Social Networking Overkill

I suspect that there’s no Web application that won’t eventually acquire a whole slew of social networking features. Rather than just doing whatever their core competency is it seems that every startup along with many established Web applications provides friends, comments, content voting, messaging, and so on.

This makes me wonder how quickly the gloss will fade for users as they wind up with yet another set of similar social networking services for every Web application they sign up for. The challenge for Web Applications that aren’t intrinsically focused on social networking (that is, social networking isn’t a core feature of what they do) is to partner with companies that are social networking focused.

For example if you build a new scrapbooking application why not acquire your social networking services through mashups with Facebook or MySpace – why stick out your neck to provide non-core services that you’ll invest a lot of time and money to build and that you probably won’t do as well as the market leaders?

• Software
• social networking