gregword

Pete Caputa posts about events and niche social networks; Pete links to Dave Beisel, who has some similar thoughts along the lines of business models for these niche social applications.

I’ve been mulling around some ideas regarding social applications and niches. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again (heck, it’s part of my Blogdigger pitch) that the web is all about niches. Whether you’re talking podcasting, blogs, news, content or people, the web throws down the geographical and distribution barriers that prevent people with similar interests from connecting and communicating. So far, the developments in social software we’ve seen take a top down approach to niches; get everyone on board (i.e. Friendster, MySpace) and then allow them to sort themselves out into niches. I’m not going to argue that MySpace hasn’t been successful, but if Pete is right, their ability to maximize profit off of each individual niche is stunted, possibly because of the sheer number of them out there, and the lack of a decent automated process. Google AdSense will only get you so far, there have to be other solutions that work better (that’s where Pete comes in; I’d put money on him figuring this one out).

Another option is to work from the bottom up. The technology involved in servicing a niche is quickly becoming a commodity; thanks to open source versions of social applications, you can build you’re own Friendster in just a few minutes (and with Ning, you don’t even need to download anything). Starting a new niche site will soon be as simple as starting a new blog. With a bottom-up, focused social application, monetization will be easier and more explicit, and benefiting from a diversity of revenue streams will be much simpler and manageable.

I’m going to be trying at least two different things that are based on these ideas, we’ll see how they go.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Attention, Blogs, New Media, Software, Startups, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.