Bison: Prelim SWOT Threats

My objective this morning is to get through the Threat (T) portion of a SWOT for Bison.

SWOT refresher
In the not-so-near future, I need to do a SWOT analysis on Bison. As a reminder, the reason that this NoMoreSnow Ventures group will be doing SWOT analysis is to decide whether a venture is compelling enough to start a business. In case you need a refresher on SWOTs, here are two links I'll be using this morning:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swot_analysis
- http://www.bplans.com/dp/article.cfm/148

Core Reminder:
As usual, we need to remind ourselves, what are Bison's offerings:
Communication and Networking. Please read the previous posting for the details of these objectives.

Communication Objectives
1. Be an Open Network, allowing information out and in
2. Provide Information-Level Permissions (ILP)
3. Allow Anonymous Communications

Social Networking Objectives
1. Allow Relationship Tagging
2. Provide Visual Relationship Network (VRN)

What are external threats that Bison will face upon launching? I'm
just going to list external factors that may influence the success of a Bison launch. These are not in any particular order and I'm going to
throw everything into this list, including the kitchen sink. Later, when the SWOT is performed, I'll pair the list down to the major issues.

Threats:
- competitors begin offering ILP-type services for email, blogging,
forums, calendars, webpages, etc... Facebook, Yahoo! Mail, Google
Groups, and Blogger to name a few.
- People's attitudes about security and privacy change, such that
these topics are no longer important
- People are satisfied with using their current tools (email,
calendars, blogs, etc...) and don't see the compelling need to switch.
- Social networks are "old news" and people no longer care about
networking because they've done it so much lately.
- Advertisers no longer see the value of paying social networking
sites.
- Technology is not yet mature for us to implement ILP or VRN.
- No more angel or VC money available. It is possible that VCs have spent all the money they wanted to spend this year. Timing of when we launch may be bad in that the amount of VC money that has already been invested this year have almost reached $1B.
- Others???

This type of objective look at our offerings compared with what we
think are Threats makes me consider that Bison does not want to
"pigeon-hole" itself into being called a "social network".

I'll have to revisit this later, off to work now.

-john