Specialization in Social Media

"You can please all of the people some of the time or some of the people all of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time." This variation on Lincoln's famous quote contains a valuable lesson for social media giant, Facebook.

The site has dominated the social media landscape, leaving a trail of competitors in its wake. What it has failed to do, however, is to become more ubiquitous by incorporating services popularized by other sites. Facebook Places failed to dethrone Foursquare and Facebook Deals could not replicate Groupon's success. A recent CNN article from Mashable's Peter Cashmore explores those failures and speculates on the viability of a music service incorporated into Facebook.

The failures mentioned above indicate that the public is more interested in specialized websites that are superior at one thing, rather than the web portals (e.g., Yahoo!, AOL) of yesteryear.