« Group Relationship Management | Main | The Story of the Sex Pistols » Social networking doesn't work?CNet just published "Five reasons social networking doesn't work", and I found myself shaking my head as I read it. (My pal Bijoy Goswami sent me the link, and I composed a response that took so long to write, I inevitably want to blog it...) Starting with the title: we all know that social networking "works," but she's not talking about social networking. She's talking about technologies built to facilitate social networking, what we sometimes call "artificial social networks." And she's not really saying that they don't "work" so much as saying they don't seem to have a viable business model, that they're not profitable... though all she's really said is that Friendster seems to be in trouble. She never mentions Ryze or Tribe.net, both of which seem to be hanging in there pretty well. As for her five "horsemen": 1) Nothing to do. I've always said that SNs make more sense if there's a targeted purpose, that the technology for identifying connections and relationships will find its way into a mix of tools to support business or organizational goals, rather than existing as an end in itself. That said, some of the SN sites do offer some set of community tools that some people are finding useful. There's a LOT of activity on Tribe, and there seems to be a lot on Orkut, too. And I'm constantly getting LinkedIn requests to help people connect, so it seems to be active and valuable to many of its users. 2) It takes too much time. I don't really get that one - it's not like you have to do anything on the sites, or use all the tools and functionalities they offer. The one SN site that takes a lot of my time is Flickr, but I love every minute of it, and I have friends who are active there though they never got into the other SNs. (This is an instance of the "targeted purpose" thing - showing and sharing photos). 3) Traffic alone isn't enough. Okay, but we knew that. Maybe Friendster thought traffic was going to be enough, but I think other sites are aware that's not the case. Ryze, for instance, has always offered premium services at $9.95 a month. I think Google gained quite a bit of intelligence from Orkut; I always assumed they were using it for load testing, and possibly to try out a few concepts. 4) Strangers suck. I always thought the point was to find your friends, and then possibly meet new friends through those connections. I think the real argument here is that the author didn't find value in networking tools she was using at some site (she doesn't really say which, though evidently most of her experience was at Orkut). But she seems to be speaking pretty subjectively... other people do use the tools, and they're finding more to do than "read profiles over and over." She also says " social networking sites pretty quickly and inevitably degenerate into cliques," - she doesn't cite evidence to support the contention, but I'm sure it's true, though I have an issue with the way she's framed it. Why doesn't she say "social networking sites pretty quickly and inevitably lead to group-forming behavior." That sounds less degenerate, no? 5) We already have the Internet. True enough, but the Internet has always been a network of networks, and the artificial social networks are just another way to leverage network structure and network thinking. It's a pervasive model, no? If you read some of the recent thinking on scale-free networks and complex systems, you find that networks are everywhere, it's inherent structure, in cells and molecules. We begin to consider that top-down social hierarchies may be anomalous, social networks were there first, we called them tribes. jon posted this at 6:21 PM |
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