Social networking sites were in the news this week again with AOL’s purchase of Bebo for $600 million. Maybe the new owners might get round to fixing bebo.ie, which is still pointing at the “cover story” used by its previous owners.
Closer to home Vaveeva is reported to be in trouble and looks like it will be shutting its doors permanently.
The site is currently unavailable, so whether or not it comes back or not remains to be seen.
Last year there was some mention of them faking their online numbers, while they also took
liberties with one of Krystian’s photos.
Can all of these various social networking sites survive?
Or are they all trying to be snapped up by some big media giant?
It seems like it will eventually go the way of lots of other industries that initially saw a proliferation of providers when the product/service was new. There will be increasing consolidation between products with basically similar functionality and audiences until you have several big players and clear niche markets or differentiators among the “boutique” providers out there.
I’ve been kind of bowled over by how many different networking sites there are just within the professional realm. I get at least an email a week from someone exhorting me to try out Plato, or Blue Chip Expert, or Spock, or whatever else. I haven’t even clicked through to see what any of these sites are about, though, because I’m not really dissatisfied with LinkedIn anyway, and they don’t have anything “new and different” that leaps out and encourages me to have a look.
It takes great poetic license to describe vaveeva.com as a social networking site – it was an out-of-the-box CMS system given the Social Networking label by its owners – it had little, if any, of the functionality of proper Social Networking sites and the problems that led to their downfall had little to do with the rise or fall in popularity of that type of site.
At the end of the day it was a bulletin board, blog and a few pages that were fed by RSS feeds. I have no idea how they lasted as long as they did given the amount they seemed to spend promoting it.
Interestingly enough their data on Alexa.com (ok, not the most reliable metric when it comes to measuring a site’s popularity) indicated they were getting a pretty healthy amount of visitors. Did they have someone employed just sitting there hitting f5 all day? Probably.
@Christina – I have accounts on a lot of them, but I only use a couple “actively”. As you point out – most of them don’t bring anything new or exciting to the table, so I can’t really see the point. There’s a lot of hype surrounding the entire thing at the moment, so maybe when it all settles down and matures we’ll all have a better idea of how things really stand in terms of longterm prospects.
@Cormac – I merely used the terminology adopted by the Sunday Business Post in their reporting of Vaveeva’s closure. The Alexa stats are odd. Of course they can be faked, as you know
Michele
“I merely used the terminology adopted by the Sunday Business Post in their reporting of Vaveeva’s closure.”
Yep, I realise that, as I said, I think this label was something added on by the site owners who were hoping to cash in on current web trends.
Do you have a link to the SBP article? I’ve been looking for it online with no luck.
The article doesn’t seem to be online. It was one of those snippets in the main part of the paper a couple of weeks ago