We all love to talk about what we think social media will look like in the future and how we think that will impact brands from a marketing perspective. However, on this occasion I'm going to look back at a few of the older social networks to see where they are now. There was a whole heap of social networks that started to spring up around the mid 2000's when social networking really started to boom, with brands starting to get involved in using social media as a digital PR and marketing tool after that. Given that it resulted in the formation of a completely new industry and subset of marketing (I probably wouldn't be working for a social media agency if it wasn't for social media...) I thought it would be really interesting to take a look at a few of them and perhaps draw some conclusions as to how/why they went wrong:
MySpace - far from dead, the social media behemoth MySpace was at its peak around 2006-7, supported in part by the developments in the music scene that contributed to its popularity. The profile customisation options were a massive hit with users, particularly the ability to feature songs on a profile. What went wrong? You could leave comments for people, but then they had to leave you a comment back on your wall, rather than in the same stream. Facebook came along and fixed this whilst Myspace left it alone - ergo everyone leaves for Facebook.
Digg - once one of the most popular news sharing websites next to reddit, Digg allowed you to dig or bury news stories based on their appeal. The problem with Digg was that it didn't make any changes to its platform until it was too late and everyone had already left. In addition, the network tended to be dominated by power users and others ready to game the Digg system, which wasn't great publicity for the network.
FriendFeed - since being purchased by Facebook in 2009, FriendFeed doesn't seem to have changed a great deal. Although it is more of a social tool and content aggregator than a network in its own right, I thought I'd take a look at where it is now. It's added more social networks to its list, but the functionality is still the same for the most part - perhaps Facebook simply plans to use the technology behind it at some point.
Delicious - originally created with the domain hack del.icio.us, the social bookmarking network is still popular now, but has perhaps lost some of its appeal since its height around 2007-8 before Yahoo snapped it up. Delicious has been updated whilst keeping its social bookmarking roots - I'm just not sure if social bookmarking is something that's ever likely to be adopted by the masses.
Bebo - perhaps better known for its purchase and subsequent sale by AOL (bought for around $850 million, sold for around $10 million), Bebo is a social network that is similar to Facebook. Bebo has had a bit of a revamp recently, but it's probably too little too late for the network, which suffered from its neglect under the ownership of AOL.
A few more - I didn't want to make this post too long, since we haven't got all the time in the world, but here are a few other networks I recall from back in the day: Mixx (seemingly now "Chime In"), Propeller (now Editions), Ecademy, Naymz, Plaxo, Furl (now owned by another network, Diigo). Feel free to do what I've done with the above and comment about them below, and of course add your own suggestions too.
It's easy to look back at these networks and reminisce without really considering why they fell from glory. In most cases, it was trend and the increase in popularity of some services over others, whilst the social networks that have remained the most popular are those that have continued to innovate and change things up to avoid getting stale (Facebook is actually very good at this).
Either way, there are lots of lessons to be learnt from the past from both a brand and agency perspective, not to mention the networks themselves.