Expansion is not always a good thing

Social Networks today are beginning to attempt to accomplish too many things at once. It is difficult to keep the profiles consistent so that they might be useful.

Facebook-- As most everyone knows Facebook has been coming out with application after application for facebook pages. It started out with a few quizzes here and there, a few game apps, super poke and super wall applications that allow more options when posting on a wall or poking a friend. On holidays you could virtually hang mistletoe over a loved one or throw a party for a friend. However, applications snowballed. Now, there are too many applications to count and you constantly get requests to add another one to your page. There is no way for the applications to be useful and fun anymore because not everyone has the same ones. Also, they made the facebook pages cluttered and did not add anything to the main purpose of "networking."

Too Many to Count-- Another problem with social networks is that there are simply too many. There is almost no way to keep track of all the networks out there. There is not one place that employers can go to search for potential employees because their resumes can be posted on a number of different sites. Classmates.com is not the only place that people from your high school might be searching for you and not everyone may have a LinkedIn account so you might not be able to find the person you are looking for because you are missing a connection.

I know first hand that there are simply way too many social networks on the web. The woman who owns the travel agency that I work for wants me to post her events on as many pages as I can. This means that I have to find all networks that are either travel, jewish or singles (the travel agency used to be only for jewish singles but is now branching out). We attempt to find sites that might be useful that will either allow us to post the trips on a free calendar or a place that might partner with us and provide a link to our site in exchange with providing a link to their site on our page. However, it is difficult to figure out which sites will help us most. We started off with a list of about 400 different social networking sites and Jewish Community sites! Imagine how long that takes to go through and figure out which ones might actually be helpful and which ones won't be.



It is just becoming more and more difficult to contact the people we want to. Somehow, these sites need to be consolidated, which could possibly happen naturally through competition. The ease and simplicity of social networking sites will eventually make the difference. I think that there will always be a place for social networking sites that cater to very specific audiences but the general sites will have to endure a fight before making it.