The future of Social Networks

To know the future, just look to the past.  Each of the big Social Networking, “Web 2.0″, sites share commonalities with Web 1.0 sites that were popular ‘in their day’…  and this is not necessarily a good thing for the Social Networks.  For example:

Flickr is the new GeoCities…  a very popular place for people to upload their content.  Getting people to upload and view content is one thing, but turning that into a profitable business is another.

Twitter is the new Hotmail…  a breakthrough communication service that will, eventually, be aquired by a big company, where it will proudly sit and make very little money. Don’t get me wrong, I use and like Twitter, but, from a business perspective…  how do you make money by, basically, letting people txt to their entire friends list, or user-base of Twitter?  Advertising?  Ha!  Yea, Hotmail…

YouTube is the new Napster…  a media ’sharing’ service of cultural significance (although, no downloads in YouTube’s case), but sharing many of the same issues are Flickr/GeoCities.  That is, with the added benefit of being beaten over the head by copyright-owners.  YouTube will end up living longer than Napster, but giving away free media is not a business model.

MySpace is the new AltaVista… a pioneer in it’s field, that was ultimate passed-up by a competitor and never recovered.  Although MySpace will hang around longer than AltaVista, FaceBook has surpassed MySpace as ‘the’ Social Network on the Internet.

FaceBook could be the new Yahoo…  big, with a ridiculous amount of traffic, trying multiple different ways of making money - microtransactions here, fees to organizations/companies there, advertising everywhere - and not really succeeding.  In fact, I wouldn’t be suprised to see them start off down the Yahoo-path by buying Twitter, BrightKite, and other smaller social networks/services that can be integrated into Facebook…  or, Facebook will do-a-Microsoft on those companies by coping their functionality into FB.

Recently, Newsweek, the traditional-media news magazine, made some fairly radical changes to their business-plan.  According to the New York Post…

Part of the strategy is to shed lower-paying readers, who today pay an average of only 47 cents an issue for a subscription, even though it costs Newsweek at least $1 to produce and mail.

So, Newsweek is raising their subscription fees to a point where they feel they will drive-off-the-deadbeats.  The folks at Facebook are pretty smart, I think, and they realize that there are only so many advertising dollars to go around.  My bet is that, within 18-24 months, Facebook will come out with a subscription-model.  Right now, Facebook pulls together much of the features of many of the existing ’social networks’…  you can upload videos like YouTube, upload pictures like Flickr, make quick comments/updates like Twitter, post links like Digg, etc.  If they can get 5-10% of their, nearly, 200,000,000 members to pay, oh, $2.49-$4.99/month, and shed members from which they are earning no revenue, or losing money, why not do it?