Today we welcome Jeroen van Eck as a blogger on State of Search. Read his bio here, and enjoy his posts! Welcome Jeroen!

Everyone wants a slice of the social pie. While the classic social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter keep developing by adding new functionality, other companies are trying to create their own social networks. But building a valuable social network takes an enormous amount of time, or does it? Building a social network could be as simple as connecting the dots, all you need is a lot of dots.

The value of a social network is in the amount of users and the amount of usage. So all you need is a large group of users with an account on your social network and a user friendly interface with the proper functionality. A user friendly interface and proper functionality can be developed with a good analysis of the behavior and wishes of your users. Creating a large group of users takes a lot more time. It took Facebook almost three years to reach 10 million users while Twitter reached the 10 million users at the beginning of their third year. To start a new social network with the potential to grow to such amounts your platform needs a major benefit in usability or functionality. Therefore the secret is not in building a new network but connecting the existing dots. (more…)