There is a mad rush towards online social networking space. Every second person wants to get on the bandwagon with his own social networking website with a silly-sounding name. In my opinion, most of these sites are just a fad and are not built on strong fundamentals in terms of a) revenue sources and b) the problem they solve.

What is online networking, btw?

The purpose of a social networking website is to help you keep in touch with your existing contacts and to generate more contacts! In case of social networking, the contacts are friends or prospective friends, whereas In case of business networking, the contacts are business associates or prospective business associates.

Now, answer this question - How much time and money are you willing you spend to keep in touch with your: a) friends and b) business associates. It is important to know this fact. Online market may be different, but it is closely related to offline consumer behaviour. Online business model can help in extending the product composition with new innovation and format of delivery. It is important to know if people are willing to pay for a given convinience. And if they are not willing to pay for the convinience, what alternate source of revenue do we have?

So how do you keep in touch with your friends?

In real life, you spend nothing to keep in touch with your friends. You call them up when you want to hang out with them, you give them a shout on their mobile phones or drop in to kill some time! If you are tech-savvy and love to announce a great news, you send them emails. Why will you like to send a scrap to someone (when you can simply send a short email or catch up on various instant messengers)? And why will you like to create such huge volume of personal content and share with millions of people on the Internet who are not even known to me.

Though you may have build friendship /relationship on social networking websites, they are generally not for long. And the long ones actually use the social networking as only the contact point and then evolves and flourishes offline.

What about business associates?

However, business networking sites will keep evolving, since it adds value to businesses. It help people refer / recommend a vendor or buyer to other people in a networked environment as a recommendation network. It has been very successful, when it comes to executive search and generating new business.

Again, the formal nature of relationship and privicy factor makes business networking websites a great place to get connected and exchange notes.

So, the conclusion is:

So, as on today, given the trend, I can say that social networking is a fad, which is getting saturated and is not supported by a proper revenue model. Online advertising cannot be considered a decent revenue model for a site where people come to kill time! However business networking is here to stay. Corporate intranets having social communities may stay. 

I have already written the orbituary of Facebook, My Space, Bebo and social networking platforms. These are evolving as a fad and will vapourize in the same way in years to come. I wish these trillion dollar valuations to be true, but my mind says otherwise. And I am not the only person saying this. Steve Rubel of Micro Persuation feels the same way to a great extent (may be for different reasons).

What do you think? 

Among all the social-business networking sites, I find Ecademy and LinkedIn to be the best ones. Ecademy is my favorite since it has very nicely integrated offline networking in its system which results in creating trusted networks.

I experienced a very nice group-problem-solving technique called Virtual Tables during an offline networking event organized by Ecademy. I found it to be very effective. It can be extremely beneficial if practiced in a trusted network.

What you need:

• People who are interested in helping each other
• Ninety minutes (1 1/2 hour) 
• Paper / Pen to take notes

This is how it works:

Group together

It works best in a group of six-seven participants. If there are many more members, they should arrange themselves in group of six participants. I feel that it works best when the group is of people from diversified field (different businesses, departments, etc.). I think (not yet tested) that it will work best if people with same kind of responsibilities participate together (all business owners, all managers, all programmers, etc.).

All participants sit around a table. Every participant has 12-15 minutes by turn.

Now its your turn

When your turn comes, you can table your problem. Generally people table their biggest concern, dilemma, situation, issue they are facing in few minutes. The other participants of your group come up with their own solutions, point-of-views and ideas to help you. Since different people come from different backgrounds and have different ways to solve a problem, it is amazing to see how many fantastic ideas pops up. These sessions are generally filled with why-i-did-not-think-of-this-before sighs. This collective brainstorming delivers a list of suggestions that are diverse in nature and gives a new approach to solve the same problem.

It is like having five consultants serving you for fifteen minutes with their subject matter knowledge and common sense with an honest intention coming from an absolutely independent chair to help you out!

Take notes & rotate

You should take notes of the ideas. I suggest you note down all the ideas and spend some time back home thinking over them and considering the solutions offered by different people on the table. For the time being, you shall rotate the strike and the next guy should now table his/her problem and you should become a part of the elite panel of consultants who will help bail him/her out!

An important note:

It is utmost importance to maintain the privacy and confidentiality of the discussion. The purpose of the virtual tables is to help and get help. It may take time for members to trust each other, but once a trust network is formed, the effectiveness just multiplies and it keeps growing with the speed of trust.

So, go out and try this to discover a stress-free way of solving your problems (and others’ too)!

I was reading about Ed Kohler’s post about social networking update redundancy.

I think there can be a simple solution. To do this we may need a simple new standard format of data syndication, which can be a simple derivative of RSS. Basically every individual can have a personal RSS feed.

A person shall provide an input socket (it can be a XML-RPC based system, which already is used by Wordpress and several other blogs) when he signs up with any social networking sites or any website where he might update his personal data or make comments or blog posts. These sites can have a system to push the information to this personal RSS feed, which can be the only RSS feed that your friend need to subscribe to know all the latest news about you or your company. I understand that when all data is pushed to the same personal RSS feed, redundancy can be controlled by smart pattern matching algorithm (may be simply matching the heading to start with).

I think this technical solution might work

I think online networking is the best thing that has happened on Internet in last few years. I see several benefits of networking and spending time to meet new people and build professional and personal relationships.

• You can make new friends in new places.
• Someone might be of great help to you in a given situation. You never know.
• If someone cannot help, they might know someone who can help. They can simply connect you to the right person.
• You might get references for business and professional engagements if you can build a trust relationship and prove your expertise. We all know that word-of-mouth publicity is the best advertising. It is most influential and cost almost nothing. Most of the times networking is the only way to reach a particular person to discuss a proposal.
• You can get feedback on your idea, plan or work from different people with different point of views.
• You learn by sharing knowledge and experience. This can be done on a 1-2-1 basis or in a knowledge forum where people with same interest can discuss on a given topic.
• You can create mastermind groups where members discuss individual problems and help each other achieve their goals.
• You can help others. It is a great feeling to be of help to others. It makes you feel purposeful.

I have seen several online social networking websites. The ones which I liked the most are:

• Ecademy (No doubt the best business social networking website on Internet)
• LinkedIn (A great fan following and very good selection of people to connect to)
• Facebook (Looks like a decent social networking website - I really do not have much experience on this platform to make a firm comment)

BTW, I keep traveling between Kolkata, Chennai and London for business and will love to meet people who feel that I can be of help to them. Please write me a small note with your area of interest and I will get back to you.

May you have a million connections!

Abhishek

Reliance’s BigAdda, Rediff’s iShare and Naurki’s Brijj.com are the latest dotcoms to hit the Indian social networking marketplace. It may trigger the next dotcom explosion with many more mindless dotcoms in line with these me-too networking sites by public listed biggies of India. Soon, we will forget why the first dotcom boom wave came down crashing after showing colorful dreams to thousands of tech-entrepreneurs worldwide.

I will personally advise new startups to keep away from such me-too type projects unless they have a solid niche, a risk-managed business model and a proper revenue model.

In fact, I am not at all optimistic about success of any of these new ventures unless they offer a great reason to be a part of it. The market place is already saturated and people are finding it difficult to manage their multiple social networking accounts and commitments. Besides, most of these sites do not offer any value addition apart from entertainment. Gautam Ghosh, an avid blogger shares a simmilar view on the subject.

If I have to select a possible winner among these biggies, I will go for brijj.com, which can take a turn towards the business model adopted by yellowjobs.com of NDTV. Another reason for possible success of brijj.com is that it is designed to be a business networking portal. It offers you a reason to spend time and have a clearly marked revenue model. In comparison other sites, just like their global originals heavily depend upon a speculative value creation and are looking for a buy-out similar to youtube.com which will make them rich overnight.

Do check out how many times people are referring to "Internet advertising" as their business model for their social networking website. It is not that Internet advertising is not BIG business. But it will just not work for social media websites in long term. And it is a foolishness to bet on Internet advertising as a revenue channel. We know it from the Y2K dotcom meltdown. In fact I can see the same madness as Y2K. We are not yet there, but we know it can peak very quickly  

Do you think these sites will bloom?