« DeLay's Felonious Campaign | Main | Big boss man, can you hear me when I call? » Dvorak vs social networksJohn Dvorak of PC Magazine has gone out of his depth with a piece about social networks, where he ponders whether they're "Dead Already?". Sites that support social networks have their problems, but they're certainly not "dead." However Dvorak betrays his biases in his second paragraph: I was getting an invitation to join one or more of these systems daily. LinkedIn seemed to be the most popular at the time. I demurred, since I'm not much of a joiner. But after being hounded and hounded, I reluctantly joined a few of these services and watched my personal network of associates grow.What's a good analogy? A hermit peers out of his cave and proclaims that communities are a bad idea, because he doesn't really like to be around all those people. (After which he's eaten by a grizzly bear, but that's another story...) Dvorak seems to think that all social networks have the same goals and functionality as LinkedIn: The idea behind these social/business networks is that with the Internet and these special services, you can put together and control a list of people who have qualified as your friends. These people in turn develop networks that you can access. When somebody from another network wants to get hold of someone in your network, you can forward the request as a kind of qualified lead. "This guy is okay because I know him," and that sort of thing. He bemoans the fact that "A" list people like Larry Ellison and Hillary Clinton aren't present on these systems, just "B" and "C" list people - he sees this as a drawback, as though somehow the presence of generally unapproachable celebrities would some how make the systems more useful. Then he says The first thing that happens is that you begin to notice that many, if not most, of these people have bigger networks than you have. You look like a total loser if your network is smaller. So you start to invite people to join your network to pump up the numbers so you won't look like a schmuck. Soon others do the same. Now it's a race. Okay, so I let the guy from Toledo add me so I can add him and get my numbers up. This factor alone ruins the usability of the entire scene, since nobody is qualified at all.Nobody's ever told me they felt like a loser because they had fewer contacts (might be a good research project in that one). And I can say from looking as many others' social networks that they don't seem to be padded in the way he describes here. People may do that, but I don't quite see how that "ruins...usability." I have a hunch Dvorak is talking about himself here, and I don't think you can generalize from one guy's experience, especially if he's already made it clear that he wasn't into the scene in the first place. Dvorak explains a bizarre experience he evidently had with LinkedIn where he was limited in his ability to contact other members. He could only contact four, and three didn't respond. Since they didn't respond, he surmises that they were "bogus." On Orkut, he says he "couldn't do the kind of search he he needed to isolate anyone," but he doesn't quite explain what he couldn't do - he's distracted by the thought that some Orkut members might have better looking friends than others, another point where he assumes people are competing. What evidence does he cite for this? None. He says in his next to last paragraph that he sees "no evidence that any of these systems really work." I.e. he couldn't find a use for them, so how could anyone else find them useful? Did he ask around? He doesn't say. I suspect he didn't. In the final paragraph, he says his invitations to the services dropped off. He doesn't really say what this is supposed to mean. To me it suggests that most of the people he knew who were likely to do the social network thing had already done it... but it certainly doesn't mean that no one is using the social networks. It's really not just about adding more and more people, after all. The idea is that you'll make use of your connections and communities in various ways, and there does seem to be a lot of that happening... at least to me, when I wander back to Tribe or Orkut. Finally, he says After about four months of inactivity, one lone person gave me an invite to LinkedIn, with a canned message that made me roll my eyes. It went on and on about how valuable the network has become for the person.Hmm - well, he's described the rather lame canned message that many of us got via Multiply, not LinkedIn, which has taken quite a bit of care to make canned messages subtle and sane. There's a lot to say about social networks, but Dvorak's remarks are basically just bile, nothing constructive in 'em. What I'd really like to talk about is what you can do well with social networks, and how they might be more effective in a context where they are not an end in themselves, but serve another need. jon posted this at 4:16 PM |
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Comments
Dvorak has never been into the social part of the Net, going back to the late 80s. He may not be a loner, but he seems to have a basic aversion to mixing it up online with people he doesn't already know.
Posted by: Cliff | September 24, 2004 9:34 AM