1. NICHE ONLINE NETWORKS
IS NOW THE TIME WHEN LESS IS MORE?
Carlos Osorio
Newcastle University Business School
The Co-productions of Knowledge . 2012
2. MOTIVATIONS
Increment of new users and new Social Network Sites (SNS)
Investment on SNS related start-ups (Arthur,2012)
i.e. Facebook bought Instragram for $1.000.000
Who is next? Pinterest, Spotify, Path?
Trend related with personalization/customization features of
SNS: i.e. Close friends in FB, circles in Google + or promoted
post and twits.
Uncertainty about success likelihood of SNS initiatives
Previous research consider all SNS in a single category to find
patterns, but ignoring the differences can be dangerous
(Wilson et al. 2012).
Are we in a SNS bubble similar to the “.com” in
the early 2000‟s?
3. WEB 2.0
Web 2.0 as a platform. (O'Reilly, 2005)
Creation of communities based on users continued interaction
“Is about „transforming monologue (one-to-many) into dialog
(many-to-many)‟ ” (Hansen et al., 2010, P. 12)
Online vs Offline communities Attributes
Aspatial Purpose
Asynchronous Place: chat, SNS, virtual world, etc
Acorporal Platform: Synchronous, non-
Bandwidth synchronous
Astigmatic Population: (1) small group, (2)
Anonymous
network (3) publics
(Smith, 1992) Profit model
(Porter, 2004):
4. SOCIAL NETWORK SITES (SNS)
Social Network is a set of nodes (can be people,
organizations, enterprises) connected through a series of ties,
generating patterns (Wellman, 2003).
Focus on structural issues Social Network Analysis (SNA),
Divorce between sociological
meaning and computer science
Boyd and Ellison (2008) defines a Social Network Site as
meaning (Quan,2009)
“Web-based services that allow individuals to
Construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system
Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection
View and traverse their list of connections and those made by
others within the system”.
5. NICHE SNS
Contrast between general purpose and niche SNS
(Boyd and Ellison, 2008; Goldbeck,2007; Quan,2009;
Hansen et al. 2010),
Research consider all SNS in a single category to find
patterns, but ignoring the differences can be dangerous
(Wilson et al. 2012)
Niche SNS looks to narrow audiences through the focus
on
Characteristics of the population: aSmallworld or Beautiful
people
Activities: Coachsurfing and wayn
Identity: Blackplanet and Cafemom
Affiliations: Mychurch
Dependency: Standalone or secondary feature in a website
(Goldbeck,2007; Quan,2009)
6. RESEARCH IN SNS
Structural approach dominance
Try to explain and predict the interaction between
network members, based on patterns found in the ties
(Oinas-Kukkonen et al., 2010). i.e. Homophily and
Triadic closure
Focus:
General-purpose SNS:
large data available
public character of the information*
Comparison of the network characteristics(structural
and operational approach)
Take all networks as if they were from same category
regardless the size and /or purpose
7. RESEARCH AIMS
Understand why a user would prefer to join an
independent Niche SNS over a general purpose
group.
What are the main factors that drive a user to join an
independent niche SNS?
Independent vs Dependent
8. USES AND GRATIFICATIONS THEORY
Highly used to understand users‟ choices (Lee, et al
2009 )
Assumptions:
a) Communication behaviour is goal-directed, purposive, and
motivated,
b) people select media,
c) many factors guide our media selection,
d) media compete with other channels for messages
e) people are typically more influential than media
9. GRATIFICATIONS
Socialising Information seeking
Networking Social support Information sharing and seeking
Privacy and Innovativenes
Identity Learning
security s
Social Network
Sites Uses and
Gratifications
Entertainment Convenience
Pleasurable way to spend time Covenience Market
Boredom relief Channel use profile
Figure 1 SNS Uses and Gratifications
10. NICHE THEORY
Interest in explaining “how organisms that consume
similar resources and perform similar functions in
an environment compete and coexist” (Feaster,
2009, P.967).
Dimmick (1993) propose an adaptation of the
biological formulas, following the Hutchinson
approach of n-dimensions, in which the factors
identified trough factor analysis become the
resources that the species will be competing for.
11. MEASURES
Niche breadth measures the degree of
specialization of a niche regarding the dimension or
gratifications that fulfil. A general medium can fulfil a
wide range of dimensions, whereas a specialist will
fulfil a narrow spectrum (Dimmick et al., 2000;
Nyland, 2007).
Niche overlap measures the similarity in the
resources used. Hence, a big overlap means that
the populations are competing for the same
resources.
Niche superiority as its name indicates, will
measure which media is superior to the other
regarding the dimensions considered by media.