Markus Frind, who runs a successful dating site, is usually pretty contrarian. So, it’s no surprise to see he says most social networks will fail.

I’m not sure I agree with all his data, but I do agree with his sentiment, with a qualifier. If “social network” is defined as a site that exists purely as a collection of friends and contacts. Think MySpace and Friendster, a place where there is nothing to do beyond socialize. Places that break my first rule of social Web sites will have a hard time sticking around.

The market for social sites that do something beyond connect people is virtually unlimited. Give me a reason to go to your site and then let me share the experience with others. We may be seeing the end of social networks, but it’s just the beginning of social Web sites.

Webvisions has come and gone. There were plenty of organization things that could have made the conference better, but I’ll save it for the survey. Overall, I think it was pretty good. One way to tell is that I missed an awesome session by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress blogging platform. How did I miss it? I was in another awesome session.

Luckily, Micki Krimmel took some good notes. The session was titled, “Scaling for Your First 100k Users,” but a friend of mine who attended said it wasn’t really about scaling, but making a product for a user. Matt has twelve rules on making a Web product and Micki wrote them all down.

Here are my three favorites:

• Get out 1.0 as fast as humanly possible. This goes hand-in-hand with bootstrapping. Get something done, make it public, and tweak from there.
• Measure your success – you have to have metrics. Everything that is watched improves.
• Know what to do if you are successful — dog chasing a car doesn’t know what to do if he catches it.

I really like Portland coffee shops, with their independent style and community feel. And, of course, I like the Web done right. But both are often done wrong and it’s a shame since it takes so little to do it right.

Noah Kagan says a shop in San Fran does so many things right. Similarly, my old office had a good little spot I called Mike’s, because the owner was that friendly. What’s interesting to me is the things that make a coffee shop successful (after location, perhaps) are really easy. All you have to do is remember that your customers are people.

This approach works on the Web, too. The visitors are people. To create a place where visitors return, you need to give a positive experience. And it probably only takes a little more effort.

Greg Linden tells it like it is:

Today, the greatest pool of user-generated content ever created, the World Wide Web, is full of crap and spam. Search engines or other applications that seeks to get value from the Web needs to be built with filtering in mind. The Web is a cesspool, but sufficiently powerful tools can pluck gems from the sea of goo.

Linden’s solution is personalization, which he thinks will solve the problem of information overload. His company, Findory, does this by tracking clicks and helping determine what you’re actually interested in. His background is pretty good, having worked at Amazon in the early years.

Bonus Linden link: Combating Web spam with personalization. Imagine how different the Web would be if everybody had different search results.

1. I can wrap my brain around it. If something is simple, that helps me see what I need to do first/next.
2. I can get from idea to execution quickly.
3. I can always make things more complicated. Removing complexity is a little harder, like asking the stylist to cut your hair a little longer.

I could write more, but why? 😉