Prompted by a tweet from Brian Gardner (@bgardner) regarding the opportunity for premium themes for BuddyPress I’ve spent the last few days pondering how to clearly articulate why I think the market for premium BuddyPress themes has potential beyond my initial knee-jerk reaction. What follows is (hopefully) a semi-articulate explanation of why BuddyPress and Premium Themes are a big deal.
A Quick Explanation of BuddyPress
For those of you not already familiar, BuddyPress is a self-hosted social-networking platform from Automattic, the makers of WordPress. BuddyPress runs (currently) on WordPressmµ (WordPress Multi-User) and essentially allows you to have a self-hosted (your domain name) social networking platform similar to Facebook.
Side note : There is a pending plug-in from Scott Clark (one of the brilliant minds behind the PODS CMS Framework plug-in for WordPress) that will run BuddyPress on a standard WordPress install).
You can see an example of BuddyPress in action at BuddyPress.org/demo.
Why This is a BIG DEAL
Social Networks are still largely controlled by the entities that created them, Facebook, MySpace, … but with the advent of an open-source platform which allows anyone to create their own social network, the power is about to get handed back to the users. Niche social-networks will now have the ability to quickly and easily create communities with similar functionality to the currently dominant social networks and begin to rival their demand for viewers.
There are a several factors which will begin to drive the migration of people toward these smaller, more targeted social networks:
- Focus: As Facebook and others continue to be a “catch-all” social network where we go to catch up with old friends, keep in sync with new ones, … the sheer volume of information becomes overwhelming (not to mention the spam) and of decreasing value as the supply of (occasionally) interesting but (frequently) irrelevant information increases. Information and updates from contacts which is relevant to our daily lives and personal interests will become increasingly more difficult to filter. As such, we’ll begin to migrate toward a hand-full of social networks which we personally deem relevant.
- OpenID, and other “universal” log-ins (ok, it still needs work but is getting better) will allow us to log-in to multiple sites without needing separate log-ins across all of them. They may even use Facebook connect allowing us to transport our Facebook profiles while centrally managing them (hint, hint Facebook, I would encourage this).
- Customization. Since BuddyPress an open-source, GPL platform for running a social network it will, like WordPress, see the development of plug-ins and themes allowing for significant customization of functionality and appearance. To date, the development of BuddyPress themes has been (sorry to be blunt) a total pain in the ass. However, according to Andy Peatling (@apeatling), lead developer for BuddyPress, developing themes will become much easier in BuddyPress 1.2 which is expected sometime in early 2010 with a Beta release in Dec 2009.
A Little Historical Perspective
My personal expectations are that we are about to see history repeat itself. To begin with, if in the course of reading this you find yourself thinking that Facebook is just too big and too dominant think again. Yahoo!, Wang (remember them?), Microsoft, were all considered “un-challengable” at one point in time. Automattic will excel at challenging the incumbents with the open-source/GPL model. FYI, the current darling Apple, in case you have forgotten, nearly went out of business in the 80′s when open-architecture PC’s came into play. My point is that proprietary systems tend to have a definitive life-span. They get out to a bit of a head start by controlling everything but eventually fall behind when the “open systems” catch up, their coolness (e.g. novelty) wears off and people want a choice (and lower price point). It’s good old-fashioned capitalism/competition in action.
So What Does This Really Mean For Facebook?
Obviously no one knows for sure. I don’t think Facebook will decline anytime soon and I’m not predicting their demise but I do think they (or at least our attention to them) will be challenged by “niche-networks” that anyone will be able to set up. Where Facebook may continue to have a significant play is by continuing to allow and encourage Facebook Connect as a preferred method of accessing those networks, keeping our profile information (once-and-for-all) relatively centralized and keeping us still tied to Facebook. (As I think about this it all smells a little bit like the vision of Ning but decentralized and more extensible).
One of the more important factors that has elevated WordPress to the status it enjoys today (and it’s still on the incline) is our ability to quickly and easily customize it’s look and functionality. Think about it, what makes something like BuddyPress appealing is not only that we can control our social-networks (or set them free depending on how you look at it) but that we can make it look and act the way we want. If they all look the same it diminishes the user experience and we’re less likely to adopt.
All of that said, the opportunity for BuddyPress themes is huge. Allowing us to easily customize the user experience on our own social networks will set BuddyPress on fire, much as it has for WordPress.
What do you think? Will easy customization lead to greater adoption of BuddyPress and will “free” social-networks challenge Facebook?
About Scott Ellis
I believe where BuddyPress directly competes with Facebook is in the area of micro-niche marketing. You’re right, Scott… I originally went to Facebook to catch up with friends and connect with new ones. Not to join another upteen thousandth “Fan Page” of yet another store or business. Am I really “connected” to them? No. However, if I’m truly interested in communicating with other “cashmere sweater devotees,” somebody has built a web site community around that specific topic and I want to talk about my penchant there… possibly NOT in front of the whole FB world.
Very thoughtful article, and one that I agree with wholeheartedly. As Wendi mentions too, I think that Facebook as the ‘uber’ social network has validated the need for online, robut communities. But what FB cannot do is service groups effectively. In fact, their removal of Regional groups is a sign that they’re acknowledging the inability of their platform to be truly relatable.
Where I think we are heading is Facebook as a defining platform for social networks, providing univeral login ability and a more robust “Fan Page”-type inclusion of other social networks (the “micro-niches”). People will still go to Facebook just as they would go to, say, CNN.com or MSNBC.com, but it would be as an aggregator of the “socnets” that matter to me.
My company, Carina, is already experimenting with this, developing what we call a Local Social for our community. I really believe it’s the direction things are going.
Christopher, Good observations. It’s going to be really interesting to see how all of this evolves. Would love to hear more about what Carina is doing in this area. Drop me a line sometime if you can chat about it.
I’m so glad I found this page, talk about hitting the bullseye (directly in the pupil). I got here via your excellent content mapping post, and this topic here is my hottest topic at the moment.
I am planning our site (brand new from scratch) and my biggest gripe with the marketing strand of our mindmap is how do we hit the section of people from the social-net that we want to? more specifically how can we do this with precision i.e. without a shotgun approach and having to go fishing (trawler style) for the fans we want as this brings side effects like spam-oblivion forever after. On a personal note we also don’t want to be ‘spamming*’ people that aren’t true/core fans either. (* sending stuff that doesn’t hit the recipients bullseye)
FB et al are huge baskets of people and I absolutely agree with Wendi here, I am erring away from the fan page ad nausium because it seems so saturated and kind of impersonal, it smacks of crude logic “if you buy our stuff then you must be our fan” -not true. I have so much stuff that I bought of which I am not a fan (cos it was new and widgety!) and this is not our intention at all.
We want a fan base that isn’t just necessarily a fan of “us” but are fans about the “stuff we are into” if people want to buy our stuff – great! – but we want a fan base that can also tell other people in our network what ‘not’ to buy/use/do and also why, what’s the best for others and where they can get it. We want a kind of ‘pull-net’ whereby our network determines the future direction of the business by pulling us in a certain direction and we need to stay agile and flexible, like only small businesses can, to meet that model. In order to do this we want our ‘micromunity’ to also be agile enough that everyone can go in that direction together.
Maybe it’s a utopia thing, can’t be done?
I think BuddyPress will be the way we will go and hope the ubiquity comes along. It would be nice to have a fan base that can evangelise in a far more close-knit community.
Daz, Yeah..I don’t like to make a lot of predictions but I think this will be a hot issue in 2010. BuddyPress will enable businesses, individuals, et al… to build very targeted networks and connect with a good core crowd. I don’t think what you want to do is a “utopia” thing, it’s just going to take some figuring out. BuddyPress will be one of the many tools that enable that but there is really much more too it (as I’m sure you know). BuddyPress is just that, a tool afterall but will be a great enabler. Just read a tweet this morning that they are freezing development by the end of December on BuddyPress 1.2 and we should expect to see a release in Jan. That release will include much easier theming of BuddyPress which will be key to it taking off in the market place.
Keep an eye on it and prepare to have a lot of fun in 2010!