DISQUS

Brad · 2 years ago

I hope these sites bring some true innovation to the social networking space. While MySpace and Facebook have been extremely and obviously successful, in some sense they feel incomplete to me. Facebook is doing some interesting things allowing developers to come up with all of these applications that run on their platform, so that's a step in the right direction. But the question to me, really, is what are these sites fundamentally about?

While it's nice to be able to express my opinions, tastes, travel plans, and thoughts sites like these, the self-focused nature of these types of sites starts to wear thin pretty quickly. Do we really need more sites that allow me to blog, post photos and videos, and see what my friend is doing right this second (generally not that interesting)? I don't think so. We need sites that are somehow -- and I don't know what the solution is here -- truly innovating in this space, allowing users to do something more interesting than post random thoughts, join random and meaningless groups, and "poke" each other. More entries in this space -- is that really a sustainable proposition? At some point, I think people are going to be hungry for more engaging functionality and more engaging content, no matter if Google, Yahoo, Facebook, or Myspace delivers it.