Mashable here has a great article about "Sharepocalypse", or how social media overload will generate an expanse of new problems. However, this will generate a new opportunity for social assistance — a new category of software and services — and therefore, a ripe environment for startups.
Social Relationship Management (SRM): : Services that help people create, organize and manage sets of social network relationships — for example, sets of people to follow and/or share with on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.
Social Awareness: Services that help people keep up with their social networks, especially among a user’s friends.
Social Curation: Services that help people organize and make sense of their streams and messages.
Social Personalization: Services that help people sift through the network noise for information most relevant to their particular needs and interests.
Social Analytics: Services that help to measure online social behavior and trends, optimize engagement, monitor activity and communicate more appropriately.
Social Automation: Services that help to automate activity in social networks, like automatically updating your status, helping to increase your influence, suggesting what to share, matchmaking, alerting, and using bots to intelligently interact with and assist users.
Because social assistance will become so necessary, both vertical and horizontal social assistance could mean interesting opportunities for startups. Ventures that provide vertical social assistance for particular networks, like Google+ and Facebook are going to be early build versus buy acquisition targets. These are rapid innovation opportunities for individual developers or small teams.
