Discovery in Social Networks
One of the biggest challenge in creating a social network is making content and users discoverable. A new user must be able to find the content instantly. Discovery is critical, especially during formative period of the network. When there are not many existing users and not much content going, it is critical that newly signed up users discovers existing users and interact with them intuitively. Nothing is more sticky than the content on a social network. And the content has to be discoverable.
Discovery is one of the biggest mistake that Color made. Those of you who don’t know about Color, it is a photo sharing application on iPhone and Android. Color was one of the biggest launch in recent times. They raised $41M from Sequoia and then launched the product with much fanfare. There was a time when everyone was talking about Color and there couldn’t have been a better launch for them. But when the initial euphoria died down, people started realizing that they couldn’t do much with the app. The reason is that it was nearly impossible to discover users on the app. Discovery on Color was based on concept of geographic proximity – you can see other users and their pictures if they are within 100 feet. If other users are in next building or in some other part of the city, you can’t see them on the app. This concept of discovery based on geographic proximity made discovery of users and content extremely hard. I’ve personally never found any users or content on the app so far. I have used the app many times in a number of public places but never found any other user that I could connect and interact with. Whenever I created content on the app, I felt like I am shouting in vacuum.
Most social networks deals with discovery problem in different ways – some use Twitter/Facebook to find friends, others create a public list of all users that users can browse through to find who is using the service. The specific solution depends on the nature of the product. Whatever is the solution, it is extremely critical to think how your first 1000 users are going to find content from each other.
