My universal theory of social networks goes something like this.
There’s some deep part of your brain that instinctively wants to make connections with other human beings. Even when you do something as superficial as click a button on a website to confirm that somebody you’ve already known for ten years is your friend, that bit of your brain experiences a little ‘ping’ of happiness.
This is why social networks like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook work. Once they’ve tricked you into signing up, you have to find everyone else you know who is also on the service and connect to them. When you run out of people to connect to, you have to tell everyone you know to get an account so you can connect to them again. Because it’s fun. And it’s fun because people are fun, even if they’re people you see every day, and have no need to interact with over the Internet.
Eventually you run out of real friends to add. At this point you have three options:
You can pretty much chart the mass-desertion of Friendster’s initial userbase on these axes. Lacking a compelling application beyond building your network, Friendster’s initial population became divided into those who were just wandering around looking for complete strangers to add to their friends lists, and people who were deserting the service in droves because it had become nothing more than a way for strangers to bug them.
A social network without a compelling reason to bring people back to the site will have a massive churn rate, relying on a constant influx of new blood still in the network-building phase. As such, social networks are prone to huge and sudden shifts in demographic as trends in which site is ‘hot’ change unevenly in different areas. (See also, Orkut)
http://jaxinteractive.wordpress.com/2007/09/27/susseccful-social-networks/
http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2007/09/14/on_social_networks
THESE 1: SOcial Networks entsprechen menschlichem Bedürfnis (Literatur Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society) habe ich zuhause, alle 3 Bände
außerdem dazu Social Capital: http://del.icio.us/search/?user=social%20capital