3 ms·
I think it is very hard to have a social network that appeals to a limited subset but to have enough of any one collection of people to make communicating on th
by robryan 12y ago
I think it is very hard to have a social network that appeals to a limited subset but to have enough of any one collection of people to make communicating on there worth their time.
Just have a look at Google+, millions of people gave that a try but in the end only a very limited number of those formed enough connections to justify primarily sharing things on there.
The question then really is, if there is enough of these niche groups that will provide enough user retention to make the economics work. There has been plenty of things written regarding app development and the difficulties in supporting recurring costs with one time fees. I suspect you would need a pretty significant userbase to support even a small team on cheap one time feature purchases.
- woah 12y agoCould this be circumvented somehow... through web scraping?
- egypturnash 12y agoIt's worth noting that G+ also chased a significant chunk of early adopters away when they added that "legal names only" policy. It's been rescinded but the damage has been done.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoWhich makes it somewhat surprising that Facebook is trying it now.
- robryan 12y agoI got the impression that the people who cared about the real names policy was a pretty niche (although a quite active group) compared with the millions that the service really needed to attract to hit the mainstream and seriously compete head on with Facebook/ Twitter.
- egypturnash 12y agoI may be biased by being in a subculture that likes to use obviously-not-real handles on the net (furries) - but seriously, like half my Livejournal circles migrated to G+ when it started because they were sick of where that was going, and then scattered elsewhere when Google said REAL NAMES ONLY. This was a pretty connected set of early adopters moving at once. Would things have been different if Google had quickly relented and said "okay, sure, if you wanna be Fuzzybutt Wolftaur on G+, go for it"? I dunno. But chasing them away, along with all the other people with scarier reasons to want to avoid using their real name, sure didn't help.