Social Networking Software – When You Wish Upon A Star

If you have ever spent an evening in the country, miles from the nearest streetlight, you know how amazing and massive just the sky above you can seem.  Filled with “billions and billions of stars”, as noted astronomer Carl Sagan was fond of saying, the night sky seems endless.   But with the aid of even the smallest telescope, that same star field is multiplied to the degree that it becomes, well … galactic.  Even the most accomplished astronomer is dumbfounded by its immensity.

Such is the state of software development in the newest technology solar system, Social Networking.

The Internet is a vast and increasingly uncharted cosmos, with new social networking stars appearing by the hundreds every day, and with each new star there is “a wish upon it” — a wish born in the mind of a computer student, or a software engineer, or a businessman, or an investment banker — a wish of promised wealth and fame.

A decade and a half ago, when I opened the doors to my first web design company, the vanguard of technology just appearing at the edges of the known software universe was “the Portal.”  Spoken in hushed, reverential tones, whenever or whereever it was discussed, the idea of the Portal was thought to be the secret to web design stardom.  Well, it wasn’t.  It was just the genesis of a whole new breed of complicated tools and elevated thinking.  It was the ancestral beginnings of the current social networking phenomenon.

When the Portal was first growing in Internet consciousness, it was a huge task to find software to build one, or a web designer to guide you.  Today, in the social networking galaxy the software stars, and the web designers who study them, are innumerable.  Classmates.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, MeetUp.com, MySpace, Orkut, Plaxo, Twitter, Xanga, and Zoosk are just the planets in our small social networking solar system, but even this small sample boasts over 686 million registered users.  Imagine if each one of those users is worth a dollar in advertising revenue.  As Dudley Moore said in the movie “Arthur” … “I wish I had a dollar for every dollar I have.”

A Google search for “social networking software” yields an astonishing 386,000,000 web returns.  That’s one social networking website for every man, woman, and child in the United States, with 83 million left over.  Can there really be that many renditions of any idea, no matter how popular?  And if so, how can anyone make a profit with a new social networking website in today’s world?  It’s not unlike a teenager playing basketball in the neighborhood playground, dreaming of a career as an NBA superstar, without realizing that there are ten million aspirants for every NBA job.

The answer, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “lies not in the stars … but in ourselves.”  The truth is that anyone can build a social networking website, but it takes unbridled business acumen and a touch of online genius to make one successful.  It’s really that simple.  So, the next time you are staring into the night sky looking for social networking stars to wish upon, search for an astute businessman not an astronomer to guide you.

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