All the same. All different. Social Networking Trends.

Been tracking an interesting discussion on homophily on O’reilly - the social behavior of tending to interact and get together with people who think the same way. And whether social networking sites emphasise this.

You know, the old people who saw this also saw feature, or the friends feature reinforcing similarities.

But there are two natural tendencies - or maybe, human tendencies - which would break this.

First off, look at most of the social networking or interactive sites - digg, flickr, youtube and so on. The audience there is primarily young adults, with a lot of time to spare. There might be the odd millionaire, but most of them are likely to be just about making ends meet. That’s a homophilic group to start with, so it isn’t too surprising that they reinforce each other. But within these sites, there are multiple different environments - and as likely that each has a different bent to it. More important, as they move on to the next stage of work, career or life, the time they spend and the reasons for spending time online is bound to change. Even otherwise, the spate of new sites coming up every other day gives an automatic break - all except the strongest older ones tend to fade out.

The second, and more subtle facet is something that’s usually derided. Spam. Look at Blogger - it started off quite ok, but once it reached critical mass, a whole bunch of folks started spamming. Same with Myspace; was on another forum discussion about setting up fake profiles on Myspace, the intention being to attract friends and then upsell.

A jocular aside on this claimed the practice was so prevalent, the hottest toy for this Christmas would be a Social Networking Barbie - a bald and obese 50 year old male masquerading as a 20 something hot female. Shades of Bree aka lonelygirl15?

Nope - between wanting something new and the commercially minded seeking to game the system, the only constant will be change.