ON "SOCIAL NETWORK PLATFORM" FATIGUE

OY VAY

(Update:  Brad Feld has a good post articulating the "Facebook problem" in another way, and there's a good Techmeme discussion on the subject).

It's barely a month since Facebook's launch of it's F8 platform strategy, and I'm really starting to suffer from "Social Network platform Fatigue", or SNitis for short.

It's not Facebook's fault.  They're at the early stages of an exciting and potentially game-changing strategy execution, as I've articulated before.  Marc Andreessen has a comprehensive take on this here.

But given the attention the strategy change has gotten in the geek and mainstream media, every incumbent social network, portal, media company, and web company that's had any aspect of social networking in it's model, is re-vamping it's strategy to both emulate and counter Facebook's strategy. 

All the while they're busy "partnering" with Facebook with their own applications and widgets that work within the emerging Facebook platform.

No one wants to miss on the next big internet opportunity and/or make the mistake that IBM did with Microsoft, and Yahoo!/Microsoft/AOL did with Google (gave the upstart company a game-changing, long-term advantage for short-term expediency).  As an aside, it's interesting to note that given the web 2.0 fishbowl today, Facebook has far less of a head-start on it's game-changing strategy than either Google or Microsoft did in their day.

Which means that we poor users should brace ourselves for a flood of revamped social networking platform strategies, in the coming weeks and months.

Robert Scoble has a couple of posts up yesterday that hints at some of this. 

First he talks about getting an early look at Plaxo's new strategy, to be officially announced next week.  You remember Plaxo...this was one of the original social networking companies focused on keeping your address book up-to-date into eternity.  As Robert highlights:

"I’ll be honest, I last tried Plaxo a couple of years ago. I hated the service. Yet another way to be bugged by people into joining yet another social service.

And worse everytime I added someone to my Outlook contact Plaxo bugged them with an email to join up and keep their contact info up to date. I quickly uninstalled and didn’t try the service again.

But I met someone who works at Plaxo at a recent Silicon Valley party and he said “everything has changed you should come back out and see what we’re up to.”

So, today, I did.

They are coming out with a new set of services on Monday. All I can say is “wow.”

I quickly signed on. I can’t say more until Monday, but Plaxo is definitely added back onto my set of services that I’m going to regularly use."

How much do you want to bet there'll be aspects of Facebook's social network platform model in the new Plaxo model?

Second, Robert talks about the compulsion he feels to try a spate of new social networking platform companies as they crop up.  He's not even sure of what to do call them.  In a post titled, Jaiku/Twitter/Facebook/Kyte/Plaxo = something happening you should pay attention to, he says:

"I’ve really been bitten by the Facebook/Twitter/Kyte/Jaiku bug...

I had to add Dopplr to my bag of tricks (it keeps track of where you, and your friends, are). Forget Dopplr right now, because most of you haven’t yet experienced many of these five services that help you share your presence and other things about what you’re doing, or what you’re thinking about with other people.

Why am I using these services nearly every hour of my waking life? Because they are being talked about and I want to learn what is making people so passionate...

I’m not sure what we should call this group of apps. Presence updaters? Microbloggers? Social networkers?"

Read the full post for a lot more than you probably want to know about these five "must have" social networking/micro-blogging/presence updater thingies.

And it's not just about getting overwhelmed with all these social networking thingies.

Each one of them will have some type of a platform/widget strategy, that'll be spamming you with dozens if not hundreds of "applications" that you'll initially feel compelled to install and try out if you're a geek. 

The alternative is missing something cool, and not keeping up with the geek Joneses.

Paul Kedrosky highlights this in a timely post titled "Option F and the Facebook 500,000,a few days ago:

"Around this time last year Josh Kopelman came up with the idea of the Techcrunch chasm. The root idea is/was that too many companies were targeting the then-53,651 readers of Mike A's popular Techcrunch blog. A good review in Techcrunch, as Josh pointed out, gets you 5-25k beta users, and then you're stuck.

I'm wondering if something similar isn't happening in Facebook. I keep hearing about companies that are exercising "Option F" and launching a Facebook version of their app, only to suddenly have 500,000 users.

But for how long? I'm betting, pace the Techcrunch chasm, that those people are an ephemeral crew, and that they try pretty much anything, and then drop it again."

It's true.  I've installed dozens of applications in Facebook, and barely gone back to actually using a couple.  I've joined almost a hundred groups, but barely visited the discussion forums of a couple.

As an aside again, is doesn't help, as Howard Rheingold rightly points out, that Facebook lacks a simple way to all the updates in all your subscribed groups at one go.  This is a capability available in the most basic of message boards, employing technology that's almost pre-historic by Web 2.0 standards.
 

Do the numbers.  Add up the potential applications per social network, add up the social networks.  Multiply those two numbers. 

Multiply that number with the average time per application/widget, and that result with a certain frequency per week of using the lot of them, and pretty much you barely have enough time to do anything interesting in your life, that you can then share in all your social networks.

And we haven't even added in all the discussion groups you'll subscribe to within all these social networks.

So if you thought "portal fatigue" and "ipod fatigue" was bad, you ain't seen anything yet.  Get ready for some serious "social networking fatigue/SNitis".

It'll get a whole lot worse before it gets any better.

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[Simon Cast]

Put another way, we are going to see the super fast evolution, Darwinian survival at light speed of internet startups.