I picked up on a great article on digg today – an awesome whiteboard sketch of the social media bubble.
Believe me, you need 20 minutes to just read all the stuff on here, let alone absorb it all!
Anyway, it got me thinking about the social-web, and it’s ever growing bubble – and I wondered… Bubbles eventually burst right? How far away from that are we? A lot of the apps in the center are still trying to figure out their business models, have they got enough time?
I’m not into making predictions on this, but if this follows anything like what’s happening in the world economy, we could see some of the big players dropping out in 2009. It’s not the first time I have heard the theory that the social-web “premium brands” will lose marketshare – no names will take it up. We could be going into another revolution of a revolution.
Does seem a little bit of an obvious statement to make though… no names will take up the marketshare, and then start to grow, and some will become premium brands – boom we’re back to where we started! This is life, dog-eat-dog world etc… No brand is safe, big or small. Nothing lasts forever so of course we could see twitter gone within a year, just like we saw the last big name “whatever” business go bust over the past 3 months.
For me, services like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter et al all have a time bomb attached to them. Users don’t feel any loyalty to them, they could drop them instantly. Another company could do it better/faster and probably will at some point, and we’ll all jump onto the next boat – just like we do any other service in the “real” world.
Services like Wikipedia however will continue to grow… why? Because the users are making Wikipedia, their contributions build Wikipedia to the success that it is today. Where are users contributing to the continuing improvement of services like Twitter or Facebook? They share their content with others – great, they are sending in feature requests, and publicising their dislike for xxx – but that’s old school. Users want to make change themselves, not ask someone to do it for them. They want to feel ownership, it makes people feel good when they create something and give it to others.
Facebook have tried (enter apps), but that’s only limited to nerds to create – it’s got to be broader than that. End users can use the apps, but again – same problem as we started with.
Example:
- You cook an exquisite 3 course meal for 6 people from scratch, using all the tools at your disposal and using all raw materials.
- You cook a pretty good 3 course meal for 6 people, the starter you did yourself but the main and dessert you used a ready made meal you purchased and put it in the oven because you didn’t have the power/tools to make them yourself.
Which option above would give you the most satisfaction at the end of the night if you did both 2 nights in a row? Which would you repeat if you had the choice?
Companies running services really need to think about this, otherwise they will be surpassed by someone else doing it better. If you give the users the ability to make that service better, they will – there might be bumps in the road, but they will do it. It’s just a question of how to empower them to do it?
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