* Bar|Book is making the scene with pop networking
Social networking has come a long way very, very fast. On the Web this area of personal interaction has evolved particularly rapidly from free form forums and wikis through intranets and extranets, to complex Web-based messaging systems that add structure and goals to interaction as well as create, manage, and control connections between individuals.
What is intriguing is that as the structuring mechanisms have become more complex and powerful the goals of social networking have become more oriented towards pop culture goals – what I call popsoc networking.
Just take a look a Wikipedia’s list of social networking Web sites and see how many are focused on dating, tribal groupings, and partying. These are a far cry from the technical forums and corporate collaboration platforms that were the foundations of social networking.
What’s also interesting are the huge numbers of people who join these popsoc services and who are committed to using them. The greatest of these popsoc services is arguably MySpace which claims over 166 million members and has a sign up rate (so they claim) of 230,000 per day!
Why is MySpace more used than most other services? I’d suggest that it is simply because it had the right features (not too many, easily understood, no surprises) at the right time (just after the bleeding edge of pop social networking passed) and, most importantly, MySpace was adopted by the pop culture it served.
The generality of MySpace is part of that success – you can be a consumer, a musician, a film maker, whatever and find relevancy and connection in your interests as reflected by the community. This generality also means that newer competing social networking services have a huge barrier to developing their own markets.
So in popsoc networking what’s left? Specialization. For a new pop culture social networking service to have any value it has to be able to mediate some subset of social interaction better than the more generalized services do.
An example of this is a service that only recently opened its virtual doors: the Bar|Book which is, of course, in beta (and what respectable Web application service wouldn’t be these days?).
Founded by five recent Berkeley graduates and self-funded, Bar|Book provides a mechanism for coordinating groups of people meeting at bars, restaurants, and other socializing venues along with reviews and personal photos of events.
The venues are organized into Scenes (“Over five hundred of Los Angeles’ most popular night spots can be found right here. From bars in Hermosa Beach and Santa Monica, to clubs in Hollywood and Downtown.”) and Events (concerts, happy hours, parties, etc.). You can create your own event and invite Bar|Book members as well as anyone with an e-mail address (Bar|Book currently has an odd limit of 10 external addresses) but Scenes can only be created by businesses and are carefully managed by Bar|Book to ensure that they are real and relevant.
Bar|Book currently (as of March 2007) has a few user interface design problems mainly involving ease of use (how to do something is not always clear and help isn’t available). Even so, the service is more than usable and has attracted over 500 registrants in under 30 days with virtually no promotion.
There are a number of features that Bar|Book needs to add, such as SMS event notifications and user cell phone photo submission through multimedia messaging.
The other missing component of Bar|Book is that the founders are only in the earliest phases of thinking about monetizing the service. Advertising is an obvious choice as is driving product promotions through events promoted to users. Other ideas include charging bars and clubs for extended entries in the Scenes section.
Bar|Book’s strength is its focus on a locale and organizing party culture. Currently the service only applies to Los Angeles (LA’s diffuse nature actually increases the values of a service like Bar|Book), but other areas are planned with San Francisco already on the list.
Bar|Book is on the right track to capitalize on the popsoc networking wave that’s building but the team has some way to go to join up all of the dots to make it into a real business. This could turn out to be quite a task because, as the founders note, “Building a killer, hip community is hard work when you’re plastered four nights out of the week…”
