For 10 painful years from 1978, the game show 3-2-1 dominated the ratings on ITV. Hosted by Ted Rogers, an ex-Butlin's redcoat, it combined variety show, game show and quiz, and was regularly endured by 15m viewers.
I never managed to watch a whole show. It served to combine a baffling format (riddles delivered by the Chuckle Brothers) with staggering banality. I couldn't understand what was going on but, more importantly, I couldn't muster sufficient interest to try to figure it out. Even as a child with time on my hands, there was always something better to do.
I sometimes feel like this when I find a new social network.
Recently, I've been sharing my top Tuesday recommendations on Scoville. The idea of the site is that every week on Tuesday I should reveal the best places I've been to and, based on the places I record, the site will recommend great new places to discover. It's simple.
I started by being asked to help to build London. Apparently this was successful because London is now a 'village', the first step in what the site calls Scoville's adventure. With every level I help to reach by inviting friends to join, new features will be unlocked. I don't know what these features are, but it all sounds exciting.
It doesn't end there either. I can also create Likeboxes: categories of venue that I can then populate. I created Best Caffs in London, and added Pimlico's Regency Cafe (if you get nothing else from this article, at least you now know where to go for pie and tea). There are lots of other Likeboxes already there - restaurants, pubs and coffee shops.
For every action I take, posting tips, promoting my #toptuesday on Twitter, adding Likeboxes, I get Scoville units (from the Scoville scale, a gauge of the hotness of chillies). I've currently got 30, though one user, thesegoto11, has 125. I know who you are, thesegoto11, and you should be staying in more.
I have no idea what's going on. There seems to be so much terminology to learn - Likeboxes, Scoville units, different levels of village. It shares my 'toptuesdays' on Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook - do I want to? Where I eat isn't that interesting, is it?
It's thrown me back to Ted Rogers. I'm mostly baffled as to how this works, or whether it does. I'm not convinced that there's any benefit to me using the site, or that doing so is likely ever to be interesting. In short, should I invest my time learning what it's all about? In short, can I be arsed?
Launching a social network is amazingly easy. Making it successful is amazingly difficult. Social networks are subject to a causality dilemma - users gain no meaningful benefit from them until there are masses of other users. This chicken-and-egg situation means it's very hard to get to a point where you have scale: a bunch of people like me and thesegoto11 have to early-adopt, and stick with it for long enough to give it relevance so that the mass start to take an interest.
At this point we might move on, but by then we've done our job and the site has critical mass. But to get there, the site has to appeal to something simple and fundamental to the human condition. So Facebook equals 'don't miss out'; LinkedIn equals 'be successful'; Twitter equals 'here I am'. These services aren't answering technical needs, but human ones, and the trouble with those is there aren't that many of them.
The key is to address a fundamental need, simply. And 3-2-1 is just too complex.
Andrew Walmsley is a digital pluralist.
30 SECONDS ON ... EMERGING SOCIAL NETWORKS
- Color is a location-based social network that connects people with shared interests. Primarily a photo and video-sharing mobile network, it enables users to post pictures, then uses technology to determine what is relevant to individual users.
- Nintendo and Pearson have sponsored the launch of Gransnet, a spin-off from popular parenting network Mumsnet. Gransnet aims to provide networking for 14m grandparents in the UK and has sections on relationships, hobbies and culture, as well as grandparenting.
- Jabble is a British-based social network that aims to make networking as safe as possible for young children. It offers stringent parental controls, enabling mothers and fathers to vet their children's friend requests and communications.
- Path is a mobile-based network based on the premise that the maximum number of 'quality' connections possible is 50. Restricting users to 50 is not the only limitation; Path enables users to share their experience with friends via photos alone, although video and text is expected to be added later.
- XYDO pulls stories from users' Facebook and Twitter pages and builds them into a tailored news site. It enables users to discuss stories with friends and followers and arrange the news on offer to their preference.