Social networking's salad days are ending, Forrester says
Forrester CEO George Colony speaks at LeWeb. — PARIS—Bad news, would-be social networking start-ups. — “Social is running out of hours. Social is also running out of people,” concluded George Colony …
Context & Ripple Effects
George Colony's LeWeb keynote lands on a question this beat has been circling for years: whether social networks were a durable platform or a fad was still being argued back in 2006, and by late 2007 analysts were already flagging an uncertain future for the category. The 'Facebook fatigue' reports of early 2008 were treated then as anecdote; Colony's claim reframes them as structural — the constraint is not waning interest but arithmetic, with 'social running out of hours' and 'running out of people.'
The argument fits Forrester's own recent data trail: its December 2010 finding that only 4% of US online adults had used location-based services like Foursquare already pointed to thin engagement beyond the core networks. Coming from Forrester's CEO on the LeWeb stage in Paris, the saturation thesis is also a positioning move — steering clients away from consumer-social land-grabs and toward the enterprise engagements Forrester has been pushing all year.
First-order effects
- Would-be social networking start-ups pitching investor growth curves face a colder reception: if total hours and total people are finite, new entrants must take share from Facebook and entrenched networks rather than ride category expansion.
- Incumbent social platforms lose their easiest growth story — user-count headlines — and are pushed to defend engagement time per existing user instead.
Second-order effects
- Advertising economics tighten across the category: with attention supply capped, brands bidding for the same finite social hours should see pricing power shift toward whichever platforms hold the deepest daily habits, squeezing mid-tier networks first.
- Analyst and vendor attention pivots toward enterprise social and mobility — the territory Forrester itself has been mapping through its wireless-trend and sponsored-conversation work — as the next budget line once consumer growth stalls.
Third-order effects
- If the saturation thesis holds, the industry's center of gravity moves from acquiring users to monetizing and retaining them, favoring consolidation around a few high-engagement platforms and making 'growth via new users' an unreliable pitch for the whole social software sector.
- A maturing social market also sharpens the recurring analyst role Colony is playing: forecasting saturation becomes a lever that redirects corporate IT and marketing budgets, giving research firms outsized influence over where the next wave of spending lands.
The trend: Social networking is crossing from a land-grab growth market into an attention-saturated one, where value shifts from adding users to deepening engagement with the people already signed up.