The explosion and evolution of social networks on the internet is something I have been watching and participating with a keen interest especially Youtube, Facebook and SecondLife. What is great about these social networks is that around the time of the dotcom crash period most commentators said that people would not “socialize” on the web, preferring personal contact. Well I don’t think these commentators predicted the impact that the millennial generation or generation X would have on social networking! History is now proving thesm wrong, Facebook has over 50 million users and is valued at £7.5bn

With results like these imitators are of course following fast. It’s simple economics and anyone familiar with Michael Porters 5 Forces model will know that industries displaying high profits and low barriers to entry will attract competition. One of the new boys on the block is Yuwie an social network who’s proposition is to share with it’s members a percentage of the advertising revenue the company gets. According to founder Korry Rogers “Yuwie users get paid every time they log on, send a message, upload a picture or invite someone to join.” So if you visit pages, you earn money, if you invite friends, you earn money, if your friends login in, you and they earn money…sounds like a no brainer… but is it? Do people really want to earn money out of their social networking and what their friends do…Facebook believes that it’s core members don’t and the opinion of some analysts is that people use social networks to link up with friends and make new friends not to earn money out of these social activities. So will the lure of making a potential £200 or more per month be enough for users to switch from their current social networks? Personally, I like Facebook and funnily enough now feel that I have a “personal investment” and connection with the site so for me it isn’t easy to just switch. However, Yuwie launched in July 2007 and has over 350,000 members and is growing at 50,000 members a month. Seems to me that Yuwie’s proposition is working. Now of course the mighty Facebook could eliminate this threat by matching Yuwie’s offer but this would erode industry profits so they are unlikely to do so for now…But I’m intrigued enough to give Yuwie a try and who knows maybe earn some Yuwie pocket money… let’s call it a social networking experiement, I’m keen to be part of this evolution…