Like many of the internet users, I have been avid and frequent user of one of the many social networking sites that are ruling the page hits, number of unique visitors and other such charts these days. However, a lot of times I end up just being in there trying to think out what more to do here? And I really feel that a lot of other people probably feel the same way.
Looking at this from a basic concept perspective, most of us like hanging out with friends or people whom we know where we kind of do activities for which we share common liking. We then use these friends or contacts to also help us with information and assistance for many needs that may come up - things like admission to universities, jobs, moving to new places and so on. Social networking sites enable us to take the "hanging out together" concept online, which is great since it removes physical distance issues. But once this task of putting people in touch with each other is achieved, a lot of stuff is left to be done by the users - things like building groups/ communities, contests, etc.
In my perspective, to take social networking to another level, probably a bit too much is left just to users and thus, this phase of being on a social networking site and then wondering what more to do. Now, this is a rare situation and opportunity where you have got visitor’s time - but not more to offer to the visitor. From my viewpoint, social networking sites need to take this to another level by giving a way to the users that are networked on its sites to have collaborative fun via doing something on common interests as well as find approaches to enable leveraging of the built network for person’s use.
Here’s an example for how social networking sites may help leveraging networks a person builds on their sites. Lets say a person is moving to California where he does not know anyone and wants to use his current web of network on a social networking site to find if he can reach a contact who lives in California to help him out. Typically, user would be able to do this by searching friend’s lists and checking locations and so on to determine this - now thats exactly an example of "a bit too much is left just to users". One approach to help here can be to enable the user to search up to "X" levels of network contacts whether there’s someone from California in these lists whom he can contact and say - Hey I am Y’s friend and so on. I must say here that implementation that I’ve put on is just an example and may differ - I say so since the way features work on social networking sites is a very sensitive area so implementation feature for anything needs to be deeply and well thought out.
An example of how social networking sites may want to enable friends to collaboratively have fun is via better content sharing and at times the sites themselves starting themes or putting up content to trigger talks and discussions. A place on the site where the site may put some content of the ongoing cricket world cup and asking people to upload pictures and videos and then triggering a forum/group/ community like discussion on that would certainly generate more traffic and keep people more and more addicted to the site. Usage levels of websites such as Youtube should give the social networking sites a hint in this direction - this can be more like merging of a content sharing website and social networking website. I understand a lot of social networking sites allow you to share your photos and videos, but that’s about it. This needs to be taken to a further level and again currently it’s a bit too much is left just to users.
The above basic concepts would certainly require detailed implementation thought process and organization of user data in a systematic way to enable greater search and browse capability and probably a lot many more steps that I have not yet thought of - but this certainly is the area where social networking sites can march ahead.
PS: If you are aware of any social networking sites doing one thing or the other in these directions - leave me a comment.
