Week 7 Presentation
Which Industry?
Social networking sites
Why is it important?
Social networking sites are important as they enable communications between people regardless of distance. It is cheap form of communication as oppose to phone calls and much much faster than mail. The interactive qualities also provide a place for people to search profiles and make new friends. Not sure anybody ever looked through a phonebook and rang random people up asking for friendship. It is also new and expanding industry. There is alot to learn and discover.
Research question
Why causes social networking sites to fail? I am asking this question because if we don’t understand what makes a site fail. We will never understand how to create a successful one.
Resources
I will look at two failed websites The Hub, which was created by Wal-Mart (my personal favourite) and Friendster which was at one point very very successful and then slowly died I will then look at MySpace, which is very successful but seems to be loosing its place as the social networking site leader.
I will compare these with some other sites but these three will be my main focus I intend to use different formal blogging sites, hoping to find reviews of people who have used the failed sites and their comparisons with more popular sites. Also some academic journal articles, Danah Boyd has done alot of very good research in this field.
Issues/Problems
Primary information is going to be difficult to find, seeing as the companies have failed. Not too much literature has been written about social networking sites. Most journal articles are written by danah boyd or are written by someone else about her findings so the information may be a little bias. Also finding quality blogs and opinions will be difficult. i will have to sift through many.
Brief Findings
Wal-Mart’s The Hub failed because of too much advertising clutter on WebPages, It had too many ‘fake profiles’ of people who just spoke about how great Wal-Mart is. It was intended for teens BUT they had to get parental approval before the profiles were put up to do this user information was sent to parents emails. HOW UNCOOL.
Friendster had an age limit on members- they had to be over 18, Friendster lost its members to MySpace, which had all of the same features. A lesson learnt to the sites founder who once was offered 30million for his site from google and turned it down. Friendster failed to update features.
MySpace is now loosing its members to facebook. perhaps because it is easier to use.
TimeTable Plan
I hope to have it done by the due date. lol
