A broad-based belief in Silicon Valley is that new opportunities for social networks occur only with “platform shifts,” such as the growth of mobile. Only then, so this theory goes, do consumers have the cognitive bandwidth and interest to seek out new social products—and can budding networks find cheap enough distribution avenues to grow efficiently.
This dogma is starting to be reconsidered. Company builders and investors are starting to focus on a new generation of social products. That is despite the fact that there is no meaningful technological shift on the horizon and customer acquisition costs have never been higher, at least in the strict sense of advertising cost.
Few people think that mainstays like Facebook, Snap, Instagram and Twitter are going anywhere (I certainly don’t). But many, including myself, believe that we face a future where people are going to be engaged in more networks simultaneously. This creates ample opportunity for new networks to grow.
The question, of course, is where exactly these new social products will come from.
It is a fool’s errand to compete directly with existing social products on their turf. That means our current model of social networking, and the intense battle over one-to-one messaging, is not a fruitful place for new products to play. There are, however, four paths being explored that I believe can lead to successful next-generation social products:
Path 1: Leverage the ‘Real World’ and Build Physical Communities Enabled By Technology
As someone who does a lot of investing in early stage companies, I have been pitched the idea of using technology to build a “next-generation church” nearly a dozen times in the last few months. There is a strong belief that people have lost, and are deeply craving, physical community and local networks.
No one knows exactly how the next generation of social products will leverage the real world and what the next generation of tech-enabled communities will look like. But there are three themes that keep coming up as the heart of the opportunity.
The first theme is that real-life interactions are simply better than anything digital, and the demand for them is unmet because technology platforms that have attempted to address facilitating real-life interactions, like Meetup, have faltered.
The second theme is the belief that if you leverage the real physical world, you get more diversity than you do in the virtual world (at least in cities). Where once the theory was that the physical world was “narrow” and the digital world was “broad,” this has inverted. Now the way to give people more variety and new exciting experiences is in the physical world, rather than the virtual world.
The third theme is also a surprising reversal: People are potentially more willing to share openly in the real world than in digital spaces. Where once the physical world was seen as repressive and the digital world a space for free expression, the discussion is now how the physical world is the place where people can “open up” and are willing to share more meaningful content than on the web.
Regardless of what exact mixture is true or not, and what ends up working, a major theme is forming around the idea that there is an opportunity to leverage the real world as a central component of stimulating new relationships, new content and new tech-enabled networks.
Path 2: Design Communities Around Truth with Content Moderation, Curated Memberships and Clear Information Provenance
If the first path to next-generation social networks is leveraging the real world, the second path is leveraging what many see as a gap in content moderation, trust and “truth” on social products.
Ideas for new social networks in this space essentially all start by asserting that the existing social world was effectively built around free speech principles, sharing and ultimately engagement, but that in many cases people crave more highly curated and moderated conversation and interaction, and sources of trustable truth.
Existing social products may be attempting now to retrofit different spaces and experiences with more moderation to generate higher trust (i.e., shift toward groups with administrators, etc.). But that is a hard thing to do versus possibly starting fresh with content moderation and information provenance.
In the future, social networks may be designed bottom up around the principles of truth and trust. These types of networks would have strong content moderation guidelines where leaders would explicitly take control of the speech in the space. They would likely aggressively curate membership, and be very transparent with the provenance of information and content—so that anything shared could be traced back to the source (and blame or credit properly assigned).
The big and open free-speech platforms, I believe, are critical to the future of humanity, but I expect to see many smaller and deeper networks form around these different sets of principles. I don’t think that these types of communities will necessarily be particularly entertaining—but I do think they are critical extensions to the information space.
Path 3: Inventing New Content Formats That Drive New Graphs of Relationships
There are really two fundamental ingredients required to launch any new social network. The first is a new form of sharing, and the second is a new “graph” of relationships.
You can invent new forms of sharing, but existing networks likely will rapidly subsume your format. You can also discover new networks that exist in some nascent form, but without a new form of sharing, it is hard to drive the engagement needed to map and expand those graphs.
So the real magic comes when someone creates a new form of sharing for which there is inherent demand, but which can be massively extended with technology.
People forget that this was the story of very early Facebook. Facebook didn’t invent profiles, and people of course had real names. But the innovation was to allow for a new form of trusted sharing on the internet using your real name, photo and life details—all tucked in the private enclave of your university domain and bi-directional friendships. The original “hack” was using university email addresses to allow for the trust necessary to share real personal identities on the internet, and it was a revolution.
This was also of course the story of a network like Venmo. People wanted to send money easily, and in the earliest days they wanted to establish financial trust as well. But the set of people that they wanted to transact with didn’t yet exist in another graph somewhere. Simple social payments was the sharing factor, and the financial graph was distinct from existing networks.
The list of companies that found an important new type of content that led to the expression of a new and distinct “graph” goes on and on…Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snap and TikTok all found new formats that led to new relationships.
The real thing that propels new networks is the discovery of new content-sharing formats in addition to new graphs of relationships which want to push and pull that content.
In this model, the opportunities for new networks are nearly always open regardless of platform shifts or customer acquisition costs. It does take some genius to find a new angle of attack to develop new types of sharing and new relationships with whom to share; however, somewhat like fashion, opportunities do seem to naturally open up over time.
Path 4: Wait for Platform Shift
The fourth path to new social products is simply to wait for platform shifts, as per the long-held dogma.
Historically, there are a few reasons that platform shifts have led to new social products. The first obvious one is that with new platforms usually there are new forms of sharing and new relationships that people can build around the platform. So whenever a new platform launches, you see a Cambrian-explosion moment for new content and networks.
There is a second reason, however: Platform launches tend to open up distribution. To succeed, social networks typically require very low customer acquisition costs. Their value historically was driven by scale, and early on there just aren’t very many dollars to buy new users.
But when companies launch new platforms they typically need users, and are willing to dump huge amounts of money in the form of free distribution and promotion on new products that help drive their adoption. This is what happened with the Apple App Store, and what Facebook attempted with free distribution for applications when the original Facebook Platform was launched.
This will probably happen again in some meaningful way with VR/AR, perhaps in-home voice-driven assistants, brain-links and more. However, it isn’t guaranteed. Most of the platform companies now are wise to the value of social networks and may try to more tightly own the networks built on their platforms than they did in the past.
Ultimately, whether the new-platforms-drive-new-networks narrative is intact or not in the future doesn’t really matter. I believe there are enough paths constantly opening for new networks that we will continue to see innovation.
Who Provides What Infrastructure for These Next Generation Networks?
In the next many years we will all be using many more social products than we do today. There is a huge amount of opportunity, and for the first time in a while it feels like a huge amount of appetite to explore future social products via the vectors I outlined above.
The question on my mind is, exactly what infrastructure will these networks be built on top of?
The default answer is that the infrastructure will be much the same as it is today. People will build apps for Android and iOS and use the good old internet, and of course AWS.
I do think it is worth acknowledging, however, that the world of social network infrastructure could become more complicated and more interesting.
Following WeChat in China, it is quite clear that a race is on between companies like Facebook, Apple,and more to provide identity and messaging infrastructure for lots of social products.
In a sense, one powerful future for Facebook, which has long been acknowledged but never realized, is that it could become a platform for not just its own family of apps, but for any number of new social networking–oriented projects. It will, however, be a long road for them to get there and overcome both the technical hurdles and the branding/political deficit it currently faces.
There is also the question of how things like gaming and VR will play out. Will Steam become a social networking platform? What about Oculus, etc.?
The overall social economy is obviously enormous—and growing. As the formal barriers of people interacting with each other have dropped, it is clear that human beings have an almost limitless appetite to interact and share with each other. The future is going to hold many more social products and networks, and my suspicion is that we will see some interesting new platforms come into play sooner than later.
The multibillion-dollar questions remain—exactly which next generation networks will break out, and who will be providing the low-level social infrastructure on which they are built?