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Interdependencies between acceptance and quality perceptions of social network services: The standard-dependent user blindness

Social network services (SNSs) are having an in- creasing impact on social network communities and in the globalization process that integrates them. Social network communities are being to regulate this impact and adopt SNSs to their cultural distinctive features. Social network communities are in permanent co-adaptations with SNSs. These "relationships" have two chances-either SNS gains acceptance and will become standard or it slowly dies. Nowadays, Facebook is the standard in the SNSs' world but in Russia's SNSs' communities Vkontakte, the domestic SNS, dominates. To explore the reasons for success or failure of SNSs and the perception of quality of SNSs define among their users, this study applies perceived information system quality and their acceptance of Facebook and Vkontakte. As a result, we found out for both SNSs that "network effects" create "the-winner-takes-it-all" situation, where a critical mass of users is achieved by one SNS, which is able to keep its dominant position. Each user will be "socialized" through this SNS (Facebook in Germany-VKontakte in Russia). It is expectable that the users prefer "their" SNS in terms of use and impact. But our results show that even the users' perceptions of the SNS's quality (e.g., ease of use) is strongly influenced by the applied SNS. We will call this effect "standard- dependent user-blindness (SDUB)." It seems to be impossible to gather unbiased user perceptions on network markets.

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