SOCIAL NETWORKING
I have been thinking about social networking sites, such as MySpace or Twitter, and what would be involved in the construction of one of these sites and how long it would take for one to be built. I have some prior web design experience and therefore have an idea of how long site construction can take and what is involved. From my experience a lot of time is spent (or perhaps wasted) with trial and error on CSS and cross browser accessibility, but it is also quite time consuming incorporating content into the site.
Because the content of these social networking sites is built only by the users, I was considering whether it would be a quicker or longer construction process?
In terms of construction many aspects would have to be taken into consideration, such as its design, functionality, uses and scalability. In terms of scalability, the site would have to be designed to capacitate, store and apply data from millions of users and billions of pages of content (and that’s all just hoping that you accumulate such a fan base … risky business). Aspects such as tagging and user behaviour, as well as how these will be handled and applied (such as Facebook’s ‘people you might know’ feature) are also things that have to be considered ahead of time. Multiplicity would also be a factor here because the site would grow at an exponential rate in size, with people taking actions such as re-blogging and every user telling their friends to join and so on. They have to consider the network.
The following video is a pretty dumbed down version of how these social networking sites work.
The design also has to be perfected, with all uses in mind, in order to ensure it is functional and will last for the lifetime of the site. One obvious example of poor design consideration and its ramifications is Facebook. Facebook’s original interface was not capable of withstanding the popularity of the site and needed to be re-designed. As people can’t handle change, this caused an uproar. You can see the change in interface below, with the old on the left and the re-design on the right.
This image is courtesy of Internet News who did an article about the effects of the new design, stating “the new Facebook design… upset both critics and millions of users.” Apparently millions of people joined protest groups on the site (which I by the way thought was kind of a hilarious paradox).
Based on the amount of consideration and planning that would have to go into designing a social network site, that the process would be longer than that of a static web site. However, I think the benefit would come in the long run as the site would be maintained by the users, rather than by an individual.
But if it is a much longer process, as I am imagining it would be, then it must be a very risky business move. As there would be expensive productions costs, endless work, and no guarantee that it would even be successful. Especially seeing as a key part of social networking is of course the network. So at the beginning the site is pretty useless (I am imagining one lonely American guy uploading photos of himself at star trek conventions, posting comments about his killer WOW activities, and praying for some more 2D ‘friends’).
So then how do they get started? I for one know that I only began using these ‘web 2.0’ social networking sites because my friends insisted or I had to use them for an assignment (*hint hint*). SO then it’s a word of mouth and popularity issue that gets people involved, people tell people they know so that they can ‘interact’ with each other online and the more people who are using it, the more interest it gains in terms of publicity and the ‘cooler’ it seems to use it. But once again, back to the lonely WOW guy, how does it first start. That I don’t know, but I can only assume that it is some kind of publicity drive which promotes it enough to get a small network going which is mildly functional and then it grows from there.
Here is the popularity of search and news related articles of some popular social networking sites, courtesy of Google Trends.
By the looks of things here Facebook has the majority over most other social networking sites at present, but if they are growing exponentially other sites are not out of the running, especially twitter which we know is on the rise (or maybe it just appears that way because of the news etc, but surely this publicity will increase its popularity). You can also see how sites such as MySpace started growing, not quite exponentially, but more interesting I think is its demise. What makes it less popular than Facebook when there is not a great deal of difference?
So looking at this from my two perspectives; one as a web designer, and the other as a social networking user. How is this information useful to me. Well, if social networking is all the rage these days and it is a result of societies ‘evolution,’ I am left wondering what the next big thing will be? Or if there is still a gap in the social networking market which could, and I’m sure will, be taken advantage of? If I could discover this ahead of time, then I think I could use these factors to develop a strong piece of network media … I could make a hell of a lot of money. But it’s the satisfying the demand no one realised existed that seems to be the tricky bit.
