http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1463&CFID=8025570&CFTOKEN=89891895&jsessionid=a83076c1efdf21a1a202

The above article addresses the issue of how long social networking sites will stay popular. The issue is important because just like any other fashion or fad, they can come and go at unpredictable rates for not so obvious reasons. The article mentions Friendster and how it accrued to 20 million users in a relatively short amount of time, but quickly fell below 1 million when MySpace and Xanga started becoming popular. In this case, it appears that increased functionality was the cause of the mass migration; the technology to stream music and video became available and more viable as internet connection speeds increased, and users flocked to sites that had music and video capability, leaving sites like Friendster for other ones.

But now video and music sharing is rather ubiquitous. Virtually all networking sites have incorporated multimedia to attract and retain its users. It is now the era of “Web 2.0” and all social networking sites are jumping onto the bandwagon; Is increased functionality sufficient for a networking site to retain all its users for a long period of time? What other strategies are there to maintain long-term popularity?

Security and privacy concerns that have unexpectedly resulted from the popularity of social networking sites have spawned some ideas. As written in the above article:

One way to retain a site’s aura is to limit membership. For example, Bell notes that when Diesel jeans faced the problem of losing marketing cachet by becoming too popular, the brand cut back on the number of outlets it would sell to. Facebook tries to limit itself to college students. Social networks seem to operate best when they strike a balance between heterogeneity, which provides large numbers of members, and selectivity, which keeps the hordes focused and engaged in the site, he says, adding that social networking sites also must keep pace with technology and provide new features — for example, fast downloads. “To create stickiness you must have functional value and also community value. If either of those becomes diluted, you give people a reason to start looking elsewhere.”

One reason why limits and restrictions on social networking sites are “sticky” is because people feel creeped out when they realize how stalkable they are when anyone anywhere can read up on them. An example is mentioned in this article from Business Week:

Andrew Anker knew he had too many “friends” when business associates, looking to curry favor with his blogging company, began striking up conversations about his “cute” young daughter and his recent family outings. “It was a classic salesperson technique,” says Anker, “another way to create this creepy familiarity.”

So Anker, the general manager of consumer products at Six Apart, moved his blog to his California company’s latest product, Vox. It’s a social networking and blogging site with strict privacy controls, so users can limit who sees particular posts. Vox users can make some content available to the general public. Other posts and photos can only be seen by users designated as true friends, family members, or people in the user’s extended neighborhood (which includes friends of friends).

Since launching to the general public on Oct. 26, Vox has nearly tripled in size, says Anker. Its success indicates a trend among newer social networking sites, which are gaining traction not by focusing on the mass-popularity model that made News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace famous, but by helping users connect with smaller, more specific, groups.

Basically, people feel more comfortable around others that they know and are familiar with, in real life and on the web. In some sense, a weblog “community” is more appealing than a weblog where everyone can see everyone else’s profile and pictures. As sites become more and more popular and have more and more members, users start to feel a little uneasy about the number of people they are exposing themselves to. Naturally, according to Debra Aho Williamson, also mentioned in the business week article, when something gets too big, people want to leave for a “smaller, more personable experience.” The article also cites examples of networking sites targeted more towards smaller but specific groups, such as Fuzzster for pet fanatics, Yub.com for shopaholics, and Mog for music lovers and artists.

The whole notion of maintaining popularity through limited membership seems a little counterintuitive at first. Just as in information cascades the cascade could go on for a very long time (in the absence of specialized “private” information that can break the cascade), we would expect that things that are popular will continue to become more popular, and those that are unpopular will become increasingly unpopular. Interestingly enough, this may not be the case for social networking sites when they reach a certain size, and the site may be better off in terms of long-term popularity if it starts implementing restrictions and/or begins to target a more specific audience (e.g. Facebook was cooler when high schoolers couldn’t join).