You’re very right (and great work at Sermo, btw).

I just recently signed up for Facebook… on a “why not?” whim. All I’ve done there is add a few friends I”m connected two elsewhere and add widgets for EVERY OTHER SPECIALIZED network I use. What’s the point? I’m better off just having my blog as an aggregator for all these specialized networks (last.fm, twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, etc.).

I think one problem with the more general sites is the implicit assumption that you will want to have ALL your photos, music, blogs, friends etc. hosted there — there is little interoperability with other sites. It’s a sort of AOL-style walled garden all over again (with slightly shorter walls).

Contrast with the Flickr model, where the scope is limited (only photos), but it’s well integrated with a lot of other places on the net–you don’t need to worry about having nine different places to keep your pictures and which actions you can take at each site. You can have them in one place and yet still do what you want with them. It’s more of a “small pieces loosely joined” approach.

Overall the general sites are gambling on total buy-in, and they’re just not gonna get it…

Also, the signal-to-noise ratio tends to be much higher on a specialty network (and this is evident on Sermo).

You join a group for which the topic is one that you can relate to. Make that group’s topic the focus of an entire website, and you have a very valuable arena with highly concentrated conversations.

So yes, this is just repackaging a pretty straightforward concept. But the tools have evolved, and, more importantly, the trends have evolved to make a more comfortable experience of using the net as social media. Early adopters will gravitate to the focused social sites. Late adopters are more likely now than back in the 90’s to lurk and possibly interact.

So the concept of the medical professional network? Great! The business around it? Well…that’s another story.

Based on Mike H’s comment, there is no intention of selling advertising to the network. My money’s on “Not Yet.” It’s easy to get a network; it’s getting them to talk that is the hard part. So selling to lurkers seems like a logical plan B. Selling aggregate information to financial and healthcare companies, as they are doing now, means that you are defining and monetizing the trends based on your active community. Which means that community best be fully active. I would hope that Sermo stays true to its integrity by not including key brands in its polls nor leading questions in its questionnaires.

I believe in the concept; I just don’t see the money in it - especially in a space with a TON of money to spend.

I wholeheartedly agree with you regarding the sustainability of specialty networks. Looking at the history of existing sites, it’s clear that users who flock to a focused site will be much more likely to stick with that site than to abandon it when something else comes along.

I think that notion owes much of its credence to the importance of a specialized community. Generic social networks seem (to me) to focus more on social networking features than on developing a meaningful community. So when a new site comes along with new or better features, people move on, because the community they’ve established is secondary.

In a specialty area, users connect on a far more specific level, which allows them to place more value on those relationships, and they become unwilling to lose them.

This, in turn, makes it much less likely that future competing sites will even show up, since they’d have a lot of “social inertia” (think the object at rest staying at rest) to overcome. That’s why I expect new features to be added to existing specialty networks, since the communities can remain intact, while entering into this brave “new” world.

Thinking about social inertia makes me want to form even more physics analogies to social networking, such as relationships having mass and what not. Maybe I’m just too geeky for my own good.

To clarify the question about differentiation, one big difference with Sermo is the unique business model: physicians get free anonymous membership, and clients in the financial and healthcare industries pay for access to aggregated voting data and physician commentary. There is no advertising, and no plans to add it.

There was a recent blog posting somewhere about social networking sites being short-lived: first everyone jumped on MySpace, then abandoned MySpace for Facebook, etc. I have a feeling that for specialized social networks this is not the case.

see also appscout.com post on nanoscientist network too btw. if not on my phone right now i’d add link

First, it’s built for professionals, where nearly all established specialty networks are for hobbyists (such as LUGNET). Second, designers and developers are starting to add a richer set of social features (learned from more generic sites) to these specialized networks.

I expect that, in addition to an influx of professional-oriented specialty networks, we’ll see a significant upgrade in the feature sets of existing hobbyist networks.