gain access to the medium. The web doesn’t work that way, give me a cheap phone with a reasonable 3G (or even) 2G connection and I’ll broadcast to the world. Whether anyone will listen is another story…

That’s the lesson to take from ITV and Friends Reunited, the digital social network is fleeting. Once friends had been reunited and a new generation started growing up using digital technology Friends Reunited had to evolve to provide other services like dating etc. Of course the Facebook model is not so focused and it is about all sorts of connections in lots of ways but everything needs to stay fresh and social networks are often generational.

When I was teenager and in my early twenties, I had my favourite pub to hang out in. It was my social hub, I never needed to plan too closely who I would meet because socially most people I knew would be there. When I was visiting the town where it was based a while ago I saw it had become a Chinese restaurant. I had moved on and so had the social networks.

Creating a weave of social networks on the web is exciting it can help remind of us of lost friends and keep us in touch with a wider of set of contacts in an increasingly frantic world. Putting too high a fiscal value on it is a mistake because today’s buzzing pub is tomorrow’s something else.