The real life social network…a Google report

http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2

Has your online social presence every come back to haunt you offline? It’s happened to me more than once, fortunately it was nothing terribly serious and it didn’t change my life much. The potential for something terrible to occur though is very obvious and stories about marriages failing and relationships ending because of one’s online life conflicting with their offline one is disturbing. Check out the link above for a great report on this.

Social Media = the disheveled multitasker

Over the past couple of years complaints have piled up about Facebook. Through friends, family, and other contacts it is so easy to hear about how terrible each layout change is, and how poorly implemented certain features (Facebook search, FB chat, etc.) are. Well the good news is that Facebook isn’t the center of attention anymore (in terms of complaints, that is…it’s still the center of everything social); social media has boomed in the past few years and the number of services available is astounding. However, the territory that comes with being a part of a revolution (and evolution) is that nobody has done it before so you are going to make mistakes, a lot.

Mark Zuckerberg: Doing too much.

The necessary expansion for sites that begin to catch on in the social media world is something that not even a major league player like Facebook has been able to handle in stride. My personal gripe about the way Facebook approaches its expansion is that it develops features like FB chat that are great, but then don’t take the time to perfect them when problems arise. It is extremely annoying to not have automatic refreshing for FB chat; constantly trying to IM a person who is not actually online, contrary to what my homepage says. Facebook needs to perfect the basic features it offers before trying to expand. There is a new feature, something along the lines of a Q&A thing, that Facebook has been advertising to get beta testers. Why are they implementing a feature like this when they still haven’t made it easy enough to search on their site? Expansion should only happen with a solid foundation, something Facebook needs to work on. Here is a rather extensive list of some Facebook criticisms just to get an idea of issues they already have.

The other social media sites that are going through transitions like this remind me of the rattled teenager just starting his first job…and is completely overwhelmed. Trying to get too much done, too quickly, and trying to please everyone at the same time. This is a mistake.  Trying to please everyone will result in nobody being truly satisfied…this is why Apple is successful. Sticking to your market, and rising vertically within it and taking it over is what the best in the business do. Apple does this, and gradually expands their market reach once they hit the pinnacle of their industry (iMac, to iPod, to iPad).  Foursquare is a company that has its issues with expansion as well.

I’d like to see a sight sweep in, take over the industry by perfecting the art of social media in one aspect (say, social networking like Facebook), and continue to rise vertically. What do you think?