Social Networking (enablers) sustainability
A personal view on the future of social networks:
Social networks are not tools we use to communicate online with other people, but people connected around nodes. Then, facebook, tuenti, or linkedin are not social networks themselves but social networks enablers.
These enablers face big challenges:
1. When they are born, they need to open up in order to acquire new users and contents and to lower entry barriers to newbies.
2. Once they are big, they have the threat of being to opened. Users are the owners of their information and they may leave the platform or sindicate the content from another platform. Then, it would be necessary to lock-in users by closing the platform
3. opensocial and openid would convert platform into commodities that, in fact, do not add value further from hosting contents
Social networking platforms, in my opinion, are over-valued and their future sustainability is of a great difficulty and wild competition with lowering entry barriers to social sindication.
At the end of the day, they are also content business (although user-generated) and they face the challenges any other online media faces. Their content may be moved out and their network economies may not be enough to stop the development of neutral and external applications. The B plan would be closing their platforms, but that would get into a kind of autarchy of proprietary software in a growing opened software world.
Content aggregation tools (tools, no the social networks themselves) have, in my view, a clear path to become commodities and to face much more legal problems than business opportunities. There will be (probably) many business based on social networking, but, it may be the case that this business is not made by platforms themselves, or, at least, not by their platform development business unit if they had any.
