Orthogonal Thinking

We all periodically receive emails from social apps requesting that we add a contact, confirm a contact is a convicted mass murderer, or that we trust a website to divulge the pecadilloes of everyone we know.

In the distant past we had only a few social media apps. Plaxo might have been the first business oriented one (am I wrong?) and LinkedIn got going eons ago. I’m a late adopter of such things, so I got into Facebook only about 6 months ago. Now it seems like a new social media app spams me every week.

On the one hand, I’m supposed to keep tabs on all the new developments in social media so I can help Market Motive subscribers understand the new online marketing stuff that works, vs that which is new and irrelevant.

On the other hand, I am very unlikely to accept an invitation to join someone I barely know in a social media app I certainly don’t know. There are just too many of them, and I’m not going to contribute to the problem by having it automatically spam everyone who ever emailed me.

The issue is that most of these apps do not solve my problem (finding people) but instead are focused on solving their own problem (acquiring subscribers). Unfortunately for such new sites with small numbers of subscribers, the most compelling aspect of LinkedIn is that everyone already uses it. Established sites are very hard to beat because of their superior network effect.

I feel bad that I’m contributing to the failure of a VC funded startup, and in so doing I am causing the stock market to deflate and thus putting my long term finances in jeopardy, but so be it. Not every social media app that can scrape hotmail for a list of contacts and spam the bejesus out of them deserves to succeed. I won’t join you, trust you, or interact with you in a social media app that I’ve never heard of, because chances are I’ll never hear of it again.

You are now seeing the long tail of social media apps. The blood flow is poor at the extremities.