Let me just say that the social media, or more technically loser generated content is inherently flawed. That is of course a polite way of saying it is screwed. But I am not a polite person, so there you have it. I have found a CNET article explaining why. It is a short, good read. So I won’t go into details why social networking sites are crap.
But I would like to take the first argument from the article and elaborate on it a little bit; There’s nothing to do there (in a social network). Social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Orkut are based on creating a profile and associating other profiles with it. Thus you get to show everybody how many friends you have, you get to sell them and poke them and bite them (via Facebook applications), you get to rate them (in Orkut) and finally you get to send them private (and otherwise) messages. You can do all this stuff, so these social networks must be invaluable tools for our social life, right? Let’s take a closer look.
Last time I checked, relationships were more about quality than quantity. Who cares if you have 10 or 1000 friends in your profile? Having a huge friend count doesn’t even make you a popular person as far as I’m concerned. Because I know people who just pop out of nowhere and request to be friends with me. Unsurprisingly they have a high friend count themselves, go figure!
I think relationships are about sharing experiences. Social networks like Facebook give you that opportunity. In a twisted sick way though. For example you can poke your friends. Think about how much you can strenghten your relationships by poking people. And not only that, thanks to the application API you can buy and sell your friends as pets or you can suck their blood till they become vampires. Just the constant stream of invitations makes up a great experience. But I doubt it is the kind of experience Facebook wants you to have.
But hey, you can use social networks to communicate with people too. Isn’t that a good thing? You can publish your status, you can send your friends private messages. You can even join groups to meet like minded people! Isn’t that cool? …well, no. If you think that’s cool you must have missed the news about something called Internet! You can do all these without a social apparatus and almost always more effectively. You can email people for example. I would suppose people check their email more often and with greater attention than their social web2.0 gadgetry Mainstream social networks are not much more than profile association tools. There is nothing to do there. And noone, other than your friends, cares about your profile decoration. Perhaps not even your friends…
This huge mass of loser generated content reminds me of all that wasted bandwidth over once popular and useless e-mail forwards. When I lashed out to the senders they would be offended and surprised at the same time. How could I reject these wonderful delights Internet has to offer us. Do they still forward? That was before we had hyper-super-wall applications and send-poop applications. Actually I am a big fan of user generated content. There are many blogs for example, not only worth reading but their content is so precious that you can’t just possibly buy a book or take a course to get to that information. These people genuinely have something to tell and they have spent the effort to set-up a proper channel for their valuable voice. There are lame blogs as well, but of course if you’re reading this you already know that. But the bad ones are not strongly connected with the good ones, therefore you don’t even have to notice them. In other words they can not publish stories in your news feed.
There are also social networks that are built around another application. So there is a common goal, or at least something solid to talk about. I divide them into three and a half categories; building, sharing, bookmarking and business.
- Building applications with social networking are in my opinion most sophisticated and most valuable. Common example is Wikipedia. If you find it hard to spot social networking elements in Wikipedia that is probably because you have only seen the frontend. Wikipedia is a big community, and they form a social network with a wide communication bandwidth. Just google it to find out about how they operate and edit. Another good example to this category is open source software development. They also form a social network, and the networking aspect is much bigger this time.
- Sharing applications with social networking include Youtube, Flickr, 8tracks and the like. I won’t deny most of the content here is loser generated, just go to a random Youtube video and try to read the comments. But that may be, on an end user level, irrelevant. In these applications networking is not pushed too hard and the sharing mission is fully accomplished.
- Bookmarking is actually a special case of sharing. Bookmarking applications such as Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon are built on an incredibly powerful idea of sharing bookmarks. Today we are using WWW for many different things, but generally surfing is still the most prevalent. And hyperlinks and search engines fail to serve well enough for general purpose surfing. Social bookmarking does. You can choose a general or specific category and enjoy an almost endless stream of human reviewed websites.
- Business oriented social networks form half a category. They are not very different than mainstream friend portfolios. They emphasize business networking and I hear they can be useful. People are more open to meet new people in business context and these sites copy real world interaction successfully, so I don’t put them together with the other time wasters.
If you want a web presence the best way in my opinion is blogging. If you don’t have anything to say, no matter how many social profiles you have and how many times you can twit a day doesn’t really matter, nobody cares. You can also incorporate social media if you like, you can import your RSS into your Facebook profile or ping.fm some your posts. There is no need to spend a lot of time tweaking your profile, it is pointless.
On the other hand social networking is an important concept. It adds value when it is built around another, related service. Take Kongregate for example. I mentioned about how it is structured as a game which forms social network with unique dynamics. Check it out, if you also believe profile association is not the highest point for social networks.
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- David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08
- Getting The Most Out Of Your Facebook Account
- Serving Static Media In Django Development Server
Tags: media, social network
Great post, and I agree with everything you said, except for one thing: email/im vs. social sites. There are other use cases for me, like: - mass-messaging, like I wanted to ask all of my (relevant) “friends” (acquaintances?) about something. It’s a lot easier to write a question, memento, anything once, instead of CC-ing to tons of addresses - “meeting” new people. You can’t do that on email, maybe only on some concept-oriented mailing list. And I don’t want all of my new acquaintances to know my email. I don’t want to mail them. Maybe later, when I know them a bit better. - finding old acquaintances, like ex-classmates, teammates. You can ask around at mutual friends for phone numbers, mail addresses, of course, but not always. A social web can help in this one. - doing all this at one place. This is important for me, I don’t like using more tools than required.
I’m not a social web fan, of course
But they can be useful/fun sometimes.
Ah, sorry for the messed-up formatting
shame on me
@ochronus: All good points, I am sure there are more uses if we sit down and think about it. But still in practise once your profile is saturated with your friends there is nothing more to do.
After reading your comment I think I should have mentioned about online persistent chat tools as well.
And never mind about the formatting
Take care.