Seth Godin, in a bit of a D.H. Lawrence moment has attempted to define the 5 pillars of social media success. What makes a successful social web app? Why do people choose to visit online social sites?
He boils it down to these 5 points:
- Who likes me?
- Is everything okay?
- How can I become more popular?
- What’s new?
- I’m bored, let’s make some noise
Seth points to Twitter as an example of an app that does all 5 very well. I would also include Facebook and to some extent Friendfeed.
I’m not sure about “is everything okay”. This implies that people are concerned with the status quo or have a certain neighbourly concern. I would probably replace that with “what are the people I know up to?” as I reckon there is more of a nosy neighbour factor.
But then again, who am I to question Seth?
Cracking
I mean to say, “is everything okay”. I don’t really get that either
Yeah I know, there definitely needs to be some acceptance that people like to snoop.