A few days ago, I exchanged emails with Charlie Schick of the Lifeblog blog on the issue of "social network fatigue". Charlie wrote a post titled "Facebook fatigue" - which reminded me of similar issues that have arguably been around for longer in Asia, in the forms of "Cyworld fatigue" and "Mixi fatigue" (Mixi tsukare).
About this "social network fatigue" issue, the "why" is actually an easy part - novelty gone, etc. But the "how to solve" is the more difficult part. When asked how to keep a social network "fresh" and prevent it from becoming a fad, I couldn't come up with good answers myself:
About this "social network fatigue" issue, the "why" is actually an easy part - novelty gone, etc. But the "how to solve" is the more difficult part. When asked how to keep a social network "fresh" and prevent it from becoming a fad, I couldn't come up with good answers myself:
Self-reinvention, new acquisitions and value addition (think Google), letting users constantly find new people within the network, etc. pops up to my mind, but clearly it's more complicated than that.So here's a nice brain teaser to keep your brain running even during the weekends ;-) : If you were the CEO of Cyworld or Mixi, what would you do to overcome these fatigue issues and continously provide new values to users so they won't leave your service? Watch out - "doing more stuff", again, might not be the right answer.
But doing "more" can actually lead to adverse results - Cyworld tried to add more features but that made the service increasingly difficult to use and many users didn't like it.
