Email Social Networks vs Social Network Emailadmin
Google Buzz The recent launch of Google Buzz and their attempt to turn email into a social network is a huge misstep, and its not the first time this has happened either. Yahoo! Has added social features to their email that have fallen pretty flat. The amazing part is that the reason for this failure is simple and, uh, I think pretty obvious.
The main reason Buzz and Yahoo!’s socialization of their email fail is that there is no reason for people to connect, no imperative. Facebook does a pretty good job of connecting you with your existing friends, Friends and Strangers is designed to connect people with new friends and Twitter sits in a limbo between the two where its easy to find new people, but hard to get to know them. There is no compelling reason to connect to people through email.
Not Just Personal Contacts People don’t want to have their email contacts all of a sudden activated so they can talk to each other. Think about how you use email: You likely have several email addresses, some used for signing up to those registration-required sites, others for friends, others for work. Yeah right. Most people are not that organized and their email contacts are probably a good mix of all the above. I don’t want websites I signed up for to be able to connect to my personal contacts, to my friends, and to my business contacts.
It’s not a question of privacy, it’s a question of structure. Most people have a list of friends and create that list with the knowledge that those friends may connect to each other through the social graph. People simply don’t use email that way, and have not thought about the social graph while using their email accounts.
Dating Email Then think about people who are actively dating. Even if you play the game on the up-and-up, if you’re going out with different people connecting those contacts and letting them talk could be awkward at best, messy and a whirlwind of drama at the worst.
Make it Social First An email service would need to be positioned as a social network to start with, but then why not just build a real social network? Google and Yahoo! are trying to bootstrap their email assets to makeup for their lack of success with their social networking properties, and they have been in such a rush to do so that they have failed to ask the basic question: How are users connecting, and why? You can’t take a short cut with social network: A social networking site needs to help its users connect to people they couldn’t connect to before, and that they actually want to connect to. |
