Everyone wants to jump on socnet these days. Ever since Facebook perfected the model, companies have realized that they can potentially make lots and lots of money by allowing people to "connect" with an online service in some form. But very few companies have actually built services that catch on. It's easy to say you're going to make "the next Facebook", but Facebook sort of does its job well enough already. To create a successful social networking model, you need a hook that's different enough from what's already out there. Twitter made it happen--so did FourSquare. They were so successful that Facebook even added features to emulate them. The great majority of social networks, however, fail miserably--even those from certain net giants. Here are the most embarassing attempts at going social. 

 

 

The iPod was a hard act to follow. Apple rose far above the clunky, awkward mp3 players on the market by developing an elegant little slab with an intuitive user interface. The iPod defined how we play our music today. If you still use a separate music player, it's most likely an iPod. It's become synonymous with "mp3 player" even though other companies still sell alternatives. Microsoft, of course, had to throw their hat into the media player ring. No one hates being outdone by Apple more than them. And so they developed the Zune--a player that would, they claimed, surpass the iPod in popularity thanks to its social capabilities. The Zune had the feature of being able to share files wirelessly with other Zunes. If you and a buddy both had one, you could swap files between your devices. To satisfy the powers that be, Microsoft had the shared files expire after a period of a few days. The idea was that you could sample a song or an album that a friend had bought and then buy it yourself if you liked it. Given that most mp3 consumers fall into the categories of iTunes junkies or pirates, the Zune obviously did not catch on. The social feature was not enough to convince people to buy it, and because not enough people bought it, most didn't use the social feature. It would be one thing if everyone had a Zune and could swap songs willy-nilly, but if you had a Zune, you were likely the only one of your friends who did. Microsoft made a valiant effort, but managed to seriously misunderstand the habits of their consumers. 

 

 

Oh, Google--you do most of the things you do so well, and then we have things like Buzz. In an attempt to compete with Facebook, Google implemented a social feature to users' accounts. People could share activity from a number of sites, as well as "like" the activity of others. Sounds pretty innocuous...except for the fact that the service by default publicly shared names and contacts. Unless you turned off the publishing feature, anyone could see the names of your Buzz buddies. The mobile version of the service also reveals your location whenever you use it. One Eva Hibnick, a law student at Harvard, was not pleased with this setup. She proceeded to sue the crap out of Google, who agreed eventually to stop sharing sensitive information by default and to set up a fund to promote internet privacy education. Buzz is still around, but Google made quite a blunder from the get-go. Doesn't look like they'll be stealing too much of Facebook's traffic anytime soon. Given their sordid history with social, Google should probably just stick to what they know best--search engines and email. 

 

 

 

Here's a tip: if you're going to start up a new social networking service, don't call it Buzz. It probably won't do very well. Just speaking from observation. In '08, net giant Yahoo! decided to formulate a link-sharing service with a voting feature. Users could share news stories and vote stories up. Sounds like a good model...except that it had already been done. Yahoo! took the mechanics of Buzz almost straight from Digg, which already had a thriving community. The similarly-structured Reddit had also been active for three years before Yahoo! decided they wanted in on the game. Buzz was so derivative that it couldn't pull users over from the already existing superior communities. The only people using Buzz were people who were into Yahoo! to begin with--i.e. people stuck in 2002. The push to drive traffic to the site failed, and in April 2011 Yahoo! laid Buzz to rest. 

 

 

Wal-Mart's probably not a company you would expect to enter the social arena. They seem pretty content with filling warehouses with obscenely cheap goods and letting obese America run wild. But someone in the Walmart machine decided in 2006 it would be a good idea to make a MySpace-reminiscent network exclusively for teens. The Hub encouraged its users to build profiles, upload photos, and create wishlists of their favorite Wal-Mart products. Because if there's one thing teenagers in America love doing, it's showing off how much they love Wal-Mart. Can you imagine any teen with any sense of social graces recommending The Hub to their friends? The network even required parental contact information to use--and would then update its users' parents on any activity. What could be more fun than disclosing all your online social activity to your parents under the umbrella of one of the country's most predatory corporatations? Oh, right, pretty much everything that's not doing that. Wal-Mart quickly recognized its blunder and shut down The Hub just two months after its launch.