by Aner Ravon
Lately I feel I have more social networks then friends. As a matter of fact, I know more social networks then people. Spooky? Scary!
A social network for meeting business colleagues…Wait…. 3!
A social network for bookmarking websites… Wait… 5!
A social network for sharing media….Wait…15!
A social network for sharing social networks….You get the point.
It seems like every trivial detail in life makes a good enough reason for not only one, but a few competitive social networks. The pseudo-differentiators are ridiculous (”my social network is available offline on your PDA”….who cares???). There are simply far too many social networks out there. We tend to dismiss that with hope for natural selection, but I am growing weary of the very concept. My attention span for chasing and maintaining social networks is very narrow. I have no desire to re-live the IM no interopability nightmare (”Oh you’re on Yahoo? too bad, I’m on AIM”). Thanks, I’m skipping this round.
The abundance of so many networks is a problem by itself. For a social network to be successful it needs to be socially known, something we are all familiar with. Maybe not MySpace but I’d set the minimum bar at del.icio.us.
Do less web based social networking folks. Get out more and meet real friends!
Aner Ravon
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I see two major problems with social networks as they are today.
First of all there is the ever recurring problem of the business model, when starting a ne social network service nowadays you don’t aim at becoming the new MySpcae, you want to be bought by one of the giants, hence the multiple social networks fighting in the same small niche with the hope of dominating it for a short time right when Yahoo executives decide they must have a jokes-sharing network. Since the cost of starting such a network is almost negligible you find the above mentioned abundance.
The second problem is the fact that most of those networks put too much of the workload on the users. In return they get, I guess, about 99% of Flickr filled with famuky albums shared by the ingenious method of calling your mum and telling “I just opened an album with photos from our vacation I’ll send you a link”. This truly is ridiculous, although it does the truly important job of saving bandwidth and space on mail servers.
I guess the solution to those two problems is combined. First of all, the development of a true social network will probably be left to the giants, unfortunately, but it takes someone with a broad enough “captive audience” to start a true social network. Amazon/Yahoo/Google can then use the vast amounts of data they have accumulated on us to create what is lacking in social networks today. When I open a d.e.l.i.c.i.o.u.s (please don’t try telling me where those dots shold be, I really can’t bother) I have to create a substantial links library before some elusive image of my online personality starts to emerge. Google already know much more than that about me. When I buy a book from amazon next time, I might be happy to know that people who bought the same book also bookmarked the site of an obscure literary magazine from Texas I’ve never heard of, I might also ignore this bit of data, but I didn’t have to open an account and then customize it on 15 different networks just in order to ignore it.
07.23.06 @ 1:57 pmMySpeace…
My quote-of-the-month award goes to the DeGardner blog (slightly edited):As a matter of fact, I think I know more social networks than people.This space is becoming fairly absurd. There are obviously a ton of social networks for teenagers, networks for…
Trackback 07.26.06 @ 1:36 pmAgree 100%.
A related area is the “Organic Content Community of Content Communities.” Once you publish to any social community, your content near instantly is available to everyone on the Internet. With the number of social communities growing by the minute, you are publishing not only to your intended community but also to a mushrooming number of media and services, e.g.:
- Blogs
- Wikis
- Podcasts
- Memediggers (like Digg)
- Mashups (into new content)
- Social Bookmarks
- Social Network Services (like LinkedIn)
- VLOGs
- Memetrackers
- Search 2.0 appls
And your content now lives in…
- Server cache
- Desktop cache
- Handheld device cache
- Kiosk cache (public and private)
- Shared Web files (like Furl)
- Shared local drives (desktop to WAN)
With no federation across “point product” communities.
This is one of the risks and rewards of participatory media.
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I couldn’t agree more, I wrote up a little piece on my vision for the antisocial network! http://www.dead20.com/2006/07/21/antisocial-networking/
07.23.06 @ 4:46 am