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Tech

The Unintuitive Logic of the Frenzy Around the Private, Focused, Awkwardly-Named Social Network

I am not making up this trend (nor am I fabricating the names below): social networks are too large, so we need small social networks, which are funny-sounding but also quite useful-sounding, and may possibly even be the next Facebooks - precisely...

I am not making up this trend (nor am I fabricating the names below): social networks are too large, so we need small social networks, which are funny-sounding but also quite useful-sounding, and may possibly even be the next Facebooks – precisely because they are nothing like Facebook.

And yet they are: they just borrowed (stole?) Facebook’s exclusivity approach (start at one college, then slowly let in the others, or give early users only 50 invites) and distributed that power to anybody. “Users get the benefits of sharing without the strangeness that can result when social worlds collide on Facebook,” writes the Times.

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“Their creators say that they do a better job of mimicking offline social relationships, and that they represent a new wave of social networking that revolves around specific tasks, like sharing photos or coordinating plans for the evening.”

Asks the website Ducttapemarketing.com, “Are Small Private Social Networks the Next Layer?” You can almost taste the feverish hand-wringing.

In summary:

  • be Facebook by not being Facebook

  • make exclusivity democratic

  • have a weird name

See what they did there? This is why they call it venture capital.

After users invite a few friends into a group on Shizzlr, the service grabs a list of coming events from Yelp, Google and Facebook and lets members discuss their options. The groups reach capacity at 20 people. In the last three months, about 3,600 people have downloaded the application — a tiny number compared with Facebook's 600 million members. But Mr. Jaensch says he is not interested in competing with Facebook. "The people that you've called in the past two to three weeks are the people you actually do stuff with," he said. Shizzlr is just getting off the ground, but some of the other services in this field have attracted the attention of prominent investors. Path has raised $11 million from venture capitalists, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. GroupMe, which says it is handling 100 million messages a month, raised $10.6 million from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and First Sound, and others. AOL acquired Rally Up late last summer.

Needless to say, Google and Facebook are both scrambling to develop tools for sharing with small groups of people, too. How this will effect the ability of social networking to launch revolutions remains to be seen.