INNOVATION IN MIND – Mindblog European Innovation Conference • Lund 15-17 Sept 2009

Are more users always better?

Social media is today a well known phenomena and  through sites like Facebook and MySpace people all over the world can interact openly. If we take Facebook as an example its many users should, according to theory, attract even more users, since a large network increases the odds of interacting with friends and new acquaintances. And apparently it has. But lurking around is the trend that people move to smaller and more specialized social networks with the ability to focus on and support a unique activity that appeals to a specific set of users. Many of these such as Flickr (photo storage and sharing, last.fm (tracking music); twitter (short blogging) are already well known and with the introduction of services like OpenID it will be increasingly easy for users to choose and operate several of these focused social medias. Another example reveals how professionals can use social media to interact and that is Sermo. It was founded in 2006 Daniel Palestrant and is open only to verified doctors, i.e. a network with a very clear focus and target group. Are we seeing the demise of large and aggregating social networks?

About Fredrik Häglund

Researcher from School of Economics and Management at Lund University within the area of innovation management. His special interest lies with high-tech and dynamic industries, especially platform competition. He also runs his own company.