I’ve tried most of the major social networking sites out there: Orkut, LinkedIn, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, et. al.  Eventually I settled on two: one for professional networking (LinkedIn) and the other for keeping tabs on friends (Facebook).  I don’t seem to have many friends on the other platforms.  Most of them are dedicated to Facebook, and a few die-hard MySpace users still keep their MySpace pages up-to-date, but Orkut and Hi5 are mostly devoid of any regularly maintained profiles of the people I know. (Although it’s been reported that Orkut is more popular in South America.)

The story that Facebook is gradually overtaking MySpace is playing out in terms of traffic, according to comScore:

Consolidation seems to be the direction that most internet users are headed, and judging by the increasing global usage of Facebook and LinkedIn, it seems unlikely that anyone has any chance of really challenging them in their dominance of the professional and personal networking arena. 

Sure, there are lots of reasons to standardize on a single method of modeling social networking data, especially to facilitate data portability.  And certainly emerging social technology standards and concepts like FOAF, XFN, OpenSocial, OpenID, OAuth, hCard and the like are good for everyone – consumers and social networking sites alike.  But those kinds of standards don’t really motivate the average user to pick one social networking site over another.  Even if Facebook and LinkedIn eventually do support those standards 100%, and the dreams of full data portability are fulfilled, the end-user isn’t going to pick one social networking site over the other just based on what standards are supported.  It boils down to the same things that motivate users to select the other software they use: usability and visual design, brand, virility and market momentum, and company reputation.

It seems to me that it’s hard to fight gravity at this point: Facebook and LinkedIn are likely to dominate for the next 5-10 years as the top tier players in social networking.  The only thing that could change this isn’t really standards support, it’s whether or not a competitor can build a more usable platform with better branding and a solid reputation.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Social Computing