People tend to swarm to whatever social media site is hottest and that all of their friends are using, which is perfectly logical as being the only one on any given social media site would be pretty pointless. We’ve seen the rise and fall of Xanga, Myspace, and we’re probably seeing the slow death of Facebook and Twitter as I write this. The thing that is almost always universal with all of these sites is that they follow a very certain and defined path to success and failure.
- Come up with a good, simple idea for people to get /stay in touch with each other
- Get a lot of users because people like this good, simple idea
- Notice that you have a lot of users on your site and start tossing tons of ads and additional features at them to try to gain / keep even more users and make a ton of money in the process
- Pollute your good, simple site with so much crap that everyone starts moving onto the next good, simple site.
- Close your site down as you lose all of your users
So as you watch Facebook constantly redesign their site to make it harder to use and Twitter add more and more features that no one ever asked for, start thinking about the next good idea for a social media site as yours could be the next big thing.