HN Explorer

Ask HN: What are the barbones essentials for a successful social network?

4 points by starter ↗ HN
What must a social network offer to be successful?

Profiles: Myspace has profiles, Facebook has walls

Communication: Messaging, Comments, Likes

Search: Find friends by email

Updates: Newsfeed, Email Alerts

Did I miss anything?

7 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] thread
staunch
You missed the big one: engaging content for people to gather around. MySpace was music/photos. Facebook is photos/status updates/notifications. On Hacker News it's submissions and comments.

Hacker News is a social network and it's kind of the Craigslist of social sites. It doesn't get much less featureful than this. Which proves a vitally important point: Highly Engaging Content is far more important than any bell or whistle. Not to say that HN couldn't benefit from a few select additions though, messaging is an obvious example.

starter
Highly Engaging Content. More engaging than your friend's profile information?
winsbe01
success is not just the sum of the features. offering something that other players have won't bring success, unless you can convince people it is significantly better, and _prove_ it. offering something competitors don't have also won't bring success, unless you convince people it's something they need or desire.

reinventing the wheel won't work unless you can show people that something is missing or wrong with what they're already used to. even then, it won't happen overnight, and it may not happen at all. take G+ for example. they made some not-insignificant changes to how people communicate in their network. they've already got a ton of users, but it's only been ~2 months. it could just be flashy-new, and could fade in another 12.

maybe another way to think about things is about what social networks represent: interactions between people. you have people you know, people you don't, people you want to talk to, people you want to listen to, things you want to share publicly, things that are private, etc. etc. maybe instead of building up a feature set, it would be beneficial to think about human interactions and relationships, and see how software may be able to represent that better than current models (G+ is trying this with circles).

runjake
The only barebones essential is that the people in my social circle are on it. How you hook people into that seems to be 20% features/80% luck/celebrity endorsements.