Anything But Coffee

Today I get to work and like many other office workers in America, first thing I do is log into my social networking website of choice. In my case it was Facebook. Now keep in mind I am a search engine optimization specialist so social networking is part of my daily routine but that’s besides the point.

So as I’m catching up on all the early morning postings of all my friends, I start to notice how they all seem to be bitching and moaning about the same problem; how none of their Facebook aps are loading up. I guess an hour without their YoVille or Mafia Wars is just too much for them to handle.

And then I started thinking how dependent we have become on our social networks.

We use social networking sites to stay in touch with family and friends. We use them for entertainment. We use them to stay up to date with news and celebrity gossip. We use them to stay ahead of the game for new developments in technology and medicine. We have become so dependent upon social networks that we don’t know what to do when they go down or aren’t available every second of the day that we want them.

And this brings me to my next point. The majority of social networks, including the major 3, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, are all free to join. All someone needs is a valid email account and within minuets you have your new social profile up and running. Free to start your social networking addiction.

But greedy as society is; not content with all the free services that we are offered on these sites, now we expect fully functional technical support, 100% up time, zero bugs and all without any type of compensation to the people running the sites.

A Social Network is a Business

This stuff isn’t free people! It costs money to build these websites, design these flash movies and code all these cool function’s, features and games you love so much. Huge databases of images and profiles to maintain, immense amount of bandwidth to manage. You can’t expect to have all this and still not have any problems for free.

Facebook announced that they finally turned a profit in the second quarter of 2009, it only took them 5 years. Twitter has yet to show any profit on their own apart from what they make from investors.

Maybe its time people stop taking advantage of these social sites and give a little something back. The only way for a free membership based social networking site can make any money and continue to provide the services we have become accustomed to is through advertising. As this seems as the best way to go, it still has its problems.

Myspace has made all its money from advertising but at the users expense. Slow load up times with massive flash advertisements for movies, continuously bombarding people with ads for online dating sites or diet and fitness programs. Sure its easy to ignore but we should be allowed to turn those adds off if we want. Facebook uses ads to make their money as well and they have had their own problems such as letting developers use profile images of users in their ads for dating sites. But with advertising being the only source of profit, what else is there to do?

Maybe its time to start charging a small monthly fee for these sites. Considering Facebook has 300 million users, I’m sure if they carged $1.00 a month for a premium membership that would allow you special features such as turning off these ads people, well people might just go for that.

Now I’m not saying that a paid membership is the right way to go but we have to face the facts. If our favorite social sites arent able to make any money on their own, then investors wil stop giving them money and then they will be forced to sale the site off, stop fixing bugs or worse just shut it down completly.

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Once upon a time, back in June of 2007, I came across a tiny little micro-blogging site called Twitter.

Twitter wasn’t much of anything at this point in time; think of it as a freshly hatched baby Blue Jay, brand new to the world but with a ferocious appetite and incredible urge to spread its wings and fly.I wasn’t too sure of the purpose or benefit of joining Twitter but I decided to anyway (follow me on Twitter).

As with any young website it’s membership was small and the functionality wasn’t always working at it’s best. And the fact that it was practically unheard of outside of the social networking community, it was hard to enjoy the point of the site, which is to communicate with other people.

Seriously, whats the point of tweeting all day long if there are no members to read them and interact with?

So like any good social networker, when trying to do my part and spread the word of Twitter, I often received a look of confusion and the comment “WTF is Twitter” became a part of my daily life. I had a couple friends who would at least humor me and signed up but the most common reaction from everyone was “this is stupid“.

Now from my experiences with early days of MySpace, Facebook, Friendster and as an internet marketer, I knew the potential that Twitter possessed. All it needed, just like the little baby Blue Jay, was some nourishment and time to learn how to spread it’s wings and fly.

Oh My, Look How Twitter Fly’s

Twitter slowly started to gain its popularity through word of mouth, social networking, bloggers, tech-websites and TV shows like G4 TV.

Then suddenly, out of no where, around October 2008 Twitters popularity exploded. Mainly due to the very public exposure to the media and masses in general from its use during the historical presidential elections. Every News channel you went on you would hear them mention Twitter. Some knew what it was while others had no clue but everyone was talking about it. Twitter became part of daily vocabulary for any news or talk show. Celebrity’s joined Twitter, public officials and even the Republican party decided to join.

Steven Colbert was even the first person on TV to make a controversial issue in reference to the site by using the past tense form of the word Tweet to Twatted on the Today Show, which sent the censors into a frenzy trying to decide if Mr. Colbert just committed an FCC violation or not.

The Future is Twitter

In just under 3 years of Twitters creation it is now the 3rd most popular social networking site on the internet with a membership of approximately 5,979,052 and monthly visits of 54,218,731 at the time of this writing. Twitter has worked its way into our public consciousness, and has done something that no other internet property has ever been able to do; successfully bridge the gap between the real world and the internet:

• For the first time in history of the internet and television; thanks to News agency’s such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX News and so on; a news anchor can make a statement and be able to get a real time response from a viewer thousands of miles away and be able to respond back in a matter of minutes all to the benefit of everyone watching.

• Celebrities can now offer a little bit more of a personal connection between them and their fans, allowing their fans to know aspects of their daily life without any real intrusions into their privacy.

• Companies and corporations are now able to connect more with their target audience and get real time feed back and offer special Twitter promotions to their followers.

It’s truly amazing to see how such a once thought of as insignificant website such as Twitter would actually be responsible for changing the direction of the internet and the world.

What’s even more amazing is that Twitter is able to accomplish this with only 140 characters at a time.

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Ahh Twitter, such a wonderful new form of global communication, a new step in bringing the world closer together and more connected to each other.
Makes me proud to know that someone has decided to use Twitter for good instead of evil and feels the urge to use his electrical engineering abilities to create a Chair That Tweets His Farts.

If you feel the need to follow his tweets, you can do so here.

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Some years ago back in February 2004, I came across this little start up social networking site called MySpace. At first MySpace didn’t seem like much compared to its only potential rival Friendster which has been around for a while. Since I was a member of Friendster and a few other news groups and small social networking sites I figured why not join this other one and see what MySpace has to offer.

The MySpace of 2004 resembles next to nothing to the MySpace of today. You were only allowed a small handful of photos, you only had a “top 8″ for your friends and the only way you could get a fancy background, graphics or custom profile was if you actually knew how to code the HTML and CSS your self. It was fun, simple and little to no spam or phishing of any sort to worry about.

By word of mouth, MySpace started to spread on the internet. And with the help of some of its more famous members such as Tila Tequila, MySpace started to spread like a virus. It’s membership skyrocketed like no one has ever seen and support websites that taught people how to customize their profiles and even profile generators started sprouting up all across the net. Some of the better code generating sites were even able to charge for their layouts. MySpace was flourishing, people were making money and everyone was happy.

Welcome News Corporation and Fox Interactive Media

Things were going good for MySpace but unfortunately things were about to change.

Just like with every other social popular entity in the internet, MySpace started to get the attention of more traditional media companies who wanted a piece of the MySpace pie. In July 2005 News Corporation, the parent company of Fox Interactive Media purchased MySpace for a cool $580 million.

What seemed like almost over night things started to change for the popular social networking site. Storage capacity increased allowing unlimited number of photos to be uploaded, support of flash profiles, videos and music players. Profiles for famous musicians, comedians, celebrities even every day companies such as Nike, Coca Cola and Hollywood movie studios all were becoming standard on the site.

With all this popularity and media exposure it was only a matter of time before the criminal element started to make its appearance. News coverage of cyber stalking and pedophiles and political and religious hate groups appeared on the evening news at least once a week. Then came the spammers the phishers and all the fake profiles from dating and adult websites started flooding members inbox and friend requests. It got to the point where no one wanted to even log in or at most had to make they profiles private in hopes of avoiding all these scams.

Its safe to say the fun of MySpace was gone and all that was left was a corporate ideal of how a social site should be.

The Rise of Facebook and Twitter

Around the same time in 2004 another social networking site originally called thefacebook.com but now more formally just known as Facebook was started over at Harvard University. This was more or less a social site for Harvard students but eventually expanded to other college students then high school students and finally, to anyone aged 13 and over across the country.

Out of all the social sites on the internet the battle for supremisy was between Facebook and MySpace and in April 2008 Facebook took the lead. Facebook surpassed MySpace in number of unique visits a day with Twitter in a close 3rd and MySpace started to feel the crunch.

Members who were tired of all the commercialism, spam and lack of new features were being driven away in massive numbers to Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is a social micro-blogging site in its most simplest form. Members are only allowed to post 140 characters at a time so think of it as your status update on MySpace, short simple and to the point.

Now why is Twitter so important? Well lets just say this simple micro-blog has had enough influence on the net to make MySpace add a status feature which resembles Twitter and Facebook tried to buy Twitter but failed and shortly there after redesigned, to the hatred of most its users, their entire layout to have Twitter’esq features.

And lets not forget the “Evil Google Empire”, who a few weeks ago was talking down about Twitter, calling it a “poor man’s email system” conveniently just as Twitter was launching its new search feature. Sources say this is typical of Google to do when it feels a web property is a threat,;discredit the threat and then acquire the threat. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google place a bid for Twitter in the next few months.

Ok so the last section got a little off on a Twitter Tangent but it just continues to show how “simplicity of design and function” and non-commercialism is the key to a successful social network.

Facebook has luckily found this out early on with their Terms of Service mistake a few months ago where they changed their TOS to the uproar of all its users, so much that it made the nightly news and they had to change them back, to their new re-design which will also probably be reverted back to the original layout.

So the lesson for all social networking sites to learn here is that social sites need to listen to their members, and ask them what they want before changes are made. A social networks isn’t the place for commercials or a place for you to saturate with and bombard members with new movie premiers, music releases, dating services or other advertising campaigns. It’s the members that make the site a success not the corporations who buy them.

Too late for MySpace. It went from being that hip cool new club on the strip to being that 2nd class night club where all the 40 year old men hang out trying to pick up on the 21 year old girls that no one really wants to hang out at. Just not a fun scene anymore.

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