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?
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Exactly!
Smart businesses learned during the '90s and into the 21st Century that the primary key to success is focusing on your core competencies. Those of us in technology are constantly tempted to believe that we can build anything we need into our software, and that we can do various functions better than the other guy. As a result, technologists tend to dissipate their energies away from that which will allow them to create the greatest value and get caught up in doing "better" what someone has already done.
It makes no real sense.
Those who can break away from this habit will be the next successful companies. Those who don't will be also-rans... or will disappear.
social ? networking
While it is networking, it isn't so much social. And adding apps of dubious utility and quality is generally a waste of time and money.
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