Thematic communities - the future of social networks

    Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, spoke at MediaBistro Circus on social networking prospects . In his opinion, this concept is completely misinterpreted by most experts. When the term “social network” is mentioned, many are used to thinking about projects such as Myspace and Facebook. They are constantly on hearing, but do not at all reflect the main idea of ​​social networks, which consists in uniting thematic communities . Such communities are formed around a certain topic, the so-called “raison d'etre”.

    “The community is one of those words that we use all the time, without thinking about its essence. - said Anderson. “The problem with social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook is that they are about nothing - they are about Myspace and Facebook.”

    The future belongs to smaller sites that have a narrow focus and form thematic communities around them, according to the chief editor of Wired.

    As an example, Chris Anderson mentioned the “long tail” effect, according to which the vast majority of users are distributed across many niche sites. The same effect is quite applicable to social networking sites.

    Absolutely any site can implement blogs, profiles and the ability to publish custom content. But this is absolutely not enough to build a community. A successful community building model is applicable only around specific thematic content, and the more specific it is, the better. In this regard, designers like Ning may be promisingthat provide the opportunity to create the most niche social networks. Now there are already 25,000 communities united around this or that film, car brand or other specific topics.

    Mega-portals like Myspace or LJ are too huge and amorphous, so every user there inevitably falls into the hostile environment of strangers. “We need to pull social networks out of there and transfer them to our sites,” Anderson said, referring primarily to the audience of users and the content they generate.

    Anderson’s concept is also supported by the fact that giant social networks are now experiencing some problems with the effectiveness of advertising. Despite the theoretical beautiful calculations, in fact, these projects still have not found an effective advertising business model. The stumbling block here is targeting. And this problem is automatically solved during the transition from universal social networks to thematic ones. While projects like Facebook or Myspace sell ads in bulk at 20-30 cents per thousand impressions, the average niche social network dedicated to makeshift unmanned aerial vehicles gets up to $ 7 for going through the Google Adsense advertising system.

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