Social Networks to Best Portals

Social networking is now, and will continue to be bigger than portals in the future, according to Piper Jaffray investment analyst Safa Rashtchy.

MySpace now gets more monthly page views than AOL or MSN, according to Rashtchy (as quoted by News.com). I'll have to look for the numbers, but I'm guessing that the portals still get more visitors, while MySpace has a smaller and more dedicated audience.

The billon dollar questions of course are, are these fads or not, and how do you make money from people writing about themselves and reading about their new friends?

The social networking fad isn't something all that new, it's an updated version of things we already had (Geocities, blogging, Amazon recomendations, newsgroups). It is a different packaging for a new generation, and Yahoo, MSN etc. will soon offer slightly different twists that add commerce to the mix, finding ways that MySpace hasn't dreamed of to turn those eyeballs into transactions. Social networking will be absorbed into portals, not vice versa.

The urge for people to share more and more of their lives and likes on line is here to stay, until a privacy disaster prompts people to think twice about opening their diaries online. We've heard many cases about stalkers and law enforcement using social networking data to target individuals, and an increase in these incidents will turn the tide before long. It is ironic that will all the talk of privacy and snooping fears, people are happy to tell the world where they live, where they hang out, and who their buddies are.