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.“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:
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- be Facebook by not being Facebook
- make exclusivity democratic
- have a weird name