• by Andrew Ettinger , April 2, 2008

My fingers are tired; so are my eyes. I have spent the last hour checking my eight e-mail accounts (one work, one personal, one for mailing lists, five on social networks). I barely managed to read all of those messages. Instead, I weeded through them and replied to just the most urgent. I suppose this is what ER doctors mean by triage.

I like social networks, both as a consumer and an advertiser. What better place is there to meet young, terminally ill girls; or women who enjoy being treated like ponies? But seriously, by delivering contextually relevant messages to like-minded individuals, social networks are a paradise not only for perverts and pederasts, but also, advertisers. Rather than using gender-age demographics as proxy for consumption behavior, we can actually use self-identified product interest (like a sterling-silver mouth bit). Theoretically, this should make marketing more targeted and more effective.

Hardly a month goes by that I don't receive an invitation to yet another social network.

According to JupiterResearch, the average person spends 14 hours online a week. I am an intensive user, so that number jumps to 30 hours per week. Even though that is an absurd amount of time to spend online, the time itself remains a finite resource. Every minute I spend on Dogster takes away time that I can spend on Catster. Anyhow, I am too busy updating my profiles with my latest fetish to actually take up any new hobbies. At some point soon I will experience social network overload and have to pare down my choices.

The next phase of this phenomenon seems to be the rise of niche social networks. We are migrating from mass identifiers (e.g. music lovers) to more specific attributes (e.g. country, rock, jazz music). Companies like Ning allow laymen to create and distribute their own customized network. 15 years ago, cable splintered the TV universe into narrow channels based on lifestyle and gender. Perhaps social networking will similarly fragment the social web.

BountyFishing (full disclosure: my former client) is a social network for fishermen. Compare that with golfbuzz.com, a social net for golfers: Each is a popular hobby with lots of overlap, but a person only has two hands and one 48-hour weekend.

Counter-intuitively, our time limitations might give more credence to large networks. If they can adequately satiate demand for our specific hobbies, we will not bother leaving them for ultra-specific sites.

The media industry thought consumers would have an unlimited appetite for TV channels. That turned out to be false: The average viewer watches only a dozen channels - out of hundreds - with any frequency. Thus, media buying became more important as it became harder to parse the budget and still find the right media mix.

From a workflow perspective, this is just a mess. Targeting many small groups is difficult to manage. Niche sites bring loyal audiences, but they are small in size. Aggregating dozens (or even hundreds) of identifiers is time consuming. Most marketers do not have time or energy to cull through this much data, which adds credence for larger, mass-appeal sites like MySpace.

The social networking trend is global but not united: The Brits use Bebo, while in Brazil, Google's Orkut dominates. This runs counter to the treatment of the Web as a global singularity. It also fragments the potential audience. Perhaps the next big thing will be brand-centric networks. Imagine buying a new car and automatically enrolling in that company's social network. People love to show off their new cars, so why not give them the tools to do it? Web-savvy brands can capitalize on existing consumer behavior and put consumers into the discussion pipeline for future retention.

It is no surprise that the number one activity across all online networks is finding more friends. But after a while that gets boring. Facebook got it right when it opened its API to outside developers. Suddenly, there was a profusion of other, more interesting stuff to do, and voilà the site became stickier. Little wonder that MySpace has followed suit.

I am in a losing war with social networks: I find them fascinating, but to some degree I want out. When I changed jobs, I seriously considered dumping all of my old accounts. I wanted to start fresh. But then they pull me back in.

Andrew Ettinger is the director of interactive media at RJ Palmer Media Services. (aettinger@rjpalmer.com)