We are all familiar with the “youspace” “mytube” hype. In this article I will try to explore and gather some other niche social networks that might open fresh opportunities for online advertisers.
At the moment a lot of brands are building their own community sites within their websites in order to keep their consumers “engaged” (had to use the buzz word) and get as much personal information as possible. For example, Saatchi online has built a community for the upcoming artist and art dealers where they can post their work, comment and arrange deals and exhibitions. But there are other emerging social networks that specialize in different areas. For example Trig is the version of Myspace targeting the “cool kids” with topics from the film and music world. Visually looks much nicer than Myspace.
Other special interest sites in the UK, include Zopa which matches people willing to lend money to those needing to borrow it, cutting out the bank. Then there is W.A.Y.N (Where Are You Now) which focuses people who are interested in travel. PPlParty.com and Faceparty.com are the other two fast growing clubbing related sites. Trusted Places is a London based restaurant review site with its own community. And finally, ISporty obviously gathering sports fans in one place.
What is interesting to note is that all these sites started with almost nothing but since the popularity of social networking is growing at incredible rate, investors are finding it worthwhile to invest money in these ventures.
And besides these we mustn’t forget the virtual worlds. Second life has got some competition coming from all around the world. Gaia is the manga looking virtual world for the younger audience. But, that’s another topic on the blog menu.
Now the question is, will these sites manage to steal audience from Facebook and Myspace over time or we will all end up being members of all of them, and basically spend all of our time “networking online”?
Hopefully this won’t happen because I would still like to have someone to go with for a real drink!
I find it amazing to see the evolution on the Social Networking structure itself. Like any living organism, it is evolving and dividing into “races” - dating websites, music websites (LastFM), gaming related (Second Life anyone?) and even answer/question websites (aka, Yahoo! Answers). Of course, general Social Networking websites as MySpace are still ahead when it comes to audiences, but are we witnessing a shift in the users towards their corresponding niches as these websites appear and grow? We have multiple registrations by one user on various websites, but truth be told, he’ll eventually end up focusing on one single one in the end. Will it be a general one or will it be a specific one? I believe the path these websites are going is similar to the rapture between TV and Internet - from a mainstream unifying universe to a fragmented audience with each particular universe.
I want to do a post focused on the answer/question social website trend that I think that is growing quite rapidly. I’ll start thinking about it.
Nice work on synthesizing the major Social Networking websites :)
You seem to be talking as if sites like WAYN and Faceparty are are jumping on the MySpace bandwagon.
A quick comparison on the Wayback machine shows that these were the sites that started off the whole “community thang”.
W.A.Y.N.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.wayn.com/
F.P.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.faceparty.com/