Social network fatigue growing

EMarketer gives us two interesting tidbits regarding adoption of online social networks:

• Per research from Synovate, 58 percent of adults worldwide do not know what social networks are at all.
• In the same study, 36 percent of current social network users worldwide (45 percent in the United States) said they are losing interest in online social networking.

That last point matters most to Internet innovators. This year alone, we witnessed sprouting of several new branded social networks, some on the backs of existing networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

When I say "on the backs of," I mean the new nets do something like this:

New Network X sends e-mail solicitations asking prospective new users to establish accounts. Some do so. When they log in for the first time, they are invited to furnish their login credentials for established Networks A, B and/or C.

If they choose to do that, Network X can use the programming interfaces (APIs) of the established social nets, with those users' credentials, to mine the users' friend lists and generate invitations to the e-mail addresses contained therein. Network X may or may not make it immaculately clear to its new enrollees that it will use their credentials for the other nets in this fashion.

People with long-standing LinkedIn or Facebook profiles may have observed a sudden peppering of invitations to new social networks late last year and early this year, probably from a net that uses some form of the process I just described. The technique, by which anyone with rudimentary API programming skills could create a social net that mines others, may ultimately contribute to the social net fatigue called out in the Synovate research.

As a result, I wonder whether we will see many more new branded social networks, or how many branded general-interest nets at a time the global or American markets will bear. MySpace largely supplanted Friendster here, and some analysts say Facebook has made great strides to supplant MySpace. Lay in big-niche players such as LinkedIn, and small-niche players focused around specific interests such as pets, parenthood or retirement, and you remove many doubts as to why people might tire of social nets.

(Lest anyone believe I am anti-social-networks, it isn't so. My early membership in LinkedIn led to my current day job, brought me consulting gigs and helped me recruit colleagues. Facebook has helped me find and reconnect to people I have not seen in years. I do grow weary, however, of new, oddly named sites wanting me to create Yet Another Profile. Recently, I winnowed my list of social networking accounts to the two I just mentioned. Don't try to find me on Plaxo Pulse, Naymz or Spock anymore.)

Social networking tools and methods should remain top-of-mind for strategists running brand-focused, content and commerce sites.

Smart online leaders should enable consumers to share prose, images, video, recommendations or just general communications in and around a site's core value propositions. By doing so, you provide a more personal experience and, potentially, extra motivation to learn about the brands, products or services offered.

Naturally, when every brand-name site becomes its own social network, we still face the problem of proliferating registration and user ID schemes.

OpenID and OpenSocial might matter here, at least as technology services that make it easier for users to consolidate profiles and accounts. But today, at least, they seem to matter more in the technology community than in the brand or business communities. Momentum needs to accelerate there, or consumers have little hope of holding their social net accounts down to a manageable number.