Sharing Social Networking Sites

As social networking sites gain in popularity, their original devotees almost always have to be open to sharing their beloved SNS with others. Whether the inclusion of other groups is a good or bad thing is up to you to decide, but there is a growing trend in social networking sites as they expand in size, to expand into different demographics.

An early example of this is Myspace, which started out as a niche community for musicians and their diehard fans. The site then exploded, and quickly became the hottest SNS on the web. It seemed almost everyone had a Myspace. At first I'm sure this was aggravating to the diehard fans of Myspace who before did not have to share their intimate community with teenyboppers and their parents. However, many of the original users of Myspace used the site as their lemon and made lemonade in the form of now being able to share their music with the massive and accessible Myspace audience. This audience propelled a lucky few musical talents to fame and fortune, such as Soulja Boy, Lily Allen and Sean Kingston. After Rupert Murdoch's acquisition of Myspace, the site launched its own recording label to further enable the hunt for undiscovered talent on the site. Going "mainstream" and including users from different demographics allowed Myspace to become a juggernaut for advertising revenue and a haven for the prying eyes of advertisers into the minds of users through the collection of user data.

Similarly, Facebook started out as a very tight-knit community of Harvard students created by Mark Zuckerberg, gradually expanding to allow all college students. This first collection of expansions morphed Facebook from a small community of users where mostly everyone knew each other's name to a vast SNS encompassing tens of thousands of coeds. This initial and gradual expansion of Facebook opened the doors for social networking between students across the country. Facebook has since expanded its parameters to allow anyone with an email address to join, letting everyone into what was once Harvard's guilty pleasure.

In Robert Strohmeyer's article focusing on the ever expanding demographic of adults on Facebook he worries that the presence of baby boomers on social networking sites like Facebook will cause a flee from the site in younger users. Strohmeyer's anxiety about this mass exodus from Facebook is ungrounded, as users of social networking sites have always had to deal with their SNS communities expanding and broadening to include different demographics. These original, younger users will somehow find a way to co-exist with their older counterparts, to make the SNS a space for all to flourish and network, that is, until the next big thing in social networking comes along and the cycle starts all over again. Commentators like Strohmeyer maybe overzealous in placing their blame of the disintegration of social networking on the presence of baby boomers. The demise of many social networking sites is in many cases simply because of timing and the arrival of new technologies.

Social networking sites must always expand and accept new demographics of users to join to further their relevance and shelf life. The premise and history of social networking sites has solidified the notion that bigger is better, but will this notion always hold true in the future?