What next for social networking?
Predicting which companies and software are going to prosper and which are going to fizzle and disappear is a notoriously unreliable business. But it certainly looks at the moment as if Facebook, Myspace and Bebo are pretty well entrenched as the major social networking sites not only in the UK but also in many other countries, including (crucially in terms of predicting the future) the US.
Possibly this trio will change slightly in composition, having one of its members replaced or being joined by a fourth or fifth, but at the moment all three seem set pretty fair and currently have between them 85% of the UK internet traffic to social networking sites.
One challenge may come from niche services which mix social networking with other purposes, such as Twitter, which is a micro-blogging tool with some social networking aspects thrown in.
A different source of change may be from a proliferation of many small, specialised social networks leaving these big beasts looking clunky and crowded by comparisson. (The replacement of one-stop do it all services with specialised niche services is something the IT world has seen in many guises already.)
Tools such as Ning already allow people to set up their own social networks, but they are currently relatively little used.
What may change all that is BuddyPress, and if I had to bet I’d say this is the most likely prospect at the moment to really shake up the social networking world.
Still in development, it is a collection of WordPress plugins and themes which would convert a WordPress multi-user blog into a WordPress multi-user blog with a social network. There are an awful lot of WordPress users out there and this would make adding on social networking facilities to a site relatively easy. At least, it would if you use the multi-user version, but then BuddyPress in turn may make that a whole lot more popular.
Rather than having to go away and learn a new tool that gives you a social networking service that is not integrated with your site, BuddyPress could make it fairly easy to add on one, using skills people are already familiar with. And what becomes easy, frequently becomes popular.
(If BuddyPress finally launches in a blaze of success, please remember this post as an example of expert prediction. If on the other hand it fizzles and never gets beyond version 0.8546, then you imagined reading this.)
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