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Social Networking in the Digital Age
An anonymous reader writes "It used to be if you wanted to win more friends, influence more people or make more money, you bought one of those self-improvement tomes and tried to pump up your personality.
These days, all you have to do is go online and join a "social networking" site. The pumping will be done for you."
Yeah, but even then personality has to count for something. If you're a pill, it's going to show through.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
From the article: If you haven't yet heard of social networking, stay tuned because it's the Next Big Thing.
Really? Every time some site (MSN, in this case) or article tells you that such-and-such is the "Next Big Thing," ask yourself what they might have to gain...
Friendster and others seem to be falling into the same traps as Carnagie Courses and all those self-help books... They all promise so much and yet the means to do any of these things can be found inside one's own mind. Just take a bit more interesting thoughts put into a few words and a few fears excorcised, and you have a much more interesting person who others want to be friends with. This seems like the Diet Industry, where eat less and excercise more is the actual reality that everyone will pay $$$ to avoid!
But an online social circle is a poor substitute for a real social network. I've been there, done that, and sure I see the appeal. But honestly, get some real ('f2f' as they say) friends.
no comment
Most "online" people like the anonominity of the online world, so that can be someone, or something that they aren't in real life. That is what makes IRC, Chat, ... so "interesting" to most individuals.
Computers and software will never replace real world "networking" and friendships, as a lot of that is built on your real personality, and (like it or not) appearance.
This is the best overblown, over reaching hyperbole since the Silicon Valley venture vultures were leading us willingly down the yellow brick road. This is a bunch of hype by new players trying to convince us their new products are SO much better at creating social networks than the BBS, slashblogs, and USENET that's been building social networks forever. This is a virtual velvet rope that creates the artificial scarcity that makes an exclusive club seem so much more exclusive than it really is.
But what do you do if your friends aren't interested in joining one of these sites - or you don't have any friends? If you don't have connections, you don't get to play. That's hardly a way for an introvert to better their social standing.
I could kill you, sure, but I could only make you cry with these words
With my experiences on orkut, friendster(before they ran out of bandwidth), myspace, and such, LJ is not very social.
Being a "blogger" site, most of the people there post entries just to hear themselves talk. It gets very cliquey, and even though you might get added to someone's friends list, they might not be so open or receptive to your comments.
Hell, you could post a thought-provoking, insightful journal entry and recieve zero comments, while any 19 year old grrl who posts pics of her clevage gets 20 "you're so beautiful!" comments. Don't expect intelligent discussion on LJ like you would see on here or on kuro5hin. LJ is a bit socially xenophobic.
With myspace and friendster, the journalling functions are 99% ignored.
With orkut, I actually see some decent activity in the communities. It's much better structured than myspace or friendster. Now as for meeting new people, that's a different story.
Oh, and don't bother with the livejournal meetups. They are 100% sausage fests.
The fundamental law of social environments is that it takes effort to be well noticed, and online social networks certainly do not violate that principle. They just change the fitness landscape a bit by allowing those who aren't equipped with f2f social graces to compete.
But as it turns out, if you're a dork in real life, you're usually a dork online too. People that are popular in real life but not so much online generally just haven't invested the time required to build an online presence.
In other words, the same basic laws of social interaction apply, you just get to interact with more people.
Go ahead, mod me Troll but some of us don't want to be part of a service that you can't join outright.
...and even though most of the postings are against the article, we are participating in an online community.
humble and proud of it.
a "social" site without real time chat is not that social... that is why huminity is the more faverable site
The dating networks are filled with fake pics.
The business networks are filled with people with inflated egos and phony credentials.
Sure its fun to surf them but they are useless for any valid application. Just surf LinkedIn sometime to see BS artists on steriods linking to each other in a circle jerk of mutual validation for their collective hagiography.
Having to "rate" my friends could possibly be the worst concept to hit social networking.
I'm either friends, or not, with someone, and my own classification of my friendships change so often that updating (forget about revealing it to other folks) a website is just impossible.
I doubt that. I've seen plenty of boring Friendster profiles who I'd never contact the person behind, and I've de-Friendster-ated more than a couple of people who signed up and added me, but frankly just ended up not being interesting enough to bother. "Favorite color: OMG-Pink. Favorite Music: Britney Houston."
Thankfully, to keep it interesting we always have the Fakesters.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
Orkut is still beta, so I'm willing to forgive it some hiccups. But the new friend ranking thing is just weird. The whole point of the "friend" class is to link you up to people you know...so why the hell do you need to rank those? You know them. "Oh, right! John Smith is my best friend! I totally would have forgotten that! Thank you, Orkut!"
But, that said...if there's a use for Orkut beyond spammy friend-of-friend messages, I haven't found it yet.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
That was, bar none, the most content-free article I've read this year.
NO TOUCH MONKEY!
I agree completely. I'm going to be switching careers in a few months and it'd be pretty damn helpful if I could find some friends of friends already on the inside, but it's clear to me that these networks are either secret or just for dating. So why hasn't anyone created one with validation? If VCs are giving out that kind of cash, one of us really should...
I have yet to find a social networking service that isn't just a bunch of crappy collaboration tools glued together in a dating site format.
Take Orkut communities. They're just low rent versions of web based message boards that have been around for quite a while now. There are communities for just about any subject already, but technology-wise they offer nothing that other online communication tools haven't been doing better for some time now. Ditto for most of the other features orkut has. Do we really need to reinvent email, message boards, IRC, and IM; badly?
Yeah, you can read someone's profile. But that's really more useful on a special purpose dating site. For most other purposes it's just not need to know information. Does the fact that you can't easily call up Linus's preferences in movies matter at all in the context of discussions about the Linux kernel? I don't think so.
I don't see the value added, quite the opposite in fact. Orkut interests me more as a playground for bots that game it's various ranking systems than anything that I would use to meet people and exchange information.
Nothing forcing you to make friends online, you could just one one of these pieces of software to track the F2F friends of your F2F friends. And then rather than dropping by their estate with a calling card, you could use some kind of digital medium to network with them.
Many of my F2F friends are in different parts of the world such that I haven't actually communicated with them F2F for months or years. As a result, I have no idea who their friends are anymore, and therefore without technology they are nothing more than a leaf in my network.
I used to think, man, when they finally get over this crufty networking and everybody just uses google or ebay or rent-a-coder for everything, then a massive amount of friction will be taken out of the economy and there will be a boom.
Instead, I think businesspeople are to some extent just automating the word-of-mouth method. The particular site I am thinking of is rolostar.com. The question is, is just doing the old, biased, rather random word-of-mouth methods in a faster and more organized way better than trying to just run a massive ebay for every service ?
I guess for things that are commodities, and I don't exclude services here -- writing a Will is a commodity legal service -- finding the lowest priced stranger on the internet is the best way. But for stuff were the very nature of it means it is custom done with a lot of interaction every time, I think social networking may prevail -- whether it is online or off.
I imagine that Orkut is working to develop their own social networking mapping software and all of its users are becoming part of a vast experiment in modeling of social systems.
:))))
;)
Okay...so what's in it for me? They're not going to get a very accurate map if they can't keep people signed up. There's some potential in the forums, I think, and for business networking, but I don't sign on more than once a week anymore unless I get an alert that someone has friended me.
You are not people. Your number is Liberty-4527.
Flash me back to freshman English again, and I will track you down and force you to read The Fountainhead.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
There is nothing in it for you. It's a business model. If they can't dazzle you with the brilliance of their service they'll get 1000 other people to sign up based upon their b_llsh_t. The end goal of these social networking services is not to work for the advancement of society. Their end goal is to make money. If they can come up with five or six poster children whose lives were advanced then so much the better for their marketing spiel.
Pyramid schemes, pyramid schemes. All I see in America are pyramid schemes.
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