Paul Buchheit: There's no such thing as a "social network"

Most of my friends got onto FaceBook for #3, the glorified address book, and stay on it for one of 3 other applications:<p>2.) Photo-sharing. As of now, it really seems to be the best photo-sharing app on the net.<p>3.) Making plans to meetup offline or catch up with old friends. This seems to be the most common use of the wall (and to a lesser extent, poke/superpoke), though I gather some other social groups use it for actual silliness.<p>4.) Scrabble.

Very insightful.<p>This post and this article(1) by Clay Shirky should be required reading for anyone building socially-oriented software.<p> 1) <a href="http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html</a> Old news to some I guess - but I just found it via a link nostrademons posted in a different thread and it was the most interesting thing I've read all week.

That's a great consolidation of the features offered by typical software in the 'social network' category.<p>It might also be worthwhile to distinguish the 'network effect' or 'network lock-in' which is when significant parts of the value of a service come from the people already using it.