Social Networking Sites: The Bad (Part I)

I'll caveat my comments by saying that I may not be a customer segment that the predominant social networking sites are trying to reach. I'll also say that the sites I use have obvious value to myself and the general community. I'll share my $0.02 on what I like and dislike about sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Let's start with a few of the dislikes:


1) Too many ads: While I'm not opposed to ads or monetizing a page, these ads go too far. For starters, they are intrusive. Flashing banners went out in 1999. They sport low CPMs and extremely low click thru. And, they happen to take up a lot of space. MySpace loves to place them at the top of the page which pushes more meangingful content down the page. I can't even see my inbox notifications and friend above the fold anymore because of so many ads on the upper page.

The other issue with the ads is that they are not relevant to my needs and interests. Hopefully Google can help them straighten out this mess because I don't happen to be in the market for a Dodge Ram pickup nor am I looking for a big-breasted blonde on True. Surely they have enough information from my profile to target the ads such that my click-thru would be higher. There's no reason they couldn't (and shouldn't) show me an ad about laptops given that I have been discussing this in various emails with my MySpace friends. This is kid's play on Gmail.

In short, too many irrelevant and intrusive ads that get in the way of my engaging my community of friends. They are surely leaving tons of money on the table because of this.

2) Discoverability : This is a major problem on MySpace. I find it very difficult to locate individual postings that might have just the information I'm looking for, turn me on to a new friend, or warn me of somebody that I want to avoid. We all have very specific tastes and yet MySpace does a very poor job helping me discover the content and people "tail" within the 50 million plus MySpace community. For example, if I want to find somebody else that speaks Arabic or that recently traveled to Lebanon, I don't have a tool that can help me search, find, and connect with such people. Therefore, what good information exists on MySpace is difficult to locate. This problem is described in detail in The Long Tail (by Chris Anderson). By the way, this a great book in helping you understand why the web is such a powerful commerce medium by explaining that such as medium reduces inventory holding costs to a level that online commerce players can afford to offer EVERYTHING. Look at Netflix...they offer a seemingly endless inventory of all sorts of movies which are very easy to discover. Anyway, this is one of my favorite books as of late.

I'll save additional criticisms for some a forthcoming post...