In an interesting study in elitism, the Financial Times recently profiled an interesting social network site growing in China, P1.cn. Their website, catering only to China's super-wealthy, describes itself as:
"A private social network for people with higher standards in life. Our members share similar values and interests, and have access to exclusive events and offers through our network."
The minimum monthly income to join is 8,000RMB, which FT describes as an upper-middle class lifestyle. However, the network stratifies along silver, gold, platinum, etc. lines based on how much above the minimum members actually are.
Despite how this might blatant elitism strike the ostensibly-meritocratic American readers of this blog, what struck me was the description of the network chiefly as a place for "similar values and interests" [here, "signaled" by wealth].
What is really interesting to me about this description is how different it is from many of the social networks in the United States that have gained broad user adoption - Facebook, "the place for friends," thrives on bringing interactions with those people whom you know in real life to the online world. Twitter, to some extent, makes interaction with others based on interests alone possible, but in 140-character increments.
P1, on the other hand, is all about getting a small and, apparently, lonely wealthy Chinese to meet and interact. And here's where it might be interesting for conference organizers. Whether or not P1 does this well, it's attracted 1.2M Chinese looking to try it out in order to meet and network with those who share their social standing and interests.
Conference organizers have an ostensibly less materialistic but even more focused interest-based group to cater to. Whether it's computer programmers, video gamers, or even knitters, part of the appeal of a conference is meeting new like-minded, similarly-statured people. That's why they bought the ticket. And the network that best fulfills this promise, even rather bluntly like P1, will undoubtedly grow.
[Special thanks to Paul Cruickshank for bringing this article to my attention.]