For a while, I’ve been thinking that social media is a bubble. I figure in 3-5 years the hype would be over, and, while elements of social media would remain, the bubble will burst.
But lately, social media has gotten quite stale and I’m wondering if the bubble is already deflating.
I’m not the only one.
Not surprisingly, bloggers are among the first to notice.
Problogger Darren Rowse addressed the changes to blogging in a post entitled, “Has Blogging Lost Its Relational Focus?”
The blogosphere is a different place now in many ways. For starters there are a lot more blogs. There is almost a bigger focus upon blogging as a business tool and the idea of making money online in general.I do think there’s probably been a shift (a smallish one) to some degree in the ways that bloggers look at and treat one another. For example I hear people talking about their ‘competition’ a lot more and see some bloggers link out to other blogs in their niches less. I also see bloggers developing relationships more out of strategy rather than just because they want to connect.
Robert Scoble chimed in with his thoughts in his post, “Has/How/Why Tech Blogging Has Failed You”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Tech blogging and my role in it. I’ve increasingly become saddened. Why? Because we’ve increasingly started focusing on the business side of things. Look at all the stories on TechMeme or Google News’ tech section. It’s all business, almost all the time.
Rewriting (or competing with) the Wall Street Journal isn’t why I started blogging back in 2000. I started blogging because I wanted to share my life with you (back then I was planning conferences with programmers and I was seeing them build remarkable things). I wanted to help other people discover these new things and understand how to use them best.
Over at Big Contrarian, Jack Shedd wrote a post about some of the web’s most popular bloggers (don’t follow the link if you’re easily offended). Here’s a snippet:
Write top ten lists and whore yourself on as many other sites as you possibly can. Don’t be thoughtful, long-winded or interesting. Don’t write about what you love, unless what you love is popular on Digg…. don’t even think about writing about more than one topic.
Whether their strategies work or not is slightly beside the point. It’s cheap. It’s marketing driven, instead of content driven. It’s the type of thinking that leads to a sequel to the movie Garfield.
Blogs were really the forefront of social media, and so I believe that social networking is beginning to fall in these unfortunate footsteps.
Think about it. You sign on to Facebook. You catch up with old college friends. It’s fun at first, but then it fades. Those friends were in your life for a season, but now it’s a new season in your life. And your current friends, well there’s way more to your relationships than a Facebook account.
Even if you disagree with that, you can agree that fads fade. Ask Friendster. No, really. They were an American fad, but have staying power in Asia.
So then we have new shiny things on tap. Twitter, FriendFeed, SocialThing, Plurk, Identi.ca, Tumblr and Pownce. The problem is that most of these are filled with meta-social media talk.
Even good things, there can be too much of.
Which is why we currently live in a world where Google dominates the search market while Lycos, Alta Vista, Excite, Webcrawler, and Magellan rest in the search engine graveyard. And Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Ask.com struggle to survive.
People only have so much time or a capacity to handle all the noise. Is it really any surprise that Google, probably the most minimalistically designed search engine, was the one to survive?
Think about a product like the Flip Video. It’s super simple. It’s selling like hotcakes.
Look for social media’s winners to be the ones that keep it simple. In the meantime, be wise with your social media campaigns. Don’t just jump on the latest, greatest thing. It’s a balancing act. You want to play in the space while its hot but being ready for where consumers go next. Just don’t be surprised if next comes a little sooner than expected.