Future of Dolphin and Niche Social Networks

If you're considering building a niche social network, chances are that some degree of doubt has already crept into your mind. With the Facebook super-monopoly, other strong competitors and numerous new social networks launching every single day, it is only natural to question the rationality of such a move. 

In many ways, this fear is well justified. It's easy to create a Facebook page and get your friends on board. Surfers en masse have morphed into spoiled brats who refuse to fill in a 3-field join form (because it's so damned tedious and time consuming) but will happily twit all day long about what they eat, will “insta-upload” sienna-styled shots of their Starbucks latte and will "like" every drunk party photo they're tagged in. Such is the world….Now!

My interest is in the future...

…because I am going to spend the rest of my life there (quote). Don't know who said that, but this applies nicely to this topic. Whatever you do online now must be done with an eye toward the future. The pace of the Internet world makes "now" nearly redundant, and as much as you may loath making predictions, if you're going to be a web-entrepreneur, shop around for a Nostradamus hat. You will have to learn to foretell the future (which, unfortunately, also means that you will need to learn to accept failure and move on). 

Now, to the fun part…predictions! Let's borrow from investment professionals - they live and breathe predictions, and most of the time you'll hear them grappling with two main things - trends and fundamentals. The Internet is no different. It's all driven by trends and is supported by fundamentals. The most important concept here is that trends affect the market temporarily, while fundamentals create a long-term movement. Trends are extremely hard to predict, while fundamentals are always clear, as long as you have a keen eye and can make sane judgments. 

Trends are easy to spot, for they are in today's headlines - Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google+, Groupon, etc, etc. The very reason for this post, however, is to try to assess the fundamentals of the online social networking world and to try to predict what's looming in the years ahead.

Artificial and Temporary

… are the words that come to mind when thinking about today's state of affairs. Social networks are remodeling our real-life social interaction patterns, and it works. People seem to like the convenience of using the Internet to socialize, and even more so when it helps to connect with otherwise unreachable peers. We've seen this happening with telephones and it's great. I've only started, but a little mismatch has already edged in, you see. Look at how we use phones as opposed to how we use social networks. We can call each other even if we're on different telecoms. We've seen this happening with mail, and what a treat to our lives and the lives of the trees email has become! But hey....again, I can email @hotmail people just fine from my @gmail account. More importantly, I can setup an @boonex account and still be treated as an equal. 

Not the case with social networks. I have to have a Facebook profile to share pics with my school buddies. Well, not with all of them… just with those that have a Facebook profile too. That sucks.

What Facebook (and any other large social network) is trying to create is a virtual world that would confine our online social interactions within itself, but the thing is that we already have such a world - it's the Internet. We have one "real world" (we won’t digress to alternative opinions about this for now) and one "virtual world.” In our real world, we don't have other sub-worlds, we only have PLACES. Not the case with our virtual world, unfortunately. 

Organic by design

The Internet is the single most important phenomenon of the 21st century, and the key to its effectiveness is in decentralization. It's a network of "sites", where sites are locations that store information. It is only now that we somehow started to think that sites may also be "networks" that store people. My biggest hope, belief and wager is that we would naturally evolve to understand that people must not be “stored” at different sites. People may only visit them, just as they visit places in the real world. People should be able to visit places with their friends, or meet their/new friends at places. People should be able to grab their friends and move on to other places together… for we're young and free.

It's not too far in the future that the organic design of the Internet will prevail and turn generic, large social networks into… well, something else. For that to happen we need to see one thing fixed…

Identity

Identity is the fact of being WHO the person is. A profile on any website is not and must not be perceived as an identity, because it's not the person, it's only a virtual document, an "identification document", a passport, a driver’s license if you will. One may have many passports, but one may only have one identity.

Our friends and colleagues are real people. My passport can't hang out with the passports of my buddies. My driver’s license is not me, and I should not lose my friends if someone decides to punch it. Why the heck it is different online? My social connections must be tied to me, not to my SNS profile; they are MY friends, not facebook.com/boonandrew's friends. 

The change is happening. Lots of bright minds are working day and night to make it happen and it will one day naturally blend in to our online lives. When that day comes, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ will be gone for good.

Planet of the Dolphins

Once high ships with their vast fishing nets are gone, Dolphin shall roam freely, playing and singing. Places will become relevant again. People will want to go to small, nice sites that have unique content, that feel cozy and personal, that treat people as people, not profiles. The online bureaucracy that helped large networks thrive will be forgotten, and every professional, enthusiast and fan would be able to create a place that would be relevant, engaging and popular among their friends, and (with some advertising) strangers. The Internet shall be free again. 

And, surely, if you believe in this, the best time to start is now, because you want to secure advantageous positions when the party starts again.

You may wonder, however, why Dolphin and not, say, Drupal, Joomla or Buddypress? Well, although I am indeed very biased, I still think that we have a better idea of what should serve the next wave of niche social networks the best way. Dolphin 7 and much more so Dolphin 8 are (being) designed specifically for the purpose of driving niche social networks and they offer a great balance of rich functionality and ease of use. With Dolphin 8, we plan to introduce a slew of improvements and services that will remain unmatched for years ahead, when it comes to building a niche community site. More importantly, the way we're building Dolphin 8 now is decidedly different from anything you've seen today. What we do is closely echoing the famous SJ's quote - "technology alone is not enough—it is technology married with liberal arts - married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” We started to realize that this game is not so much about features and speed, it's about making your site members smile and want to come back often. This new perspective produces wonderful results, which we’re anxious to start sharing with you very soon.