Our favorite social networking pundits, Danah Boyd and Fred Stutzman, weigh in on social networking predictions in 2007. Fred has this to say about vertical social networks, with a kind mention of MyChurch (thanks Fred!):

A lot of new SNS entrants are niche-oriented. Unfortunately, simply being a niche play isn't enough to guarantee success. We can look at these niche social networks as the modern equivalent of the bulletin board community. Research any specialty interest around the web, and you're likely to find a mailing list or forum or poorly designed website that serves the needs of this community. The SNS that wishes to come in and replace this forum or website lacks content, community and search placement. It will be a very tough slog.

Therefore, how do you successfully niche orient a SNS? First, you can find an underserved market, or a market that didn't really exist previously without the social dimension. One I can think of is Mychurch.org, a SNS for places of worship. You also need to seed content - if you want to build a SNS for patients or new parents, for example, ,you need to have more than just community - you need to have great content that incentivizes people to come back. Without the content dimension, a good number of niche social networks will fail.

I'm in total agreement. And not just because MyChurch is mentioned :) I've expressed the forum 2.0 sentiment before. "Christian social networking" by itself will not stand the test of time IMHO. And face-to-face interaction isn't a silver bullet either - a standalone private social network for a church plant of 50 people will not last...

Regarding the content, I'll save that for a future post. We're working on a pretty cool feature with the blogs that will do a better job of highlighting and saving good content.

In her piece, Danah Boyd talks about social networking fatigue in relation to large-scale portal-style social networks (ie Myspace).

I see some MyChurch users randomly adding strangers as friends. Strangers striking friendships are great, but we need to be careful. A person who sends 200 friend requests in 1 hour is obviously up to no good. And that account needs to be quarantined and captcha codes need to be dispatched for him.

Random friend requests lead to less community cohesiveness and trust. Teens don't take their myspace accounts seriously because so many of their "friends" are people they've never met. Just read Danah's account of ephemeral Myspace profiles

I see other niche social networking sites encouraging random friend requests between strangers, and it confuses me. I know why they're doing it - they want to make it seem like there's lots of activity on the site (like Myspace). But I feel their understanding of social networking is flawed when they highlight the person who has 2000 friends. If a person's network exceeds 150 people, their network is no longer effective. Malcolm Gladwell explained this magic number in The Tipping Point...