It is 2012, social networks are the most common way for people to communicate and yet while there are clear leaders such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn there are also hundreds of other services vying for market share on the internet.

Google+ is of course the newest to the leader pack, but even it is suffering the slings and arrows of mediocrity when compared to the established networks.

So why is it failing? and why do so many fail where others succeed?

First a little history.

• 2004 – Facebook launches, limited to Harvard Students.
• mid-2004 – Facebook expands to include other university campuses.
• 2005 – A ‘High School’ version of Facebook is launched.
• 2006 – Twitter is launched limiting its users to only 140 characters per update.
• late-2006 – Facebook is opened to the public.
• 2007 – Twitter’s popularity gains ground with SXSW festival participants.
• 2008 - Twitter has 100 million tweets posted per quarter.
• late-2008 - Facebook sets up international HQ in Dublin, Ireland.
• 2009 - Twitter crash due to  Michael Jacksons death, 100,000 tweets a minute.
• late-2009 - Facebook becomes ‘cash-positive’ for the first time.
• 2010 - Twitter has 65 million tweets a day posted on average.
• 2010 - Facebook’s estimated value calculated to be $41 billion.
• 2011 - 20,000 pages are removed from Facebook per day due to security issues.
• late-2011 - Twitter rolls out its third major design change.

This of course is by no means a full and annotated history of social networks, but it does include several important milestones along the way. Both Twitter and Facebook have had their fair share of scandals and hardships placed upon them due to world events, international legislation and capacity problems, both services however have managed to keep afloat through incoming investments and several venture capital rounds.

You might at this time be wondering why I haven’t mentioned other networks like Bebo, Pownce, Identi.ca or Yammer. Well don’t fret, I’m getting to those…

With the success of the few have come the failure of the many. Plenty of niche services have started up, and even at similar times as other more successful social networks but have failed to capture user or market share, even where they may be a superior offering with better service.

So the question remains, what happens when social networks die?

So a few things happen when a social network ‘dies’, but there are so many different ways it can happen that it can be hard to keep track of what tolled the death knell for the network.

Lets take a look at Myspace as case in point. 

While Myspace is technically still around and I’m sure is still used by some people every day, it is perhaps one of the best examples of a quote unquote ‘dead social network’.

Myspace was insanely popular in its time, it was one of the first sites to merge a personal web space, photo sharing, music sharing, blogging platform and guestbook into a uniquely themed page for people to keep in contact with you.. and for a while Myspace was king.

So what happened? Why did the premier social network fail so badly?

For each social network that has failed to date the reasons for their untimely demise range from financial difficulties and legal battles through to competitive acquisition or obsolescence.

First kid on the block syndrome.

Myspace certainly suffered greatly for a variety of reasons and as they were forging new paths into the social media market. Scandals seemed to plague Myspace for years where people were stalked, suicides announced, murders plotted, social predators emerged and a whole host of other uses that the original developers had not counted on. While the majority of people who used the service remained tame and banal, there were those who sort to exploit the service for their own perverse needs.

Security? What’s that?

Another area that Myspace failed was a lack of implicit security. This is to be expected of a service that forges a path, mistakes can and will be made and can cause great detriment to a social network if they are not quickly addressed either behind the scenes or in the public eye. There were plenty of ways to view so called ‘private’ pages or photos over the years that had to be ironed out over time.

Here’s the keys don’t crash the car.

Public flexibility is also an area that caused downfall, too much user control isn’t always a good thing. When Myspace allowed the use of directly entered HTML to edit profiles it was one of the best and worst moves possible for the site. Not only did designers create amazingly clean and unique profile pages within the constraints of the Myspace system, but the general populace of the network turned to third party theme designers that often produced hideous results that resembled the early days of Geocities and Angelfire.

The use of HTML customisation also led to code and cross-site scripting exploits to run rife throughout Myspace.

Just shove another gimmick in.

Feature bloat was also another problem that was encountered, specifically gimmicky features. Instead of continuous improvement of the existing features available to users, the site was added to, only complicating the already cluttered profiles and hard to operate user settings.

Now don’t get me wrong, there also were a lot of good things that Myspace did for virtual communities across the globe. Unfortunately Myspace didn’t learn from their mistakes, but others took note and led to the rise in popularity of more constrained sites like Facebook and Twitter.

A cavalcade of imitators.

Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin… they all have their imitators. From sites that offer exactly the same feature set to niche networks that specifically cater for the needs of a subset of users.

Social networks that ‘borrow’ the features of the big boys still serve a purpose. For people who don’t want to be a part of the thronging masses present on mainstream networks the smaller more intimately focused social network may be more attractive.

The dangers for these users however are usually higher due to:

• The service may not be as security concious as bigger networks.
• Failure due to lack of funds.
• Extreme lack of administration.
• Selling to another network and integrated / decommissioned.

These factors are among the most common reasons a social network could fail.

Security is in the fore mind of most users and people have become extremely protective of their information so a site that is deemed as insecure or rife with hacking will be quickly disbanded for other alternatives.

Lack of funds may impede upgrades, force cutbacks or indeed prematurely shut down a site all together. Popular social network services are not cheap to run as costs amount quickly when considering domain registration, hosting costs, bandwidth costs, legal costs and more.

Bad administration can cause a loss of faith in a social network service as its users expect timely updates, upgrades, news about changes. If a standard of service is not met and maintained then users will leave in a heartbeat.

Selling is also often a concern, if a social network becomes popular or has popular features then it is always in the interest of the owners to sell the network for profit.

Who loses in the end?… the user.

Ultimately the user loses out when a social network dies, their friends migrate to different services and not necessarily the same services either. This can fragment an existing group or make it difficult to keep in touch with a select few.

Often a user will need to be a part of several social networks to maintain the status quo with friends or interest groups, which puts strain on the relationships already forged.

Worst of all is if the social network was initially started with a purpose.

Lets take a look at a hypothetical case. 

Lets fast forward to 6 months into the networks existence. The service has been successfully started, there are now over 1,000 users who daily talk to others who have similar thoughts and feelings on depression. The administrator announces that in the next few months there will be some changes that will allow people to use the service more freely with the release of an iPhone and Android application.

Another 6 months into the future and the word is out, the service now has 100,000 users, 20 million hits a day and has required the administrator to purchase a higher rated hosting plan to support the users.

Financially the administrator is feeling pressure as he is bearing the cost of the service by himself. He decides to add a donation button to all pages so people can help pay for the service. He also implements perks for those who donate on a regular basis, increasing overhead but hopefully also increasing funding.

12 months later, there are now 500,000 users and 50 million hits per day. The administrator loses his primary job, he posts that he may need to shut down the site for a while so he can focus on finding a new position somewhere to help pay for better hosting to support the site. The community rallies behind the admin and helps pay the operating costs, understanding that there will be no major changes to the service in the mean time.

6 months later the administrator suffers another bout of depression due to his inability to find a new job and decides to either stop running the site or to hand it over to another competent administrator to operate.

Ultimately no one comes forward to administer the site.

The site exists for a while with no administrator mainly moderated by some of the more faithful users, but eventually the donations slow and the web host cancels the account for lack of payment removing all existence of the network, its users and any shared information.

The users are now at a loss, they have no direct alternative to the site, the few people who can still contact each other either through other social networks or websites are now fragmented across different services.

Those people who do not have connections to other people from the site may feel left out, they now have nowhere talk to others who could understand the position they are in and also could fall back into depression or worse.

Obviously this is just a hypothetical circumstance, but it does raise certain concerns where a social network may become quickly popular beyond its initial boundaries and be shut down due to a single point of failure.

Have you ever been a part of a social network that has shut down or had become obsolete?

Put your story into the comments, would love to hear them.

No related posts.