Michel Roland's Bookmarks tagged social_networks →  View Popular

ocial networks have numerous specificities. A company’s ability to identify and understand these specificities, and offer suitable answers, results in major success within this field. Today, this sector appears mature enough to enable a study of the market’s leading firms’ development in order to identify their “best practices” and to propose a specific framework analysis for each type of website.

So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents.

Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, "It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important". Obvious, really.

Let's play global domination. Here's a map of the world, showing
the dominant social networks by country, according to Alexa. There
are way more players than anybody, from a vantage point in Silicon
Valley, would expect. In the US, the story of social networks is
this: there was Friendster, which had no purpose but dating and
didn't scale; then Myspace, which gave people freedom to make ugly
personal websites; and then came along Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook,
which was classier.

But other services, such as hi5.com, Bebo, Orkut and Friendster
itself, have established, and maintained, footholds outside the US.
Unsurprisingly, social networks, which let people share news,
photographs and other content with their friends, benefit from
network effects. A dominant local site, such as Orkut in Brazil,
can hold off the competition because it's the default, and nobody
wants to migrate to another site, however much more advanced, if
their friends won't follow.