From Brand Republic: “The Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) and 10Duke have launched the first specialist tennis-dedicated online network, claiming that vertical communities will displace the likes of YouTube and MySpace. The ATP is using 10Duke’s technology platform to take its existing offline community online. Users can upload footage to 30Love.net via online and mobile to show off their tennis skills. Tennis fans can access behind the scenes clips from the pro tennis tour, view exclusive player video clips and share photos, videos and personal profiles.”
Again, from Brand Republic: “Sky is in talks with Facebook about launching a permanent branded presence on the social-networking site created for students. The satellite broadcaster is running its first ad campaign on the site to gauge whether the site’s 3.7m monthly unique users are willing to interact with its brand. If the trials are successful, Sky intends to invest in the development of a Facebook group to promote its premium subscription services, flagship programmes and bundled TV, broadband and telephony package.”
Comment: Somewhere along the line the plethora of social networks will break and users will rebel. They don’t want to log into 10 social networks before breakfast just to pick up every single “poke”. Either OpenID will work as a concept (although it’s sorely in need of a re-brand, since who wants their ID open?) or they just won’t join a niche networking site, prefering instead to set up their own Tennis group inside Facebook, et al. And guess what? Sky is getting in there early and setting up its own. This seems like the smarter move.
I still think they’ll be
I still think they’ll be space for niche communities (as opposed to niche social networks). There’s already a million and one forums online which focus on specialist interest and user groups, with no open ID, yet they survive and thrive. Most of the new wave of niche communities havent even begun to experiment with different social value propositions yet. Wait until we start getting the “Digg for Football news” rather than a “myspace for football fans” and things might start to look very different?
I agree you’re likely to see
I agree you’re likely to see both niche and big. The fact is that a larger percentage than anyone wants to admit, still use cosial networking primarily for perving at others pix and flirting. Why do you think the “poke” function in Facebook has both survived and spawned multiple enhanced “poke” version with options such as “kiss” “spank” and others I cant mention!
What is more interesting is whether Facebook will survive the 2 to 3 year cycle that the major social-network brands seem to go in; I have some personal views on the mobile sector for example, which will be rooting for a new brand to be the ‘big’ social network on mobile, not the by-then old guard of designed-for-online social networks.