Dave McClure - Top 5 Things That Fail and Win on Social Networks

Dave McClure, master of 500 hats and the host of Graphing Social Patterns, opened the conference with a brief but thought provoking presentation on top 5 things that fail and win on social networks.

Top 5 things that fail on social networks:

• Too many friends
• Too many apps
• Virality is dead
• Ain't no money (targeted advertising fail)
• Your privacy isn't

Top 5 things that win on social networks:

• Poking
• Multiple platforms
• News Feeds
• "App" - vertising
• Data portability

The presentation was quick, simple and brief but had an important message for social networks . Dave is right that having too many friends can fail a social network. You just don't feel connected to your friends if there are too many of them. Virality is also a very crucial component of social networks. If there is no proper platform for viral engagements, it can adversely affect the social network. Finally privacy is something that social network operators just can't ignore. It is much too important today and users are quick to sound their opinions. Just recall what happened in the case of Facebook Beacon, a poorly executed strategy from Facebook that didn't respect privacy. It's no surprise that Facebook took it down after experiencing a major backlash.

Two points I'd like to add to the list of things that cause social networks to fail are scalability and addition of poorly thought features. If your social network isn't scalable and you don't have a high availability strategy then eventually users are going to leave. They may not leave immediately, but they will, especially if a high availability strategy isn't implemented. Addition of poorly thought out features that are primarily there for monetization and don't directly benefit users will hurt user experience causing them to become less engaged on the network.

Overall, this is a very interesting list to remember. Thanks Dave for sharing this.