Viral Marketing, Classification and Community

In Pay-off from a social web? Andy Oram talks about viral marketing and how it could fit to social networks and Web Services. Currently, two diametrically opposed ideas attract both money and attention: Classification and Community. I completly disagree with him comparing the degree of seperation to trust.

– The public has mostly lost interest with the first wave of sites that offer social networking, probably because what they offer seems to add little except extra overhead to current Internet services such as email and newsgroups.
- No wonder companies chase after viral marketing, looking for ways to leverage the reports of early adopters and harness social networks to create buzz for their products.
- A friend on Friendster is different conceptually from a real-life friend; it basically reflects the architecture of the software and means you can reach this person directly.
- This is the mushy concept of “degrees of separation” turned into a network protocol.
- But how primitive email appears next to other ways of communicating!
- Eventually, to really take off, social networks should provide alternatives to email rather than relying on it.
- The draw is not what you do on the social network, but whom you have a chance of doing it with.
- But if I want to target someone for a specific purpose, I find it much easier to use a search engine or a private network of informal contacts than to go through the slow and unreliable process provided by the social network.
- I find that the “degrees of separation” concept becomes meaningless after the second degree of separation.
- These criticism apply to social networks they way they’re currently implemented. Because viral marketing and new media have an excellent possibility of becoming important social movements