New 'social networking' type site to rival facebook/bebo/myspace etc.

MMDeire

I have come up with an idea/name/domain for a new facebook/myspace/bebo style site that I think could be better than all the above.

I won't give the name, but its essentially a place where a person could do all of the usual stuff they do online from the one place.

It would be perfect to hook up with twitter or even some of the other sites too.

Product placement would be wayy more at home then in those other sites too.

If I wanted to try and build this site, who could help me or where could I go to develop it? [It would be expensive, but I am confident it could get funding)

The sites name is four letters and ends in the new extension .CO (pre registration). ****.co

BlackEdelweiss

My brother owns this company, it could be his kind of thing.
http://nightbluefruit.com/

MMDeire

I have checked him out and could get in touch.

Keep the help coming!

Also, does anyone have any problems with any existing soc. netw. site that they could improve on? or extra ideas that these sites don't have already?

blue4ever

Get a full spec together - as much end-user detail as possible - then hit odesk.com, elance.com, guru.com or any of the freelance sites.

Pixelcraft

Honestly do you think any of those social sites were outsourced on somewhere like elance?

tomED

You could help the Irish economy by getting it developed in Ireland!

But the life of running a social networking site is difficult. We built a hobby related social network website for a client here in Ireland, www.hobeze.com. It's been a struggle but numbers are gradullay growing.

I hope you have some sort of realistic revenue model as it will be difficult to get the investment otherwise.

If you need any help - feel free to contact me!

seamus

tomED wrote: »

But the life of running a social networking site is difficult. We built a hobby related social network website for a client here in Ireland, www.hobeze.com. It's been a struggle but numbers are gradullay growing.

The life of any kind of user-driven and social site I think is difficult because you have rely on it to grow organically. You can't force people to sign up and you have very little to offer in the way of enticements.
If you consider that boards started in 1998, and five years later, in 2003 it was still quite small. It was possible even then to read every single post made on boards in a day. I did it a couple of times when working past midnight in a crappy job. It was 2005/2006 before the numbers could be considered anything significant.

How many other online forums were born and died in those 8 years?

While I don't want to collapse the OP's dream (seeing as I know nothing about it), the days of setting up a site and jumping on a bandwagon to watch it take off are long gone. You'd be jumping into a market where your competitors have greater brand awareness (facebook has 50% reach in Ireland, which is phenomenal), much bigger budgets and at least 5 years more experience than you do.

What you're offering doesn't have to be new, it has to be groundbreaking.

tomED

seamus wrote: »

While I don't want to collapse the OP's dream (seeing as I know nothing about it), the days of setting up a site and jumping on a bandwagon to watch it take off are long gone. You'd be jumping into a market where your competitors have greater brand awareness (facebook has 50% reach in Ireland, which is phenomenal), much bigger budgets and at least 5 years more experience than you do.

What you're offering doesn't have to be new, it has to be groundbreaking.

+1

flash harry

I agree with seamus, and again while admire the get up and go of trying to do something, you ave to ask yourself can you protect it once its live? As pointed out it takes a lot to build traffic/liquidity on the site.

What's stopping Facebook implementing the idea immediately to their 1.4 million or so Irish users?

To reitterate not trying to be negative as I hate that about boards, but these are real questions you will have to answer

TheWaterboy

I think your flogging a dead horse trying to develop this. Facebook / Bebo etc. have the entire market lined up. Their brand name enough is able to achieve this. Unless you are going to target a very niche market or have something very very very special to offer I think you are going to spend alot of money on nothing...

Sorry for been so negative.

Chet Zar

+1 on the point above re it needing to be groundbreaking - or at least providing very specific value to a particular niche market, e.g. a web designers network??

Facebook have the market sewn up but their main weakness imo is that it is a pretty 'general' application - you have everyone from your best friend to pure acquaintances to your mam to your boss on there and it really is just people bouncing off each other having the craic most of the time - all things to all men. The advantage in doing something more specialised would the focus on a particular topic of interest - or if you only want people who are involved in the same area of employment/interest/expertise.

Good luck though, would be great to see if you could come up with something that's the next Facebook but with a different angle!

00bri

Really hate to burst your bubble but I feel I have to chime in for fear that you lose buckets of money. As some people have pointed out already the market is dominated by Facebook. Even Google can't break it with Buzz or their original attempt; Orkut. Facebook started before the market became saturated. Sure there was Bebo, MySpace, etc, but Facebook took social networking to a new level and made it easy and accessible to everyone. Now the market is saturated it's nigh-on impossible for a competitor to enter the market, let alone get a decent share.

You could approach devs and designers with this idea and of course they will jump on board and say it's great - sure they'll be getting paid and it's you are taking all the risk. You could also be asking people you know what they think of the idea and of course they will say it's great (because it actually might be) but that's not an honest representation of would they actually use it. Sometimes the best opinions to take into consideration are the opinions of strangers with no vested interest because more often than not we will be [sometimes brutally] honest.

You'll need a lot more than a catchy name... I don't think you may have factored in how expensive a social networking site really can be. Paying for the development is the cheap bit even though to pay designers/developers to design a facebook-esqe site you are looking at a six figure sum at least.

For hosting, a dedicated server in some colo isn't going to cut it. To compete with the likes of Facebook you'll need data centres.These data centres would need to be connected to each other and the IXP using something like SONET. In these data centres you'll need lots and lots of servers to process the requests and SANs to store the data. A high end SAN such as an EMC V-Max you're looking at about 3 million euro. One of these won't do because you're going to need to have one in each data centre. These would then be self mirroring using SRDF through the SONET connection. You would also need to employ quite expensive staff to run all this...

All that is just scratching the surface. Facebook recieved huge amounts of funding from venture capitalists because there was a gap in the market that wasn't yet saturated. Social networking is sewn up by Facebook just like search is by Google. You won't find many sane venture capitalists to invest in a search company to compete with Google and you probably won't find any to invest in a Facebook competitor either.

tomED

00bri wrote: »

You could approach devs and designers with this idea and of course they will jump on board and say it's great - sure they'll be getting paid and it's you are taking all the risk.

That's a bit unfair, there are at least two design agencies who have commented here and none of them said it's a "great idea"...

00bri

tomED wrote: »

That's a bit unfair, there are at least two design agencies who have commented here and none of them said it's a "great idea"...

Of course not - MMDeire didn't post the actual idea that makes the proposed site any better than existing. I'll admit I'm as guilty just as I've accused. I worked in web dev (freelance) and shamelessly told clients that their idea was fantastic even though it's not. It put food on the table for my family when work was sparse. Well, that's capitalism for ya

tomED

00bri wrote: »

Of course not - MMDeire didn't post the actual idea that makes the proposed site any better than existing. I'll admit I'm as guilty just as I've accused. I worked in web dev (freelance) and shamelessly told clients that their idea was fantastic even though it's not. It put food on the table for my family when work was sparse. Well, that's capitalism for ya

Well then you are one of those web developers that give the rest of us a bad name! You should be ashamed of yourself!

We'd never tell a client they've a great idea if we don't feel they do. We'll lay the cards on the table for them and try and explain exactly how difficult it will be - and then it's up to them to decide whether or not they should go ahead with it.

Most clients are looking for advice when starting a project. Whether it's putting food on your table or not, you should always be giving them the best advice. It's no wonder you talk about having "worked in web dev" as past tense... you obviously didn't get much work after robbing your clients money!

Pixelcraft

00bri wrote: »

You could approach devs and designers with this idea and of course they will jump on board and say it's great - sure they'll be getting paid and it's you are taking all the risk.

Well I don't know about you, but if I'm approached to take on a project I know is destined to fail I'll pretty much tell them that, indeed I did to a boardsie who approached me a while back.

MMDeire

Wow, wasn't expecting such a big response overnight!

It is crazy to try and enter a market full of facebooks and myspaces [in fact I don't think an entirely separate site would survive]

With my idea, you could do a lot of different things from the one place [and import all your stuff from fb/ms.] Ideally you could even post to twitter and view others tweets from there one too.

This site is about integration, and all things in the one place [including email, cam-2-cam and chat].

If I explained the basic setting of the site you could see its potential clearly. [You don't have a 'page' like Facebook or Myspace... its something more]

00bri

tomED wrote: »

It's no wonder you talk about having "worked in web dev" as past tense... you obviously didn't get much work after robbing your clients money!

I didn't rob any money. They came to me with what they wanted and I provided it. In fact they were happy with the quality of work and referred more business to me. I left web dev because freelance isn't consistent enough and agencies don't pay enough. I now work as an Applications Engineer in the storage networking industry. To be honest though I'm after becoming lethargic to IT and want to exit.

Back to the point, just because I thought it wasn't a great idea didn't mean at the time that it would not turn out to be great after all. Why should I give some other dev the work just because I personally didn't think it was a great idea?

I'd be more inclined to think it's the high and mighty judgmental attitude which you are displaying that would give a bad name.

Chet Zar

00bri wrote: »

I didn't rob any money. They came to me with what they wanted and I provided it. In fact they were happy with the quality of work and referred more business to me. I left web dev because freelance isn't consistent enough and agencies don't pay enough. I now work as an Applications Engineer in the storage networking industry. To be honest though I'm after becoming lethargic to IT and want to exit.

Back to the point, just because I thought it wasn't a great idea didn't mean at the time that it would not turn out to be great after all. Why should I give some other dev the work just because I personally didn't think it was a great idea?

I'd be more inclined to think it's the high and mighty judgmental attitude which you are displaying that would give a bad name.

I'd agree with your points on FB et al in your first post.

On your other one though...man...there's a difference though between nodding your head and taking the job and happily getting paid for it even when you don't think it's a good idea - and actually actively encouraging the idea and saying it's 'fantastic' when you think it's anything but. The former is cool cos it's not like it's your place to say what's a good idea or not - the latter most definitely is not!!

00bri

Chet Zar wrote: »

I'd agree with your points on FB et al in your first post.

On your other one though...man...there's a difference though between nodding your head and taking the job and happily getting paid for it even when you don't think it's a good idea - and actually actively encouraging the idea and saying it's 'fantastic' when you think it's anything but. The former is cool cos it's not like it's your place to say what's a good idea or not - the latter most definitely is not!!

Maybe I should become a used car salesman :P

Chet Zar

00bri wrote: »

Maybe I should become a used car salesman :P

Yeah, at least you don't expect integrity in the used car industry

onedmc

MMDeire wrote: »

Wow, wasn't expecting such a big response overnight!

It is crazy to try and enter a market full of facebooks and myspaces

QUOTE]

The biggest issue with entering this or a similar market is not the idea or the technology its the marketing spend to get the mass market to use it.

seamus

onedmc wrote: »

The biggest issue with entering this or a similar market is not the idea or the technology its the marketing spend to get the mass market to use it.

The internet is somewhat unique in that a company or brand can grow entirely via word-of-mouth with zero marketing spend and become a global brand in no time at all.

However, it's the very few lucky ones who get that, and they need to be in the market before a market even exists. Facebook is one example - they had the best social networking template before online social networking became a household word (though it had been discussed academically for quite some time).

Youtube is a more pertinent example. It existed before most people had the bandwidth to even consider such a form of media and was bought by Google for stupid money, despite having never turned a profit in it's life. It was one of the few brands to ever gain worldwide recognition and not make any money from it.

But for every success like youtube and facebook, there are hundreds of thousands of failed sites which just didn't get the formula right.

onedmc

seamus wrote: »

The internet is somewhat unique in that a company or brand can grow entirely via word-of-mouth with zero marketing spend and become a global brand in no time at all.

Yes some have managed to grow via word-of-mouth but most require enormous funds to get them to the top.

But by now unless the idea is utterly new and can create momentium you will need to promote it via facebook, twitter etc.

As with all business, internet projects fail because you dont get enough customers quickly enough. Big buck on marketing increases penitration and get you there faster and therefore should secure the business idea.

This marketing may be paying students to tweet about how good your service is but its all $$$.

Capt'n Midnight

MMDeire wrote: »

I have come up with an idea/name/domain for a new facebook/myspace/bebo style site that I think could be better than all the above.

I won't give the name, but its essentially a place where a person could do all of the usual stuff they do online from the one place.

google reader / buzz are trying to do this

yahoo/flickr - all the big boys are trying to offer as much functionality as possible

on the other side there are firefox apps for aggregating


Back in the day when you had anti-virus / firewall / other security apps those companies tried to link everything together in security suites. Problem was that most people preferred to cherry pick the best product of each suite.

You would also be up against the network effect if you have a generic "me too" website, even if it's 10 times better

KJF

This to me sounds like a feature rather than an idea. The instant facebook implements your features then your website is dead.

You're unique idea of being able to do everything from one place is not that unique. Do you not think facebook wants you to do everything from one place? Of course they do. Facebook want to own the internet. That's why they implemented facebook connect so you log in to other sites using your facebook credentials, it's why they implemented their own app platform and advertising platform. It's why before long they will be rolling out their own email service, video chat etc.

You're best bet is to take the best ideas you have for this site and integrate them as applications on facebook or twitter. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, instead piggy back on their success.


tinktank.ie

Kelticweb

I have to agree that it is no straightforward thing when it comes to social networks. You're opening a huge area of specialisation.

Development = 1,000+ man hours (just for a basic one)
Hardware = Scalable network distributed systems cost a bomb!
Marketing = You're up against them all here...

The other less well known social networks haven't been able to get half the popularity of facebook or myspace. Even myspace struggles against facebook.

safesecure.ie

AOL planning to close bebo if they cant find a buyer

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100406/tc_afp/usitcompanyinternetaolbebo