Putting aside enough time to honor your New Year’s resolutions? A good extra New Year’s resolution might be to avoid everything on this list from ReadWriteWeb:
10 Mobile Social Networks to Check Out – ReadWriteWeb
The prevailing wisdom (Folklore?) is that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the nodes: See Metcalfe’s law and the less-familiar, more optimistic Reed’s law. That might be true of the potential of the entire network, but what about the value to a particular node, i.e., individual? Mobile networks being geocentric will have much-smaller pockets of useful nodes due to population density and market popularity–think Orkut in Brazil.
They’re all competing for the same thing–my time–with often-redundant features. Cross-posts helps: This blog goes to Linkedin and Twitter; Twitter, Facebook, and Brightkite cross-post to each other. However, I often ignore cool features to cater to the least common denominator among my network of networks. There’s also the occasional SNAFU like when a blog bulk edit pushes dozens of bad posts to each. Diminishing returns rapidly give way to value lost with too many active networks, cross-posting or not.
Right now we’re in the Cambrian Explosion of social networking; such booms rarely end well for the participants. How many of ReadWriteWeb’s 10 will only be remembered in the fossil record of such articles?