SugarLoving: Testimony to niche networks
Uno as Ideas, Online, Social Networks, Web2.0
Oct|2|2007
I’ve said before that social networks are around communities (duh), and these are going to be more and more connected to content. Also, you might remember me saying that I can still see a ridiculous amount of niche bookmarking sites pop up. (I haven’t said it on this blog, but I think I should probably, read my one comment here).
Why is this? Because sites like Muti, Digg and Reddit are structured around a community. Take the Guy MClaren issue a while back. His submissions weren’t welcome on Muti, but if he’d posted his articles on a bookmarking service for people interested in SEO then he might have received a lot more attention. Similarly, it’s been said that Digg is a tech focused audience. Which is almost entirely true. If you submit a story about the latest hot new designer shoes from Gucci then it will get Dugg down. That’s not because they have a hostile community, but because they have a different community.
Which brings me to 2 new startups this week:
How is this relevant? Well, firstly Sugarloving is a pretty looking niche Digg (I’ll start calling it something different soon). You’ll remember that Read/WriteWeb had an interview with Rogelio Bernal Andreo, the founder of CoRank, (site similar to Pligg that you can create your own Digg clone) and that he got pretty pissed off with everyone naming everything a Digg Clone and called for the term to be buried (and I wholeheartedly agree). It’s a really good argument, I suggest everyone interested in networks gives it a once over.
What it comes down to is that these sites are niche sites, and they are niche sites in exactly the way that Social Networks are/can be niche sites as well. Following on my previous post where I argued that social networks will never die, I want to drive that point home. You can have whatever content, and you can have endless amounts of networks. As long as there are niche interests with enough people you should be able to sustain a network. Yes, Facebook will still be very popular and very mainstream. But I struggle to organise a good Kayak Polo game through it. It is a bad organising tool for these kinds of niche interests. The days for generic networks are limited (and that’s why Yahoo Mash will see very little uptake if they don’t differentiate themselves, and also probably why Netscape’s Digg clone folded and had to be relaunched)
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens with the new Friends Sorting feature - if this will be possible.
Techmeme Leaderboard is a similar iteration of this concept. They will eventually give you a Technorati Top 100 (or a Techmeme leaderboard) for any topic - once again mining the niches.
What are the next potential developments in social news?
Each workplace will have its own digg clone (you should have one already, it’s called Enterprise 2.0).
Each publisher will have their own digg clone or favourite ranked stories.
Issues will have their own digg clone (imagine a social news site for stories on Burma - the most popular/active stories are bubbled to the top).
A distributed/federated social news platform
Something that would bring immense value is a social news platform. I’m not sure if CoRank already does this… but where they would be really powerful is in giving a lot of niches their own networks, and then aggregating that info into their main site (which would have much broader topics, but more quality info in each).
Technorati Tags: social news, muti, digg, corank, bookmarking, digg,