20050215

Social networks

I have so many online community memberships that it's becoming ridiculous friendster, orkut, facebook, meetup, linked-in, I-neighborhoods, dodgeball, tribe, myspace, metails. Most of these communities have their respective foci like mobbing ( dodgeball), regions ( meetup, I-neighborhoods), commerce( metails), college(facebook), and professional networking(linked-in). I initially got started on these because of invitations from friends, and I didn't really do anything with them after that. At some point I realized that, as lazy as I am, these are a great way to keep up with friends. But as I started to hit a critical network size on friendster where I started attracting random friend requests (region switch to italy helped), I began to see real leverage potential. There is a great opportunity here to deliver a message virally and with subtlety, think chain letter or pyramid scheme only with a little more intelligence. All I need now is something to sell and a hook to hype it. The channel is already there, I'd just have to make friends with the right supernodes (people with lots of friends) and recruit them. The obvious and scary thing here is that someone has already thought of this, and is right now applying scientology like recruiting techniques (you think all those actors are scientologists because they think it's cool?) to the people in your social network that you deem to be cool. Why attempt to follow trends when you can make them, espescially when you have complete information about peoples likes dislikes and how they are linked to eachother. The real question is am I comming to this conclusion too late to do anything with it?

No comments: