Stephen Chinnadorai

I’m currently registered on over 25 social networks - only 5 of which I use on a regular basis: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Digg and Last.fm. New social networking websites are being created right now, to compete with the expansive number of other social networking websites currently in the cloud.

I agree with Brad Fitz and his “social graph” theory.

“The goal is not to build a social networking site or anything that’s fun for the end-user. Rather, the goal is to build the guts that allow a thousand new social applications to bloom, like Dopplr, etc. Do one thing and do it well. It will be most powerful to instead merge little isolated social graphs into one big social graph and spread it far and wide, for all to enjoy.”

Creating another Facebook is not the right thing to do - there is not a social network for everything, and there never will be. Facebook is extremely close to being that with its support for third-party applications - but still doesn’t include everything in one.

However, I have noticed that there are several new social networks appearing that have the same purpose as others. I don’t believe this is the way forward. If Twitter already exists, why make another one? There are enough photo and video sharing websites out there - you can’t beat Flickr or YouTube by just re-branding a clone of them; you have to think different; do something new and innovative.

I’m happy for there to be many social networks out there, all with a different single purpose: Twitter for status updates, Flickr for photos, Dopplr for travel, Vimeo for videos. But creating a clone of something that already exists and does the job well is not the way forward, and these sites will fail.