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The Social Network Sky is Falling Run For the Hills!

Posted by Nick O'Neill on January 30th, 2008 3:44 PM

Peter Kafka has pointed out some pretty depressing numbers about user engagement on social networks across the board. Kafka’s post was based on another post by Business Week’s Spencer Ante who has an early look at the Comscore numbers. While Facebook had fantastic growth in their overall user base, the total amount of time spent on the site decreased month-to-month.

Keep in mind that engagement levels typically drop off in December but many have been noticing the decreased engagement levels of even the most popular applications on Facebook. The bottom line is that overall engagement levels are dropping even though the user base is increasing, suggesting that users are simply getting bored. So where are they going? Your guess is as good as mine but perhaps people have decided that their time is better spent actually engaging with people in real-life rather than via social networks. What is the impact on the bottom line? Spencer says it best:

For starters, slowing and/or decling growth will make it harder to generate sales and profit growth from these sites. That will put more pressure on the advertising programs to deliver results. Of course, they could offset the declines through overseas gains. But so far, advertisers have been leary of marketing on social networking sites outside of the U.S.

All eyes will be on the News Corp. earning announcement on Feb. 4 at 4pm. Then we’ll find out how the slowing growth has actually impacted the sales and profit potential of these sites. My hunch is that the numbers won’t be as rosy as the company would like.

Bored users is the last thing we want for social networks. You could have foreseen users getting bored from sheep throwing just as they get bored from novelty items won at a carnival. My hunch is that we are going to see more engaging applications over the next 12 months but then again I’ve been surfing for the golden application for a while now and nothing seems to appear. Where are you spending your time on the web? Are you bored with social networks? Maybe you have gotten bored with the internet as a whole.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 3:44 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 8 Comments

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    Hey...if people are looking to spend more time offline that's good for us!! I actually think people are going more for sites like Twitter, Pownce and Seesmic where the online interaction is immediate. People want to connect...they want to interact. They're going to places online where they can do that and that "live" interaction is what keeps them from getting bored.
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    I helped someone sign up for Facebook a couple of weeks back. We went through the registration and privacy process. Sent out some friend invitations. Posted on someone's wall. The next week, we met again. She spent the 5 minutes needed to read a wall response and confirm a friend. Then she said, "What now? I mean, what do people do on here?"

    I started to laugh. What do people do on Fb? Hang out, I guess. See who comes and goes. Talk.

    "You mean, its like standing around in the mall all day?"

    Yeah, I thought, it is. Bor-ring!
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    Everyone is talking about more engaging applications but what does that really mean? Out of 15,000+ apps, there not any applications that engage you? What about Flixster or iLike or Scrabulous?

    To me those are all engaging applications that are some not some lame quiz or what kind of ... are you or throwing sheep. Those engaging apps need to be surfaced better. Just like web sites, there is a few good mixed in with alot of bad.

    I think there some developers creating interesting applications that can benefit from being within a social network and can add to a user's experience within a social network. (disclousure: I work for company that has developed a social app)

    My main concern is that those one off apps don't ruin it for everyone else by turning users away from applications in general.
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    One problem I think Facebook has is there are so much information coming at you that users don't know what to do with themselves.

    It's one of the reason why I like things like Twitter and Pownce... they're so simple.
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    "perhaps people have decided that their time is better spent actually engaging with people in real-life rather than via social networks"

    What?!?!?! There are things beyond this computer screen?
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    Does anyone remember the BBS of the 90's? Where people hung out; some times all day. Waiting around in a mall for people to come and go. Discuss things like sub woofers! What? Web 2.0 or are we up to ummm Web 9.2 or something.

    Social networking is not new my friend. A book published in 1999 called ¨Net Worth¨ Hagel and Singer, described a road map for businesses called "Infomediaries" these are Facebook, Myspace etc. These are trusted repositories of information, detailed information. Exchange centers of information traded for in the currency of trust.

    Facebook with Beacon and Myspace with spammer trash flying around, have depleted us of this trust.

    These are not areas of waste lands and the numbers are showing a zero sum game. These people arent fleeing to off-line, they are gathering again, splintering and reforming. Social anthropology studies accelerated. Split, morph and recombine.

    Geo Cities the grand father to these newbies had all these and more, broadband increased and new money poured. The world will change and evolve. TV... that will never stick!


    hahahaha
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    Interesting thoughts, Nick....

    A few years ago, at my first blog conference, I noticed all these people standing around talking to one another...and I thought it was so great that so many met each other thru their blogs! Turns out most of them knew one another from other places (like f2f places), and reading their blogs was just a way of keeping in touch with each other...

    Then things changed over in blogging, and we started meeting other people through our blogs. But that's only for the adventurous...

    Funny thing about soc. networking, though...I don't see many of us meeting new people through the social network--unless it's through another person (kinda like in blogging.) Sure, we can keep in touch better with people we've met once or twice. But how do we know if they really *are* reading our status updates, or comparing likes and dislikes among our various and sundry apps? We don't. And we don't really meet new people because all the strangers in social networking sites are either preditors or identity thieves or some other kind of person who will hurt us (or at least spam us.)

    Frankly, I'll never get bored of the Internet--there's plenty of things to do and lots of cool people to meet one way or another. But soc. networking sites? I'll probably get bored with them quicker than I ever will with blogging. At least on my blog, I've got my own really huge soapbox ;-) (and a great google page rank to boot.)
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    For me, social networking sites like Facebook are great Internet tools, but it depends how you use them and what you expect from them.

    If, on Facebook for example, one uses the site to connect with a sensible amount of friends from the past and present, then the site is a very useful tool to visit every so often (about once a week on average) to check for updates.

    However if the goal is to just add an insane amount of people as friends, when in reality most of them are strangers, and spend most of every day on the site taking quizzes, then boredom is sure arrive pretty soon.

    The quality of user satisfaction of sites like Facebook is, I believe, only as good and valuable as the genuine number of 'real' friends people add to their account profiles. It's always more interesting to communicate with people who we actually know, rather than have a list of 'friends' who don't really even know who we are.

    Using these sites for escapism from the real world eventually results in a hunger for the very world people try to escape from.

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