Why social/networking sites will never really work

I find myself increasingly straying from my brief to write about developing software. Oh well, what can you do?

One issue that I've found myself discussing with several smart people of late is social software/networking sites. Things like Friendster, Orkut, and latterly, Myspace (recently purchased by New Limited for nearly $600 Million). Several such networks have flourished and then seemingly died off over the last 3 or 4 years, which lead me to consider whether there is actually any viability to such social software.

I actually I'll come right out and so I don't think there is. I'll predict any attempt to develop a site whose motivation is to help people create relationships will fail. Why?

Think about your friends. How do you know them? Why are they your friends? By and large, we generally think that our friends are our friends' friends. And while that may often be the case, is that actually why they are our friends? Or is that simply the mechanism by which we came to know these people? Our friends afterall, most likely have many friends who are not our friends.

Our friendships are based on shared tastes, values and interests. And while there is probably a better than random chance that our friends' friends to some extent share these, there are many many people in our communities, and beyond, who more closely share these relationship drivers. Those of us who have lived in a country other than that in which we were born, or travelled extensively will very likely have very close relationships with people who are very distantly if not completely removed from our social circles. Who have nothing to do with our friends.

But what has all this to do with social software and its potential for success or otherwise? Social software is by and large designed to replicate the friend of a friend mechanism, which just happens to be the mechanism which works best in the "real world". But does it work best in the virtual world? If anything it limits our capacity to meet those who share our interests, values and tastes, the things which actually cement relationships. Because with sites like Orkut, we only get to meet people who are friends of friends, regardless of whether they might be good candidates for friendship.

But what about myspace? You can make anyone your friend, as long as they'll have you. They don't have to be a friend of a friend to be my friend.
Now, when was the last time someone asked you to be their friend, or "we are friends, right?" in the "real world". We know who our friends are, we are very good at discerning relationships. As much as anything because genuine relationships take work. Time to talk, email, meet. Relationships are organic, self correcting, complex things. So while the first generation of explicitly social software, like Orkut, were overly limiting by replicating the real world mechanism of friend of a friend relationship building, the myspace generation is too promiscuous - there is no guarantee your myspace "friend" is a friend at all.

But, social software which actually works exists already - it just doesn't look explicitly like social software, and I'd be interested to know whether the developers ever thought of it as such. What is it? Flickr.

Where services like Photobucket are just ways to upload/manage/share/backup photos, Flickr's differentiating factor is "contacts", comments, groups - its tools for building relationships which are much more like those in the real world - complex, nuanced, based on active shared interests (not much more passive things like "bands I like") - firstly photography, then areas of active interest (the things you photograph). It's much harder to fake, and much more work to build a relationship than simply "click here to add this person as a friend".
Lastly, while Orkut, Friendster, and myspace are all essentially self contained universes, Flickr lets the real world in. In fact with their requirement that you only upload photos, they insist that the primary motivation and currency of use are artefacts from reality.

For tens of thousands of years, our survival has depended on close relationships which are reciprocal, rich and lasting, and our ability to form and maintain them. We have got very very good at this. Because of the complexity of forming, maintaining and evolving relationships, I doubt that software which attempts to explicitly provide mechanisms for forming and maintaining relationships will ever survive their brief "bubble" stage, where virally they explode as people collect friends, much like baseball cards, only to tire and move on.

But the urge to form lasting complex relationships is so profoundly human that I suspect like Flickr, successful online services will increasingly become places where communities form and grow.

So if you are building an online app - think about where the community is. Oh, and Mr Murdoch, I think you blew $580 Million bucks