Rumor has it that AOL will attempt to go up against social-networking’s 800-pound gorilla, MySpace, by launching a service of its own. Apparently more information will be available within two weeks.
With the purchase of Weblogs, Inc., AOL made quite a move toward providing content rather than simply service, and the limited content they provided within the "walled garden" of AOL itself. Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are among the most popular sites on the net, so it’s natural that AOL would want a piece of the pie. However, the social networking space is crowded as is. Google’s got Orkut and Yahoo! has Yahoo! 360. Specialized services such as LinkedIn (aimed at building professional networks) Yelp (aimed at finding restaurant and other service reviews) and Sportsvite (aimed at finding sports teammates) serve their respective niches very well.
The big question is: What would AOL bring to the table that hasn’t already been done?
If the Internet has tought us anything, it’s that nobody is invincible. When I was a Web newbie, AOL’s WebCrawler was the hottest thing in search engines. It was eventually usurped by Yahoo!, which was in turn one-upped by Google, which will most likely one day play second fiddle to some hot, new search engine.
Such is the case with MySpace, which beat up Friendster for the championship-belt of social networking. In many ways, it was an unlikely victory. MySpace is fairly ugly and difficult to use from a design perspective. One of MySpace’s "advantages" is that users can "skin" their pages to customize them. However, quite a few of these skinned pages become extremely slow to load and virtually unreadable due to the busy background images. The servics is also frequently slow to load in general, but with 70 million users hammering their servers, that offense can almost be forgiven.
So let’s say AOL comes out with a new, highly-(tastefully)-customizable social networking service with lots of innovative, well thought out and easy-to-use features. There’s no guarantee there will be a mass defection from the existing services because the greatest strength of any social networking service is the users themselves. People join where their friends are. And while AOL’s service might cause a stir in the beginning due to it’s "newness," the small percentage of early adopters may become bored and go back to where the critical mass is: MySpace. I recently read a comment that was paraphrased from Slashdot that read, "Myspace is like a nightclub with crappy decor and crappy music, but it’s where everyone else is so you end up there."
Very true, but every day a hot new club opens up that attracts lines around the block. Some of those people go on to become regulars. If AOL offers something new and compelling in their new service, they may make a splash in the social networking space. If it’s more of the same, however, it’ll merely be money poorly spent.
Via: DownloadSquad
UPDATE: TechCrunch has some more details on the service. It looks like AOL will tie the service into it’s AIM instant-messaging program.
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