Limits to Social Networking?

Just looking at all the areas that Social Networking is now being applied to made me start to think about how one might be able to predict in some way which type of Net is relevant to any one application.

The roots of social networking come from deep in the human experience, we are programmed to respond strongly to what people we trust think and do. There is also some evidence that, in large enough - and heterogenous enough groups (this bit is often forgotten in Wisdom of Crowds discussions) - we are fairly good at finding an optimal path.

Thus Social nets have been used for a long time (probably since Man could speak) to get advice and recommendations of products, services and life decisions. Even in the early pre Netscape 'Net many of the earliest applications were social nets (we called them bulletin boards and listservers in the Days of Text) to find like minded individuals, find new music and even get advice on which consumer goodies we should fill our houses with.

Cometh the Web, cometh the man - Jeff Bezos's Amazon.com set the benchmark and introduced ratings, recommendations and reviewers for category after category of consumer gizmos. Moving from email to web chat services allowed a lot more informal, real time chat experience (timely as emails were increasingly been seen as legally binding texts).

What we are now seeing in the "Web 2.0" explosion though is Social Network being used for flogging nearly anything you can think of. Are they flogging a dead horse though - will they work? After all, even Amazon is not a "social network" pure play per se.

Its interesting to think about when we are most influenced by our social networks, on reflection I think there are 4 main issues where we reach for our social networks for at the moment:

- Issues where information is very poor or unclear, so the best decision is still largely guesswork. This has probably been the original driver of social networking, under the "Wisdom of Crowds" logic.

- Issues to do with socialisation / communication - what must I do to "fit in" (Fashion, Celeb Gossip, certain branded goods), and how do I communicate with people of like interest / mind. The early pre-Web social network plays (listservers, later e-groups) and later web based plays such as Friends Reunited and the various Chat Groups are all clustered around this area.

- Issues to do with choices when information available is very subjective - ie things to do with intangibles. Media Arts - Music, Book and Film recommendation based social proto-nets - were on the 'Net even before Netscape arrived, and Pandora and Last-fm continue that trend today.

- Issues where possible choice is huge and needs winnowing. The sheer amount of choice we have today in the OECD exacerbates this. The aspect that plays into this is whether we are a "Satisficer" - will buy the 80/20 "good enough" product - or a "Maximiser", where only the best will do. (Find out what you are here)

This leads me to think some sort of grid can be drawn up, if you can imagine on the X axis is the intangibility of the "thing", on the Y its impact on the life of the selector. I've had a go at this below in a Social Net Matrix:



Low Intangibility/Low Impact decisions are, I suspect, only really suitable for social networks if this solves a fairly trivial problem more efficiently (or with more entertainment) than anything else. I suspect that this area is very vulnerable to for eg search and fact based review plays that can organise data efficiently. Low value consumer goods seem to me to be in this space.

Low Impact/ High Intangibility decisions I think are probably very good uses of social nets especially if there is some fashion/ social status impact to the decision. Major threats will come from plays that make the decision space more tangible, so requiring less "wisdom of crowds".

High Impact/ Low Intangibility decisions will use social nets more for reassurance, but I suspect a lot of the decison making will come from analysis of a fact base (eg car reliability, camera performance features etc) plus opinions of other users to make sure.

High Intangible/ High Impact decisions will use social nets both for navigating intangibles and seeking reassurance - financial services, housing and some other life decisions such as mate finding feature strongly here. Precisely because they are high impact some form of social networking will be used, and a premium will be on ensuring that the social network recommendation is from similar people.

Postscript: Since I wrote this I have done a bit more work on Social Nets, and I can also identify 3 other vectors they develop on:

- Level of engagement - some nets just require you to put in your data and they then aggregate this deliver this as a part of the wisdom of crowds to others (eg music selection), whereas others rely on you interacting with other people to create the content value.

- Time Shifting - some nets are time shifted (like email groups), others are real time (like chat rooms), these probably have different ideal uses - and users.

- Level of Network Intimacy - it is not always useful to know what others are doing, what you may want to know is what "others like me" are doing - but that requires a higher level of disclosure. Thus some types of services will require higher levels of intimacy between users to get the full benefits.