Authonomy: the future of niche social networks

Authonomy was launched this week by HarperCollins. The Financial Times reports:

HarperCollins is the latest publisher to make the foray into social networking sites by encouraging would-be authors to upload sample chapters to Authonomy.com, a website that launches to the public on Wednesday.Readers – taking the traditional role of editors – will then sift potential J.K. Rowlings from those fated to remain unpublished. While HarperCollins is not promising book deals, it has committed to read the 10 top-rated submissions to Authonomy every month and hopes other publishers will also join the site.

This is a brilliant initiative. There is currently a boom in niche social networks, however most are formed very loosely around a niche concept, without offering any differentiating features to mainstream social networks like Facebook. Where people are highly passionate about something this can work; for example sport club fan sites. Even here though, our own research on UK premiership football clubs shows much higher levels of engagement in (usually unofficial) club groups/communities within main social networks than the club's own sites.  

HarperCollins have taken a very different approach; rather than just forming a community of aspiring authors (of which I'm sure there are already thousands, mostly unused) they've really thought through what would actually add value to the target users. Possibly the best thing about this is that it's a great example of using social media to fill a real business need; as the FT article goes on to report: 

HarperCollins “conservatively” estimates it receives 50 submissions a week from unpublished authors, forming what is known in the trade as the “slush pile”. By enabling readers and other would-be authors to read unsolicited manuscripts, rather than just a few “overstretched” editors, the publisher hopes to make the search for new talent more manageable.

“We as a company can’t possibly read everything,” said Charlie Redmayne, HarperCollins’ director of digital development. “So why not build a community of people that are going to engage in this content and get them to read and vote on it? By getting the wisdom of the masses, we can get them to do the work for us.”

By crowdsourcing the initial search for promising new authors, HarperCollins will be able to save significant resources in their search for new books, whilst exposing potential books to a wider audience, allowing them to gauge popularity more accurately. 

With people spending more and more of their time on major sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, because of the network effect (as more people use these sites, they more accurately reflect real life social graphs and users' average number of friend connections increase. As people use these sites to interact with their friends, the more friends, the more time spent interacting), they are less and less likely to want to use separate community based sites. New services allowing people to use their social graph on external sites (like Facebook friend connect) will make this easier, although it still won't change the trend for users to spend more and more of their community based time through their main social network. 

For a niche community site to exist completely independently of major social networks, their has to be clear value to the user over and above simply interacting with like-minded people; this is something that corporations should keep in mind when they're looking at using community features, both externally and internally (even with corporate social networks, if all they do is although employees to connect then they're more likely to use Facebook or LinkedIn). 

If you have any other good examples of niche social networks offering bespoke features that add real value to users whilst differentiating them from major sites let me know.