[Posted on January 14, 2008 - 3:30 PM]
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After funding a handful of niche social networks over the past couple of years, early-stage investor Jeff Clavier is already worried about what will happen to those startups when they outgrow their early adopters.Clavier has invested in several "passion-centric social networks," as he calls them. Dogster Inc. caters to pet owners, while Maya's Mom Inc., sold to Johnson & Johnson's BabyCenter last summer, is dedicated to parenting. And Buzznet Inc., which is preparing to announce a second institutional round of funding that includes Universal Music Group, serves music, film and pop culture fans.
In speaking with me on Friday at his office in Palo Alto, Calif., Clavier said that while people enjoy Facebook Inc. for its vast interactive capabilities, niche social networks serve a more utilitarian purpose by providing specialized content and fostering close personal interaction. For users, they represent an opportunity to engage with a community of other enthusiasts. "You figure out whether your questions are being answered, whether there are useful tips out there, and that drives your frequent engagement, almost every day," he says. "Sites which are solely focused on meeting those needs attract a quality audience."
Trouble is that as those sites grow, their cachet as specialty destinations may wane. "The big question is what will it mean to build those [networks] to 5 million or 10 million users?" Clavier asks. (Dogster, for one, counts about half a million users.) "Can you maintain the same level of engagement and proximity between users? People will no longer have the warm and fuzzy feeling of community."
Even on Seesmic, Loïc Le Meur's prelaunch video microblogging service that began testing by invitation only three months ago, early adopters are getting restless. "Already on Seesmic, we have people complaining a little bit that they used to know everyone on the service," Clavier says.
If that's the case, one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 -- that participatory sites improve when more people use them -- may be shadowed by the risk that too many users ruin the experience for the folks who put a
Web company on the map in the first place.
Watch for more from my Jeff Clavier interview in an upcoming issue of The Deal newsweekly. - Paul Bonanos
See Jan. 11 Tech Confidential post about Seesmic
See Dec. 9 story about social music sitees from Tech Confidential
i think the problem can be effectively solved with software that corrals those "seed stage" and other subgroupings of members into their own microcommunity. this is somewhat effectively solved by facebook's "networks" and a "groups". those grouping features need to be pushed on the seed members at the launch of the community, otherwise they're going to feel like they're being ghettoed