So, you got a Facebook account. Of course you did. And now you can’t stop spending hours checking your friends’ status updates, uploading pictures or finding out which Sex and the City character you most resemble.

But what’s the point, you moaned to your friends in your pre-Facebook days.

And now you know the secret. There is no secret.

While social networking sites may cloak themselves in language about re-connecting with old friends, making business contacts and expanding your network of acquaintances, really we all know they exist for the same reason reality TV exists. We don’t work that hard at our jobs and we’re positive we deserve our 15 minutes of fame. Who doesn’t want to know what you’re doing right now or stare at pictures from your weekend trip to the lake.

If it’s all just an exercise in self-indulgence, then why do some sites win at this popularity contest?

Malcolm Gladwell may have been onto something in Tipping Point, in that there is a critical mass that tips the balance from one site to another. When all your friends (or more accurately, your daughters’ friends) moved from Friendster to MySpace, what choice was there but to move too?

But to get to that critical mass takes some business, marketing and design savvy. And, unfortunately, most social networking sites were originally designed for teenagers – who have never been particularly savvy.

Teenagers have short attention spans. Everyone has short attention spans. That’s the world we live in. If I can’t figure out what the particular catch is to this site and how to create a profile in less than 5 minutes, then chances are I won’t do it. And I won’t come back.

This is why new sites have to be simple. MySpace is widely acknowledged to have awful, awful design. I may not be the smartest person in the world, but I have a B.A. from Cal and I could not get the background to change on my MySpace profile, much less get it to play music. A social networking site should never be that complicated to figure out or create a page. And while that didn’t hurt MySpace for a long time, that may have been simply because it was the only game in town. New sites can’t rely on that kind of branding. Besides, we don’t all need those terrible MySpace headaches.

People may say they want choices and fancy features and choices, but, really, they don’t want choices. Having to make choices make people stressed out and a little depressed. (No, really, science says so.) What people want are trivial choices that aren’t too complicated and give them the illusion of individuality. Too many things confuse people; confused people don’t come back to your site.

But why are these social networking sites trying to get you to come there anyway? To make money. (And you thought it was out of the kindness of their hearts.) If the sites don’t make money, they don’t stay in business. And then it doesn’t matter how pretty it was.

Of course, there are questions like how many ads can a site run versus how much will people use it, but these questions are as old as advertising. Besides, since the biggest hurdle to overcome in the social networking bog is getting people to a site once, twice, and again, ads should nearly always be put on a back-burner over usability. These social networking sites would know that if they had a business plan.

Oh, right, but they don’t. Very few ‘Web 2.0’ (or whatever Web number we’re on now) companies have business plans. This makes it difficult to make money, which makes it difficult to stay in business, which makes it difficult to care about how many friends I have on FriendConnect83.com, if it’s just going to go under anyway. Part of what has made Facebook so successful, despite its modest beginnings, is the way in which it has partnered with businesses and companies to actually make money.

And why did Facebook start getting so popular? Because it wasn’t complicated.

Again: simple is better. Every one of these endless numbers of sites has dozens of applications, video-postings, blogs, games, tracking of your friends, quizzes and whatever else they invented between when I wrote this and when you’re reading it. But few people actually use these and they simply overload the majority of users with too much useless information.

Every major design overhaul or change that Facebook has been met with uproar from the users. The ‘new’ Facebook they just unveiled already has people confused and annoyed and signing ‘petitions’ to go back to ‘old’ Facebook. Sure, nothing’s really that different, but it’s like when Microsoft Office moved the File menu to that weird icon. Why, why.

Really, though, no matter the design, general social networking sites are on the way out. Or so say the business gurus. Traditional economics would suggest that the market is oversaturated with sites, that there is little original content left to develop or create and that each new service diminishes both its own potential and that of existing services. Social networking sites thrive in their ability to gather many people in one place, so the more places there are for people to go to, the worse off everyone is.

Not that, that will stop sites from trying.

Maybe you’ve heard of Loopt, which ‘transforms your mobile phone into a social compass;’ kind of like using it to act as some sort of a device for getting in touch with your friends. Or maybe you’ve been invited to Doostang, the Bungalow 8 of social networking sites. Or you’ve created a profile of your travel on Dopplr. Or a virtual shelf of your books on Shelfari. Or you’ve registered your non-profit on Kiva.org, gotten inside your inner goth on GothPassions.com or celebrated your pets on GoPets.net.

The point is that there won’t just be one behemoth, one Google, of social networking. That’s not the way business has worked in a long time. The future is about capturing the ‘long tail’ of the market, about finding a niche for your market. As long as you can be important to someone, someone will friend you, post pictures and totally care about your status updates.

>Written by d/visible contributor Kelly Dunleavy.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 29th, 2008 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Technology, Business, Culture, Advertising, Art & Design. 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.