nathan williams | simiant.com

A tweet from a former colleague asked: “Wondering when the social networking bubble will burst. Any predictions?” As to an answer, I have no idea, but it does raise an valid point about the terminology we use to discuss such things. Not all social networking sites, as we refer to them generally, are social networking sites. Linkedin for example is not a social networking site, it’s a business networking site obvious I know, but the distinction is not often made.

So partly to answer the question: My prediction would be that networks that have no perceived value other than status building or friend making will struggle harder than those that have more of a niche purpose as the opportunities to generate revenue are more focussed when dealing with a niche or focussed audience, even if they are simply paying for the service…. who would actually pay to be a member of MySpace? (Ok I am a grumpy 36 year old father). Lets face it, some of the more blatant social networking sites can and only ever will generate revenue from advertising dollars rather than signed up members. What these sites may however succeed is if they are able to really analyse the networks created within their systems to offer ultra targeted opportunities to the advertisers…

So on to Eigenvector centrality: “…is a measure of the importance of a node in a network. It assigns relative scores to all nodes in the network based on the principle that connections to nodes having a high score contribute more to the score of the node in question.” Then we have issues such as clustering coefficients to worry about! Is anyone measuring these and using them? I hope they are, we’d like to talk to you. These are the network ‘operators’ that will survive, or generate some cash at least.

Anyway back to terminology, when we say social networks are we talking all networks i.e. ’social’ and ‘business’? If we are, then maybe ‘Peer Networks’ is a more all encompassing term?