“Social Network” May be An Outdated Term

In an interview with Recode Vine General Manager Jason Toff says, among other things, that Vine is an “entertainment network” and not a social network. This got me thinking about how, in order to truly evolve, the platforms we currently refer to as “social networks” need to be redefined to more granularly describe the unique value proposition of each network.

The basic feeling I’m struggling with is that these networks have outgrown the generic “social” label, largely because our understanding of what constitutes “social” has changed since their inception. I don’t know that I have the perfect new labels for these networks, but it feels increasingly weird and uncomfortable to lump Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and everything else under the same “social network” heading. That’s because the value proposition of each of these networks is starkly different.

Pinterest, for instance, certainly has a social network baked into its functionality, but it’s actually a bookmarking network. Twitter is the proto-social network, but it’s actually more about news distribution and discovery. Instagram is a style network.

I’m not saying that social networks are dead or dying. But that traditional social network  functionality – building a list of accounts you follow and engage with regularly – is now such an essential ingredient to sites/apps that have different purposes, be it sharing images, links or video that it seems outdated and inaccurate to continue labeling them all as social networks. There’s an opportunity for these networks to, as Vine has done in the story linked to earlier, change the definitions and our subsequent understanding of what they can do.