All of my college friends were addicted to Cinemagram.... for three weeks. Now they never open the app.

And despite not requiring (or even emphasizing) Facebook sign-up, Snapchat was able to recreate the core of my Facebook Graph on their service in a matter of months. But I wouldn't be surprised if none of my friends are using it this time next year.

Is there any loyalty, at all, when it comes to consumer/social apps these days?

As you can see from the link above, I've moved from Live Journal to MySpace to Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to Snapchat over the past ten years. And now it's easier than ever to "move" to a new social service.

As a result, do (consumer/social) network effects matter anymore? Or as much?

At this question's heart is the fact that the technology ecosystem has exploded, and has thus begun focusing on smaller and less significant problems.

Explosive growth in smartphones and tablets and explosive growth in consumer apps and services have fundamentally changed user behavior.

The former has meant new products and services have an enormous audience hungry for New Stuff to tap into. The second has increased the frequency of New Stuff -- but the the best land has already been grabbed, causing a deflation in the average product's usefulness.

There will always be exceptions, but I believe we've entered an age of fad products (Chat Roulette, Draw Something, and dare I say Snapchat) that spread quickly, and die even faster.

I agree with Ryan in that it feels very much like mobile phones are still new exciting things and people are very faddy about trying new apps and social networks. I don't think this is that different from early web app age, but there's a much larger market (especially as young kids get iPhone, iPod touches, iPads etc). But you have to imagine at some point fatigue will set in and it will feel less exciting to try out new social apps.

So do you see much distinction between something like Draw Something (game) and Snapchat (network)?

Previously, we would have thought they are completely different, but now I wonder if they both fall into the "entertainment" category, broadly?

Breadth of sharing/distribution options mean that in many cases it destination URL matters less. eg You tweet a link to a photo, who cares whether it's twitpic, instagram, twitter's native service, etc. The devil's bargain for these underlying services is that they try to use this traffic to build out their own stickiness.

Also, cloud + cheap bw/storage + data portability mean that you can move your assets between services that previously would have locked you in.

So network effects still matter a lot, but some catalysts of network effects (distribution, storage) are eroding.

I see social tools being separated into two buckets these days:

1. Does this help me communicate in new ways with my existing networks
or
2. Does this create a new network or expand my existing one

To me, the lasting networks are the ones that solve 2, where as the products that solve case 1, tend to merge into a tool built into existing networks. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram have all created new networks (access to reach new people) and owned those networks (contacts, friends, followers) and have thus lasted...

Where as communication tools like AIM/BBM and SocialCam/Cinemagram eventually get built into the networks that you more heavily rely on. I wonder whether SnapChat is a network or a feature (temporary messages)

That's an interesting framing, David. Jake Levine (Digg) brought up relevant feedback for Branch a while back. He said,

"There's nobody on Branch that I can't reach otherwise."

In other words, because we require an email or Twitter handle to send invites, you can only talk to people that you can already reach on other services.

Versus a service like Twitter, which has introduced me to scores and scores of people that I wouldn't know otherwise. Same with Facebook (if I meet someone at a party I don't get their email address, obviously).

Snapchat seems more analogous to emojis in that regard. Sure, it's powerful and novel, but am I ever going to snap with someone I wouldn't normally text message with? Probably not.

Was thinking about Ev's old pre-medium post on identity:
evhead.com

Seems like the services with greatest lock in (Email, FB or AppleID) are those that are strong at authentication in addition to what ever unique product value they offer.

I'm never gone switch off Apple for Android not just bc I like their products but bc my whole life is tied into iOS and my apple id.

If you look at Ev's post the pieces of identity are listed in rough order of descending network/lockin effect.

Are these opinions unique to people who already have established virtual and life networks?

If I'm a high school freshman using SnapChat (or whatever) aren't I figuring out my network, and so it's very important?

I think it's more ephemeral when you're young. You're less concerned about Identity as Representation as a persistent thing. Because you're going to be someone else next year. You're certainly less concerned about data portability or having to start over.

Are we all making judgements based on limited data sets over very small periods of time?

Patrick, that's a great point, but (at least now) it seems like Snapchat is being used solely as a communication tool. There's no community or discovery.

That being said, there's definitely potential. Even a service like Instagram has new communities and networks. My co-founder, Cemre, recently remarked how he's learning all about the body building community via Instagram.

And just last night, @whitneymcn, @j2labs, and @JohnMaloney were talking about how they met each other on Tumblr.

Andrew - isn't that your job? ;)

I guess then, Josh, your original post was talking about things which aren't even really networks. If you don't own the authentication mechanism in a meaningful way, you're just piggybacking on the network of your provider - you're a complete subset of the parent network. If it was a venn diagram, it'd be two concentric circles.

Snapchat, even though it doesnt require FB authentication, seems to be shaking out that it's a complete subset of FB friends. Not really a network by itself, then, either.

It seems to me that all of the cases Josh has brought up so far of being "quick flareouts" didn't own a unique graph. It's interesting to note that Branch completely piggybacks on Twitter's graph ;)

:)

Continuing on from @patrickmoberg and @goldman's points, I wonder if the disposability of (at least some) services isn't as much a feature as a bug.

Even those of us who consciously maintain a consistent, discoverable identity online may sometimes want the "summer camp" experience of reinventing ourselves for a while.

And I can't imagine what it's like to be exploring your identity as a teenager with so much of it archived online; my usenet posts as a college freshman were bad enough.

I suspect, maybe even hope, that we're going to see a crop of stuff that's a reaction to an increasingly persistent, archival social web. How the business end works is a different question, but I'm interested in seeing more ephemeral by design stuff.

@whitneymcn @josh - Definitely! Much of my instagram usage is following dog accounts (my fave: instagram.com). A behavior solely cultivated by instagram's activity tab network effects.

Network effects still work if we’re talking about Twitter / Friendfeed, Foursquare / Gowalla or Instagram / PicPlz. But most of the apps Josh mentions weren’t initially seen as competitive with the incumbents they replaced (at least not by their early users). That’s why the full-featured-from-day-one "_____ killer” almost never is. Few early users of Instagram ever thought they’d use it for the same things they use Facebook for. By the time we realize what's happening, it’s already too late, the new service has developed network effects of its own. We forget, and are constantly surprised to find, that our attention is finite and that we hire every social service for the same few jobs-to-be-done: connection, expression, and killing time.

Over the past ten years, the "chore" of creating a social profile became second nature. We're accustomed to posting the same things in "about me" sections, using the same email address, etc. And, with most of the networks you mentioned, we'll connect with the same group of friends -- people we're sort of keeping in touch with anyway.

What makes network effects maintain power is if the new platform offers a unique network -- ie, Facebook is everyone I've met, Twitter is people in my industry, Instagram is only close friends. Snapchat and Cinemagram both clone my Instagram network.

The product, and the value of the product, won't be unique (filters vs videos etc.) unless the network is unique. A new way of sorting people may be an idea.

I think there are two impulses at play:

1) The interest in trying out new and novel ways of engaging with existing social graphs.

2) The interest in connecting more intimately with narrower groups of like minded folks.

Most of the above mentioned apps explore new facets of communicating with a broad, general social graph. I think that interest will wear off in time. There are only so many ways to communicate. Twitter for smells is not likely.

Then there are networks that start to narrow the focus and hit on our impulse to identify with a sub group. SoundCloud is a beautiful example of this,. The "stickiness" or network effects of those communities is apt to be less broad but much stronger.

I am personally on a bunch of different networks and I don't think too hard about it. I don't consciously expand my network or hide away.

I tend to view networks as places for context of some kind. Doesn't bother me one bit if one network is a subset of another one if I'm interested in some genre of expression. This can come in different forms. Perhaps my hacker friends put code on Github. My musician friends put stuff on Bandcamp or Soundcloud. I follow my creative / artistic friends on Tumblr. If I want to drop a context, I just do it. For example, I don't currently have a facebook account.

Branding ideology would argue that the strongest brands are narrow and simple. I think this is true for networks too. A simple context.