Possible Challenges?

Last week, I briefly touched upon my networking idea facing challenges that were faced by all social network sites, but did not really delve into it too deeply. This week, I’d like to do precisely that: flesh out the kinds of troubles other have faced, question if I’ll face those same challenges, and explain how I would solve them.

Perhaps the largest challenge is building a simple, effective user interface: one that displays all the information a user needs in a concise, uncluttered manner. One of the main turn-offs that sent MySpace on its death-spiral was the messy, cluttered profile layout. With the ability to add HTML instructions, users could customize their profiles with banners, animated .gifs, and embedded video. Added to that were the MySpace music player (a clunky embedded Flash object) and many ads.

The above example illustrates two ineffective solutions to two problems that all sites face: how to provide a user with enough control to personalize their profiles, and how to come up with revenue to sustain the site. As far as customization, I am for the idea of providing the user just enough control to fill in the blanks on a common template, especially when it comes to a service tailored towards working musicians. As stated previously, there would be allowance to put in biographical information, work experience, and a music player for work samples, with the actual files most likely hosted by a third party like SoundCloud.

Obviously, the hope is that this network grows to encompass thousands, if not millions, of people, but handling all that traffic requires revenue. The most common way to acquire revenue is through hosting ads. However, users don’t like ads cluttering their interface. This problem could be tackled in a variety of ways: We could charge a fee for premium services offered by our site: perhaps access to industry databases, assembly of press kits for bands to offer to record labels and management agencies, or even access to professional contacts like printers and graphic artists. This could be supplemented with ad space. A more specific solution to the problem of revenue is hard to give without actual numbers on usage. These are general solutions to a problem that's likely to come up.

I don’t want to write too long a blog post, so I’ll save my talks on privacy for later in the week. Though I doubt anyone but my TA is reading this, I’ll go ahead and say that any comments are welcome; especially those that question my logic and require me to flesh out my ideas more thoroughly.