“Social networking is broken” has been a
recent popular topic of conversation among journalists and bloggers. Molly Wood of CNET lists
Five
Reasons Social Networking Doesn’t Work and Olga Kharif of
BusinessWeek asks
Is
Social Networking Broken?”
No, social networking is not broken. What is broken is the perception of social networking.
The way I see it there are two possible broad definitions of
what [on-line] “social networking” is.
1) A
site that facilitates networking, e.g. meeting new people. Long before
Friendster and Orkut, there were dating sites like Match.com and Yahoo
Personals which facilitated meeting new people. Ditto Hotjobs and Monster. One
of my former projects, commissioner.com, would group 10 or 12 strangers
together that wanted to play fantasy baseball into a fantasy league where they
competed in that intimate group for six months and often became friends. My town
runs a small web-site with a discussion group dedicated for newcomers to meet
other newcomers and my wife and I have made new friends through this.
Of course the above “social” applications that facilitate “networking”
are not new and certainly they aren’t broken. Let’s try a different
definition.
2) A
site that uses one’s social network. This requires a definition of
“social
network” and while I’m not sure there’s an official one, most are
referring to
the six-degrees-of-separation representation of people’s contacts. I
have my
contacts and they have theirs and everyone’s all linked together. The
linking together of contact lists creates, well, some sort of super
three-dimensional contact list which is all a social network really is.
So if social networking is simply utilizing a more powerful
contact list, is contact listing broken? Contact listing? What is that? It is a
concept that doesn’t get hyper-analyzed because a contact list is merely a
component of an application. My cell-phone has a contact list. My IM client has
a contact (buddy) list. I have a contact list in Outlook. I have a contact list
at my web-based e-mail service. We’re all actually contact listing all over the
place but nobody is talking about it…because
the contact list is just one helpful element used by a bigger application.
On June 13th, 2005 Stowe Boyd recently wrote in
Social Networking: Broken, Boring, or Offtrack?:
“When the social networking modeling and analysis becomes
just one helpful element of the
substrate that these next generation offerings will be built on, then we will
see the true explosion in social networking use. In the meantime, leave me
out.”
“Next generation?” Multiply was [admittedly self-] proclaiming to
be next generation in March 2004, because we recognized then that the social
network was merely an element of
something bigger.
Bernard Moon wrote on June 22, 2005 in
No
Social Networking Site is an Island
that:
"[Friendster] had become nothing more than a glorified phone
book. The lesson? Tribe.net, Friendster, and dozens of other social networking
services have proved that social networking functions alone don't make for a
successful or compelling site."
“Glorified phone book?” Perfectly stated, although we've been making that point for about a year and a half.
Multiply was launched as a sharing site,
not a “meeting new people” site. The social network was just an element to facilitate the exchange of
blogs, photos, and other content. The social network provides users
a larger audience of people that may care about their blogs and photos as well as an efficient
means to notify these people that new content is being shared. Are Multiply users paying money to add more people to
their address book? No. They are paying to share more photos and video.
But
rather than write about us as “next generation” in 2004,
many just assumed, because we used the words “social networking”, that
we were a
YASN (“yet another social network”). If there was ever a short-sighted generalization,
that is it. It's akin to saying "it's the same as all the rest"
thus creating a preconceived notion among people that haven't yet had a
chance to make a true objective analysis.
What
is most detrimental though is when those preconceived
notions have a negative stigma associated with them, and it is simply
the
negative stigma of social networking that is leading to all kinds of
theories about why it is “broken”. Who, though, is to blame for social
networking’s negative
stigma? That’ll be the topic of my next
blog entry. Stay tuned.
