Situational Relevance in Social Networking Websites

Anyone who has spent a fair amount of time on a social networking website is familiar with the "what's next?" problem. Put quite simply, "what's next?" is what you say to yourself after you have exhausted the novelty of the service, and from that moment on you use the site less and less.

Friendster.com has been stung terribly by this problem. Orkut and LinkedIn as well. Looking at the traffic graphs for Friendster and LinkedIn we can see similar traffic patterns - a long, steady climb upward, followed by a sharp drop, and decreasing pageviews over time. In television, they call a phenomenon like this "jumping the shark". While I'm not going to try and coin such a catchy name, I call this the "what's next?" moment because it represents the time period when the users sat up, looked around, and got tired of the service.

MySpace and Facebook (Alexa's charts are misleading) do not suffer from this problem. In many ways, Facebook and Friendster and MySpace and LinkedIn are similar: the visible technology, interface and face-value outcomes of site use are all very much similar. Why is it, then, that users demonstrate clear preference of some social networking websites over others?

The answer, it turns out, is actually quite simple, and it deals with the concept of situational relevance. We all have many social networks: our primary social network, which is comprised of our close friends and family, and numerous secondary social networks, which may be comprised of coworkers, classmates, neighbors, fellow church patrons, teammates and so on. As our social networks are webs, the primary and the secondary nets all intertwine; regardless, we maintain separate identities for each.

Additionally, at different times in our lives, our primary and secondary social networks grow together and apart. For example:

As youths, our primary social network grows very close to the secondary social network of classmates.

As we enter adulthood, our primary social network moves away from the secondary social network of our classmates, and towards the secondary social network of coworkers and community relationships.

As grown adults, our primary social network may move closer to the secondary social networks of PTA's, church groups and neighborhood associations.

Of course, these lists are not absolute, just illustrative examples. At different times in our lives, different social networks play more or less important roles: they are situationally relevant.

From birth through adolescence and young adulthood, our primary social network expands continuously. Eventually, we settle; the incentives for primary social network expansion, such as partnering and friend aggregation, diminish. As we settle on a core social network, the secondary social networks step forward to serve the role of providing us a steady stream of new people to meet (sustaining a human need for sociality). Just as "the new kid" was a remarkable event in grade school, the new neighbors down the street and the new vocal parent at the PTA provide us with later-life social network renegotiation that we all find interesting.

Regardless of how it is spun, all social networking websites rely on users to fuel the interestingness of the system. Users know that the websites are only as interesting as who is on them; that is why social networking website users often become advocates to non-users. However, once everyone is on the website, the users are posed with a quandary: "what's next?" We know what happens to traffic after that point.

The actual problem is not that users are tired of each other or the sites are faddish (common explanations); it is simply that the users no longer need the website's service. Take the case of Friendster: Aimed at a mid-to-late twenties demographic, Friendster positions itself as a way for people to visualize and expand their primary social network. The problem, of course, is that an average Friendster user has long established much of his or her primary social network. If the average user is not frequently or drastically changing his or her primary social network, a site that seeks to aid in that role is actually not useful. Visualization and exploration of a social network is simply not enough.

Let's bring situational relevance back into the picture. In the context of social networks, situational relevance of a social networking site is based on 1) the demographic it attempts to serve, and 2) the social network it attempts to map. While it is almost always interesting to view social networks (for example, conducting a time-to-time investigation of ex-classmates on Classmates.com), to create real value, a