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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."
What? No orkut link, but an MSN link instead? On Slashdot? Did hell freeze over or something? :)
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...
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.
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!
Really, isn't what those sites are for?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.