Grindr has grown rapidly in the gay market.
Social network + location proximity + mobile text communication

Wouldn't work in the straight market for porn, but a similar product for other maibstream interests might have legs.

I agree, terrible:
http://www.isecpartners.com/files/iS...ons.BH2006.pdf

And if someone doesn't answer my text right back I get pissed as if it's required of them to drop everything to pull out their phone and type back. lol

Totally agree, and this sort of relates to the other thread about the gay market. It's not hard to understand gay men. They are, afterall, men. You might not understand their tastes in men, but the behaviours are your own, except unfettered by gender differences. That's why Grindr is hard for regular male-female relationships but something tied to interests are not.

Ever been lost at a party or convention? You see some dude with a Canuck jacket (who you are also a fan of) and immediately, you feel like you have someone you can approach?

I will say flat out, I never believed in making straight porn social except in the very limited degrees like sharing links and videos. Trying to, may be imposing a set of rules on something that can't take it.

When Sean says there are plenty of opportunities, there is still massive room in social interactions and connections, some adult-related.

For some inspiration, think of how storytelling evolved:
oral tales -> books -> audiobooks -> movies

Porn's evolution may be in a different medium or technology, but not necessarily social.

You are def right on texting my two are exactly the same its non stop texting and as for online games I have had them spend $60 in one hit :) The other thing my two do is spend most of thier time on facebook lol

It's true a traditional social network will not work. But if you set it up properly and present to the user that it is private (for starters don't require them to tie it into an email account or if you do, stress privacy being respected) while making them see that there are benefits to being on the network they will use it.

What value does the social network have to the user? That is the question. For the swinger group it is meeting other people to have sex with primarily or to show off (part of the sexual height for some). Age, hair color, location, sexual interests - these things matter to swingers. But if I'm just Joe six pack interested in porn while married to my wife what do I care about these things as they relate to other average guys interested in porn? I don't.

...But I might care about what kind of content they are interested in and what they share. If they really tend to have interesting stuff (same fetish) then I might be interested in their writings on a certain sexual topic (like a blog).

Ever seen one of those "super threads" on a surfer forum where one guy posts 2,000 replies loaded with content and 1,000 different users "thank" him? That should show that it can be done and that there is a market.

A porn social network should integrate other media and presentation methods. Tubes, blogs, photo gallery, discussion forums, the works. But not just a hodge podge of different components added ars an afterthought (as is common now) but a totally integrated experience.

You would want to create a place where people feel they can go to share everything related to the porn which interests them. primarily. Secondarily you want people to want to go there to find content.

The REAL trick and draw would be in all the details and finishing touches to make the experience useful and intuitive for Joe Sixpack. How do you help him find the content he wants? How do you help him find interesting providers of content?

...Of course this would pretty much be content piracy hell without strong efforts to keep content "legal" or "acceptable". But just as with tubes and forums you can also use this as a means to make sales from teaser content as well.

If you find the idea useful and want to do me a favor, please push harder when it comes repeat infringers, Fabian. :)

Tubes improved the presentation method. But what has been lacking noticeably have been innovations to making the finding of desired content easier and more intuitive. The conventional methods primarily involving keywords or search terms is rather lame and stone age. There are many possible innovations here. In general some that I consider revolve around making the presentation more adaptive to user actions and more intelligent (instead of simply relying on plain old categories and searches). But the question is can that be implemented now in scalable and realistic way now?

I think we'll still need to wait a few years for the next huge technology jump in porn, Virtual Reality.

How can porn be offered? a) images or b) real interaction.

a) Images: it can be either pics or videos. Technology has improved really fast to the point of being able to offer streamed HD videos at affordable costs (hosting). What else can you add to it? more resolution? pointless, HD is more than enough. I think we have peaked on the visual technology part. Tubes will be here for a long time.

b) Real interaction: it can mean more interaction with what you see in the videos, to feel part of it, and here we are talking about Virtual reality.

AEBN tried it with that idea about the pussy you can connect by USB and that moves synced with the videos. It was a good idea, but imho not the business model they tried to use, to pay big bucks for hardware and then also pay for a subscription. If you can cover the initial costs, the better model would be what mobile phone companies use, to offer the hardware for free or really cheap but after signing an X months membership or contract like when you join mobile phone companies.

3D could also be the next thing and technology is already there (still very basic), it fits porn perfectly.

The future could be a mix of 3D with a pussy or some kind of VR glasses or even something more advanced that is closer to Real Virtuality still to be invented, that even allows you to listen, watch, smell and touch.

The other way of interaction is social networking, but as Fabian said, i don't see an FB clone that big in porn. Maybe a social community that also acts as a hub for dating, dirty talking & flirting/showing off and 1 on 1 virtual sex through webcams could work, but have on mind that still a huge % of the users are men, so you could face the problem of most of dating programs, that have way more men that women and need to use fake female users to keep the men fooled to renew. The problem is that you can fake emails and profiles, but not 1 on 1 virtual sex.

Also one of the big points of FB is that it created trust based on the removal of the usual internet anonymity, people there have real names and surnames and i don't see it working for porn.

Porn or virtual sex is not remotely socially accepted enough to be something that most of users would want to share in public or to take risks without anonymity. What if you discover some known people in the porn social network? or even worse, you end doing 1 on 1 virtual sex with some random that ends being your neighbor? your boss/employee?? your wife??? your daughter?????? As Fabian said, it would work better for swingers.

I guess manwin is also waiting like most of us, and maybe even working on that next idea, but in the mean time, they just want to get control over as much traffic as possible, so when that next idea is developed, they just need to push it to their traffic. you can't say it is a bad business model for this waiting period. I admire what they are doing (except the usage of copyrighted content but we have enough threads about it with Paul M so we better don't start another discussion here about that).

Second Life.

It's virtual swinging for the 30+ crowd.

i'm gay and i've never had my dick sucked by complete strangers at airports. Or truck stops, don't think i've ever been to one

Internet revolution is one a very fast pace. In the next few years, great thing would be put up on the web again. And we will be part of it.

Something similar to that is already in the works.

A mobile dating site for the gay community would probably blow up pretty big if done right.

several people get good ideas, lots of them try, some even launch, very few actually pump traffic to it and make it a success. Let's see if who ever you are talking about can even get it launched.

Check out grindr

Tubes will die out and be replaced by "virtual" tubes. Tubes that virtually have everything... an information giant. It will be collecting all information from search history, url type ins, and then mass categorize person and spam the shit out of them.

Facebook is the front runner... Manwin will follow suit

So... You are trying desperately to justify being a pussy?

j/k