Vladimir Oane

The death of niche social networks

2 months ago I was invited to watch a demo of Cisco’s EOS platform, a software that enables a media company to easily deploy social networks around their media properties (books, movies or artists). All these uniquely looking social networks being connected by a single EOS sign-on.

At that time I had serious questions about Cisco’s reasons to build such a simplistic software (a glorified CMS). But after some consideration I understood the play. Right now the distribution of media is in the hands of a few big distribution companies like Amazon and iTunes. If you want to sell a book or CD you need deals with them. And considering the temper these companies it would suck to depend on them.

Cisco’s offer to media companies is to build a collection of small social networks built around their assets (which serve as social objects) and this way create in time a legion of trusted followers. Having such a database might offer great leverage in your negotiations with a tempered distributor such as Apple.

The problem is that Facebook decided to do this last week. Each and every interest & and each and every book, company or movie are turned into pages that people can adhere to …. or like. This means that if you decide to “Like” a movie, you became part of a small community (small in comparison to the 400M Facebook users) around that particular movie. The same with your passions, music or the companies your worked for. Facebook just transformed itself from a generalist social network into a collection of communities around every social object you can think of. Or at least made the first steps towards that goal.