

Ask HN: What are the barbones essentials for a successful social network? - starter

What must a social network offer to be successful?<p>Profiles: Myspace has profiles, Facebook has walls<p>Communication: Messaging, Comments, Likes<p>Search: Find friends by email<p>Updates: Newsfeed, Email Alerts<p>Did I miss anything?
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staunch
You missed the big one: engaging content for people to gather around. MySpace
was music/photos. Facebook is photos/status updates/notifications. On Hacker
News it's submissions and comments.

Hacker News is a social network and it's kind of the Craigslist of social
sites. It doesn't get much less featureful than this. Which proves a vitally
important point: Highly Engaging Content is far more important than any bell
or whistle. Not to say that HN couldn't benefit from a few select additions
though, messaging is an obvious example.

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starter
Highly Engaging Content. More engaging than your friend's profile information?

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winsbe01
success is not just the sum of the features. offering something that other
players have won't bring success, unless you can convince people it is
significantly better, and _prove_ it. offering something competitors don't
have also won't bring success, unless you convince people it's something they
need or desire.

reinventing the wheel won't work unless you can show people that something is
missing or wrong with what they're already used to. even then, it won't happen
overnight, and it may not happen at all. take G+ for example. they made some
not-insignificant changes to how people communicate in their network. they've
already got a ton of users, but it's only been ~2 months. it could just be
flashy-new, and could fade in another 12.

maybe another way to think about things is about what social networks
represent: interactions between people. you have people you know, people you
don't, people you want to talk to, people you want to listen to, things you
want to share publicly, things that are private, etc. etc. maybe instead of
building up a feature set, it would be beneficial to think about human
interactions and relationships, and see how software may be able to represent
that better than current models (G+ is trying this with circles).

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runjake
The only barebones essential is that the people in my social circle are on it.
How you hook people into that seems to be 20% features/80% luck/celebrity
endorsements.

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petervandijck
Your friends.

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starter
Thank You! Anyone ever tell you that you make things perfectly simple?

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petervandijck
No, on the contrary.

