Social Networking Gone Wild!

When will the madness stop?

What started in 1995 as a way to find former classmates has now officially spiraled out of control. Gone are the days of these sights supporting just a few pictures, posts, and friends. Former industry leader MySpace now continues to lose ground to Facebook–now thought to be worth $15 billion–partly because they’re unable to provide thousands of third party applications to add to pages–yet.

That’s not where it’s stopping, however. For several years Linden Lab’s Second Life has given users an avatar based virtual alter-ego to call their own. If that weren’t enough, though, now we’re starting to see things like Ancestry.com’s DNA networking. You read that right, for a scant $100 to $200 your DNA can be collected via home cheek swab kit and subsequently filed by one of a few sites, who will then display your genetic network on a world map. That long lost cousin who lives halfway across the globe? Found’em.

There are over 200 social networking sites floating around the internet and that number is only growing. One site supports private messaging, so another supports picture albums; another supports videos so another offers 3-D avatars. So what’s the next industry leader going to offer?

The British based site Qubox is currently beta testing their site which matches people based on short opinions and interests quizzes. Users can find like-minded strangers around the globe thanks to Qubox automatically comparing user’s answers and matching people up. While the Qubox site isn’t ready to be particularly useful at the moment, this is a twist to the social networking scene that has incredible potential. With more targeted and detailed surveys it could turn into the ultimate marketing information database.

As demographics become old news in marketing circles and psychographics strengthen their foothold as the most important data to have, a door is opening for a new breed of social networking sites to walk through. Sites which serve the needs of marketers more than the user by collecting what could potentially become the ultimate database of customer information.

So while MySpace, Facebook, Google’s Orkut, and professional sites like LinkedIn fight it out with their old news business plans, other sites are collecting psychographic data and our DNA. These new business plans are going to raise ethical dilemmas for companies and huge privacy concerns for users–as well as a new type of information for hackers to covet. Despite these concerns, the potential of these sights is too great to ignore, and we should all expect to see companies start to take advantage of these opportunities in mass soon.