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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."
Just terminated my Orkut account : I don't like to be asked to quantify my level of friendship with people, it is only my business.
I'd rather keep meeting people IRL, there are still much more people offline than online, after all.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
If you want to see the social network idea extended to music, I suggest you check out my site Musicmobs. It links users together not only by the music they listen to, but also creating a web of "favorite users".
My goal is to make a place where people can not only find new music, but learn more about the music that they already listen to.
I've considered joining such online social circles in the past because I, like many others, do enjoy online interaction. I spend many hours per day talking to people on AIM or some other service, I maintain a livejournal, and as I'm doing right now, I enjoy posting on sites like Slashdot. However, I've yet to actually do it. Why? Because the people I would really be interested in having join along with me are already on AIM, or they simply aren't online very often.
Existing chat services already serve this purpose quite well. I have a number of contacts on my lists which I personally don't know very well, but they are friends of friends who I might talk to once a year. The only real difference with these sites is that the process is automated, in some sense or another. I can see the purpose to them and I would like to see a concept like this take off, but I just can't see anything like that really getting established and lasting any length of time.
KappaStone
> The pumping will be done for you.
That hasn't been my experience. I signed up for the Monster.com networking thing, and all it does is send me periodic messages stating "other people who are like you". What am I supposed to do with this?
Crap. I get far more kudos from people e-mailing me to ask about or compliment source code and articles I post on my web site, and often times they contribute code back to me.
1. Many still prefer human face to face (or any other body part to any other body part
2. Identity theft. You can register yourself as Bill Gates, with BG's photo, on Friendster. Chances are, you'll get away with it.
3. Abuse by trolls. Need I say more?
I keep my personal life well off the internet. I do it mainly for privacy and security reasons.
Friendster, in my eyes, is a vast spam engine. I get dozens of emails from people I barely know as acquiantances trying to be my "friends" on Friendster. No thanks. I know who my friends are. I don't want a website to remind me.
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Nothing to see here
Just this week I met up with some people from Orkut. I wrote about my experience for those interested.
I know a lot of people on slashdot make fun of social networks, but trust me, if you are new to a city and don't know many people there, it's nice to join a network of (mostly) real people as opposed to some anonymous bulliten board.
-Colin
Folks, a club anyone can join is a club no one will see value in joining. These networks exist so the unemployed can BS themselves to high heaven and link to other people with equally fictional self-appraisals. Once it becomes obvious how high the BS meter is on these sites, they will crash.
nobody's registering, just going there to try to, and being shown the door.
From the site:
orkut is unique, because it's an organically growing network of trusted friends. That way we won't grow too large, too quickly and everyone will have at least one person to vouch for them.
If you know someone who is a member of orkut, that person can invite you to join as well. If you don't know an orkut member, wait a bit and most likely you soon will.
We look forward to having you as part of the orkut community.
We need a Slashdot Orkut whore!
With my experiences on orkut, friendster(before they ran out of bandwidth), myspace, and such, real life is not very social.
Being about life, most of the people just want to hear themselves talk. It gets very cliquey, and even though you might get added to someone's diary, they might not be so open or receptive to your comments.
Hell, you could say something thought-provoking, and insightful and no one listens, while any 19 year old grrl who flashes her cleavage gets 20 "you're so beautiful!" comments. Don't expect intelligent discussion in real life like you would see on here or on kuro5hin. Real life 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 real life meetups. They are 100% sausage fests.
All the fervor has skeptics talking of a social networking bubble and its inevitable collapse. While such speculation is premature, issues do have to be resolved -- functionality and privacy concerns among them -- before the sector can be judged a safe bet.
Ummm, no. the skeptics are skeptical because we heard all the same hoo haa back around 1999. And investment is not profit something these dot-commies still don't understand.
The article then goes on to blather:
Perhaps the strongest arguments for social networking's success has nothing to do with the bottom-line success of the companies behind the sites. Rather it's one of those unintended consequences that's no less welcome and needed for being unexpected.
First off, that is an atrociously written paragraph. What is IT'S? "Social networking" or the "bottom line success of the companies"? But, never mind...
Secondly, these companies are having millions of dollars poured down their gullet by VCs. That is NOT bottom line success. That is investment on the prediction of bottom line success, but we ALL know where that little train went back around March 2001...
The article is just another rah-rah bit of internet blather - so five minutes ago (actually five years ago) it's kind of sad, really.
The fact is this: if you want to build a network of professional relationships, you have to get off your fat ass and go meet people. There are many organisations for just about every concievable interest. Join one. You have to go out and meet people. And if you're a loser at that, then eventually you'll be a loser online as well, because all the online thing can do is facilitate the development of f2f where the real business goes down.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
efnet rulz! I have been an irc "regular" for well over a decade.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Here is a quote from the MSN article: "By bringing a real-world relationship model online -- one where individuals are identified and held accountable -- social networking has the potential to make the Internet a healthier, more civil place. "
And there you have it, folks. That is what it is really all about. It's a false mechanism to strip the Internet of the ability to act and speak anonymously. What MSN and other VC dollars are pushing for, is a world where every TCP socket uses SSL, everything is digitially signed, where you can't even get ON the net until you are tied to a PKI infrastructure.
Social clubs like these create the natural response to the stories of 45 year old fat guys posing as teenage girls. It smashes a key attribute of the Internet that made it alluring for many. I'm not passing judgement on this, as good or bad, just pointing out that creating exclusionary groups and networking the "good" people is a predictable response. This is what gives University campuses the feeling of safety, esp. at Ivy League schools. The sense that everyone was "chosen" to be there.
What will happen to groups like Orkut that are founded from places like Stanford are they will come to reflect the population of Stanford. Alumnis will get pref treatment. Then what happens is a fragmentation of social networks, pretty soon you have social networks based on race, such as the Hispanic or Latino social network, and you get the Republican golf league social network, and pretty soon the system breaks down under the weight of 8 million social networks that are split up along cultural and economic lines, and there is no anonymity, and it just mirrors society, and while that may make it "accepted", it removes all the sense of wonder and finding new things that the net was about.
I join a web board for SimRacing (www.racesimcentral.com) because that is an activity that I enjoy. Because of people I've met there, I could attend the Goodwood festival in the UK even though I'm an American. And I may only know the people from their Nom De Plume, I may never know their real names. And it doesn't matter. I think social networks really exist to destroy things like that.
Having to "rate" my friends could possibly be the worst concept to hit social networking
Not at all. The idea is a good one, if the social network is to have any useful value for interpersonal networking, it has to know the strength of the links. If I'm trying to chart a path to Bob, the network needs to know which are the "close-friend" links, which are more likely to hold up and be worth something.
I won't get very far trying to use a chain of 3 barely acquainted people to get from Alice to Bob
you could forgo the "getting to know you" part and go out "toothin" as described in one of the front page articles of wired.com
... in there with her shirt undone. 'This beats the crossword,' she said. And we took it from there."
Brits Going at It Tooth and Nail By Daniel Terdiman
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62687,00. html
02:00 AM Mar. 22, 2004 PT
The Brits sure are randy.
First came dogging, an underground swinging scene where couples and sometimes third or fourth parties engage in public sex for an exhibitionist thrill.
And now comes "toothing," where strangers on trains and buses and at bars and concerts hook up for clandestine sex by text messaging each other with their Bluetooth-enabled cell phones or PDAs.
"I've always loved the idea of random sexual encounters, but have never felt brave enough to go to (sex) parties," says Steve, a toother from Hitchin, England. "The beauty of toothing is that there's no pressure. I was reluctant to send messages at first, but the standard greeting, which I found out from (an online toothing forum) is so innocuous there is no chance of offending anyone by sending a random message."
According to the Beginner's Guide to Toothing, the online FAQ written by a man who calls himself Toothy Toothing, toothing is "a form of anonymous sex with strangers -- usually on some form of transport or enclosed area such as a conference or training seminar.... Users 'discover' other computers or phones in the vicinity and then send a speculative message. The usual greeting is: 'Toothing?'"
Toothing takes advantage of the capabilities of Bluetooth, a wireless technology that allows two devices to communicate with each other over short distances. Many mobile phones and PDAs now have built-in Bluetooth functionality and allow users to automatically locate other such devices in their vicinity.
"I live in a commuting town outside London," says Jon, or Toothy Toothing. "The train journey in the morning and evening is slow, tiresome and packed full of miserable people halfheartedly prodding at shiny new tech. You recognize faces within your tiny half-hour community, but you never talk to them."
So last November, Jon remembers, he received a text message on the train from a device called "Angela." That night, he went home and figured out how to respond to incoming text messages and did so the next day.
"Cut a long story short, the messages got more and more flirty -- and after a while I had a good idea of who she was, and I think she'd worked out who I was -- and a couple of days later she dared me to meet next to the toilets at the mainline station we were heading to. We met, we fucked and toothing was born."
Steve's introduction to toothing was similar. He had just bought himself a new mobile phone when he was pinged by someone on his commuter line. "Bored? Talk to me," the message read.
"I thought it was some kind of SMS spam," says Steve. "I was messing with the phone's settings, trying to work out what to do when I got the second message, 'I can see you struggling. Meet me in the toilet and I'll show you what to do.'"
Intrigued, he says, he did as bid.
"It was unlocked," he remembers. "A girl was
Steve and hundreds, if not thousands, of others have formed a loose-knit community via Jon's Toothing forum. Although the majority of them are men, there are also many women on the forum, such as "Mysterious Girl," "annie 2uesday," "CandyGrrrl" and others. Members discuss the etiquette of toothing, the best locations to hook up with a toothing partner and whom they hope will be the first celebrities to get involved.
Sometimes they even have a little fun with language.
Under a posting titled "3's company?" one member asked, "Anyone got any views on the statistical chance of a toothing threesome? Would it be Threething?"
In any case, toothing seems to give its participants an exercise in figur
We're still trapped in the same vortex of stupidity that caught us all in the Dot-Bomb Era. Just like the foolish VCs who are funding these companies, we're not focusing on the bottom line. How do they make money? Do they have serious business plans? Are their projections at all realistic?
Every article, every piece of information I've come across indicates that the rise of these social networking operations is evidence of yet another case of the VC sheep following the flock. Maybe I should use the term lemmings instead.
Follow the money on these operations and you'll see it's all headed relentlessly down the drain.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This article is about 7 years too late.
IMO, the likelihood of using the Internet to find substantive connections is now analagous to the chances you have of becoming good friends with someone who dials a wrong number to your telephone.
Yea, it still happens all the time, but there's a completely different dynamic to cyberspace now. Many years ago, I got a book deal off the newsgroups, found investors for a venture (who funded a startup to the tune of 6 figures without even meeting in person or talking on the phone), dated a bunch of women and more.
Nowadays, the online scene is a lot different. There are still pockets of people and meet-ups happening with networking going on, but the dynamics are not the same.
For example, an online game such as Everquest, which is a social vehicle, now seems to be mostly filled with people who use the game as an escape from reality and have no desire to communicate or get to know others outside of the game. Nobody reveals as much of themselves any more, and those that do are likely to be more on the unstable side. Cyberspace is viewed more as a medium to be vent, pretend to be someone you're not, or a distraction, rather than a catalyst for networking.
I remember the good ol' days when you could enter a chat room and actually CHAT. Now these places are arenas where people engage in contests to see who has the most meaningless one-liner.
I just spent last night trying to add friends to my friendster account. The main reason?
Its interesting to see who your friends know. This girl that I am into is on friendster and she just added me. She was talking about going to Texas to visit friends and for some reason all her friends in Texas are guys. I don't suspect anything or really care, cause we ain't even dating. This certainly does bring up some privacy concerns. . .
I fileld out a thing on friendster once, but none of my friends were interested. You can't just meet people not in your existing network there, so to this day my friend network there ends with myself. You need to have friends that will sign up for these things, and they have to have other friends that will sign up, and so forth for this idea to work as it's implemented where I've seen it. Otherwise it's a total waste of time, as it was in my case. Were my buds a bunch of party poopers by not wanting to get into that thing, or were they smarter than I? Hmmm...