I came across 2 blog entries today that represent 2 theories that are getting more press in the social networking space. One is that online social networks are becoming more important and valuable to their members, and the other is that we're building up immunities to the social networking bubble.

Seemingly contradictory ideas, and both have data to support them. The first article was a study that found 43% of internet users who are members of online communities "feel as strongly" about their virtual community as their real world community. And the 2nd blog was about social networking immunity that's starting to surface as Myspace users with hundreds or even thousands of friends get bombarded with spam and random friend requests.

The 2nd article had some interesting analogies to phone and email. When we first got these tools and the network effects just started to kick in (ie Metcalfe's Law), we were excited and empowered. Now that they're ubiquitous and abused by spammers, we build an immunity through filters. For example, our phones have answering machines, caller id's, even silent ringers. I pay $35/month for a voice mail system that others might call a "cell phone". I never answer it.

The same filtering is starting to happen on Myspace. I probably shouldn't admit this publicly, but I've used spiders to crawl myspace for usage patterns and research purposes - anecdotally I can tell you the percentage of users who have set their profiles to friends-only has increased significantly over the past several months. (ps. I'm not the only one crawling myspace for data)

Back to the 2 conflicting articles that were both written today... it seems there is a ceiling and a floor for social networking usefulness.

I am convinced that a social network needs critical mass to be sustainable. We've been approached by different organizations (including a large church) to build or license out a white-labelled, custom church social network just for them. A completely walled garden limited to their 1000 church members. I'm not a big fan of this, although I am open to it. I look back to the success or failure of online forums. I've talked with a couple forum webmasters. The general consensus is that a minimum of 2000 members is needed for the message board to sustain itself. Anything below this floor results in an embarassingly unused ghost town.

There is a floor for social networks too. We can speculate on its value. But I'd expect this floor to be higher than that of forums, and directly proportional to the geographic proximity of the community it represents. (ie. if a social network represents a local town, the floor is significantly lower than a social network representing all the people in the US)

There is also a ceiling. Get too big and you get the problems of Myspace. Myspace users lack cohesive community, and this lack of infrastructure results in very loose connections, little semblance of privacy and integrity, and lots of spam and abuse. Sure it was fun to be friends with Spongebob Squarepants, but its getting old Bob. I'm not getting anything out of our relationship... you're too corporate for me.

So whats the solution? Finding the middle ground between floor and ceiling and hoping to stay in this sweet spot?

The previous version of Facebook (the college-only version) solved this very elegantly in my opinion. It was gated and private - you are a member of your specific campus network and thus the floor was lowered. And it was also ungated - you can add friends from other networks, thus taking advantage of the network effect. Easily get past the floor and stay below the ceiling...

I'd imagine many of the 43% that highly value their online networks are Facebook users.

There are 2 people I would love to talk to more about this. Both work for companies that make co-branded social networks for organizations. One is my smart friend Noah Kagan from EventRobot and the other is Steve Loughlin of Affinity Circles (who I only met recently). I'd love to know what they think this floor is for niche social networking communities...