The Next Thing?

NathanKingerlee

Does anyone have any ideas on what is the next Facebook/Twitter/YouTube to watch out for and get involved with, from a business to customer interaction point of view?

BrianD

There is unlikely to be anything that will replace Facebook. It now has the numbers - the critical mass - that no other social network - Friendster, MySpace or Bebo has been able to achieve. How would move to anything else when all their friends are firmly embedded on Facebook? Even generations of families are on Facebook. How many people have their parents on FB so they see photos of their grand kids on FB and so on?

What you will see, probably, is a growth in specialised social networks that fulfil a specific purpose e.g. LinkedIn, Last.fm or Ping.

Pablo

http://www.quora.com/ is getting quite popular now. It's a great discussion platform , i.e. http://www.quora.com/Why-have-Google-and-Facebook-chosen-Dublin-for-their-European-headquarters

PaulPinnacle

Interesting post on SEOmoz about just this today.

Breakdown of various options by (rough) user numbers is good and the 'up and comers' cover most of the 'usual suspects', but it obviously ignores many factors you'd need to consider before investing time such as location/interests/target market/etc.

Scuid Mhór

problem with facebook is all of the privacy mishaps that the media keep blowing out of proportion. in the future, i wouldn't be surprised to see facebook breakdown into big groups of websites, similar to how it was during the bebo/myspace/msn/aim generation (i'm aware msn/aim aren't websites but facebook chat has replaced them for a lot of people). they'll be broken down mostly by different features - nobody likes having to see the same repetitive stuff on their wall all the time so one will probably destroy those sort of application things, which means the younger people who constantly answer social interview questions will stick to facebook or whatever keeps around those applications. wouldn't be surprised to see my first point dispatch into a new social networking site - in fact, i'm pretty sure facebook has already tried to be replicated with better security numerous times already. there's something with a weird name that's in its beta stage right now but i don't remember the name, sorry.

twitter's not gonna last too long without major innovations keeping it alive, so either that's gonna be turned into a MASSIVE facebook implementation or it'll turn more social as time goes by.

NathanKingerlee

Cheers Guys.

Scuid Mhór

p.s. i just found the website i was referring to on a cnn page about the next big websites of 2011. cool coincidence i suppose.

https://joindiaspora.com/

edit: mods if that counts of 'advertising' of some kind, let me know. just wanted to post it to clear up a loose end. i don't even have an account on diaspora. i actually think it's invite only and open to only five hundred people thus far.