Trendsurfing is Risky Business

I first started thinking about social networking fatigue, when the You Knit What blog abruptly shut down last August. The creators felt that they had just reached a point where it wasn’t fun anymore, and so they quit.

Today, the San Francisco Chronicle has an investigation into the idea of young people getting burned out on social networking sites.

The article highlights one of the deepest hazards of trying to build a business like MySpace based on the trends among teenagers. As every New Kid on the Block will tell you, those teens will turn on you in a second. Or at least once they enter college.

MySpace might be the most vulnerable site, because it has been so closely associated with teenagers. Once those teenagers enter college, they are going to be extremely likely to reject MySpace as they try to assert themselves as grown ups. At the same time, new teenagers, are going to see MySpace as something that only kids from the class of 2006 did and are likely to seek out something new entirely in order to distinguish themselves from previous groups.

What if “social networking” itself starts being seen as something that only kids from the class of 2006 do? Remember when everything was all about grunge in 1993? It only took 3 years for the music world to suddenly become all about Spice.

The Internet is always going to be with us. I think, however, that the way people use the internet is going to always be changing as each generation of teenagers eventually rejects what they once found popular, and as new High School kids demand something new to help them distinguish themselves from their older siblings.

Thursday November 2, 2006