Will Social Networking Sites Be The New Portals?

In the heady first days of the Internet, portals were king. In those days Lycos, AOL, Altavista, Excite and Yahoo! were the first port of call for users. Remember Compuserve anyone?

For the last few years, search engines are the new portals; Google, Yahoo!, MSN being the big three.

Are their days numbered? Are Social Networking Sites such as Bebo, MySpace and Facebook going to dominate?

There's an interesting report just out from Jupiter Research, (Published November 6th) SOCIAL NETWORKING ACROSS EUROPE, Using Localization to Drive Growth.

Alert yourself to their predication: "Young online consumers will increasingly Use social networking sites as primary online portals".

That means Google will be increasingly under threat as an online advertising medium.

Also, 3 important announcements in the last week or two to bear in mind;

1. Google (Orkut is their social network platform) have got together with Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING to launch OPEN SOCIAL. It was officially launched last week.

This is an open-source platform that allows developers to build widgets one time and deploy them across multiple social networks. Important, because it will allow rapid deployment and spawn a micro-industry of widget building specialists.

2. Microsoft announced that they will open up the MySpace platform to outside developers

3. Facebook have announced (November 6th) that they are launching an ad platform.

What this all means is that the online media space could start to change radically in the next 12 months.

Ads will be distributed throughout social networking sites, with many users using these sites as their home portal rather than Google. Of course, Google realises this. and needs to keep access to it's audience, hence Open Social.

Add to this the announcement on Monday that Google is launching the Open Handset Alliance (dubbed "Android") for mobile phones, and you can see that the war is really hotting up.

If they can offer an open platform where developers can build mobile phone applications, you can see a clear convergence coming from social networking on the web, social networking on handsets and monetising that medium.

So, whilst search engines are not dead, they face a challenge to their dominance. Google so far have proved to be strategically very astute, so no doubt they will rise to the challenge.