Trumblog

Hmmm, reading through my RSS feeds I came across an interesting posting yesterday on Web Worker Daily comparing social networking and the 17th-century Dutch tulip mania. Then as if to prove their point today they posted about Coffeenatic a coffee focused social network.

An online kaffeeklatch seems like a slam dunk since most social networkers are probably coffee drinkers, but I somehow doubt that this site is enough of a niche to really flourish. I love coffee, maybe a little too much some times, but it’s just not a strong enough part of my life to need to add a profile on Coffeenatic.

Coffeenatic just doesn’t seem to fit in that zone where a social network will flourish. It seems to me that a site needs to either be broad enough that you can connect with the broad spectrum of people and information that are part of our lives, think Facebook, YouTube, Digg. Then there are the microniche sites where we are so happy to find other people like us to connect with and that specific information that we have been searching for that we must join. But in between those two poles where plenty of people are interested in the topic or a part of the group, but not enough for critical mass and too broad a topic to make it unique and we ask ourselves what’s the point in joining.

And that’s what builds the bubble. There are more and more social networks that are less and less useful and the bubble’s skin becomes thinner and thinner until we wonder with so many social networks of little value what value do any of them have and then the bubble pops….

(No Ratings Yet)

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