Stop trying to be Myspace

Myspace is a hit, and there’s no doubt about it – regardless of how you or I feel about it. This week, the social network swept the Yahoo! portal from the top of US website visits and keeps proving how powerful the connection between youth, music and online journals really is.

One of the consequences of this success though, is the feeling that now that one (or two – think Facebook) social network is doing well, the world needs a slew of others like it – and honestly, it doesn’t. If you’re really going to build a social network, if you really want to try and enter that space, if you can’t stand the idea of not doing it, don’t just “try to be like Myspace” – at least aim higher.

The value of Quality and Quantity

Myspace is what I like to call a catch-all social network – a network whose audience is comprised of people of any age or social status. In comparison, Facebook caters to a totally different kind of people – college students. Now, what do you think is more valuable: a million people aged 14 to 18, or a million people in colleges and universities? If you didn’t say the latter, think again.

I think future social networks are either going to be completely generic – mutating into new worlds (like music, photography, politics, etc) as its audience shifts -, or completely domain-centric (like Flickr is for photos). It makes more sense from a social perspective and much more sense from an economic perspective – because advertisers pay more for a targeted audience.

All this to convey the idea that if you’re really set to build social software, you should cater to either a specific kind of people, or to a specific kind of social object (something that binds people together – again, like the photos on Flickr).

Do you still want to do it?

If you still want to do it, go ahead. Apparently there’s always room for YASN (Yet Another Social Network – you read it here first, folks), at least for a little while until the hype goes away. Seriously, though, we’re getting a tremendous amount of proposals to build social networks but have yet to see someone actually being passionate about it. And without passion, it’ll be just another myspace copy, and that we really don’t need.