What’s The Point Of Social Networks?
It's a common question - what's the point of social networks? The most common answer is basically none. Most social networks provide yet another way to get in touch and keep in touch with people which is great but lets face it, there are about a billion different ways to communicate and leaving messages on someone's wall only looks good compared to sending smoke signals. Some people might argue that it lets you map out and visualize your social network but seriously I know who my friends are, why don't you? The address book has been around a long time and it still works seriously well.
I think the best way to highlight how seriously useless plain social networks are is to look at the 10 Best Facebook Applications For Business Professionals:
- Conference Calls
- Voicemail
- Asking Questions
- Posting Video Messages
- Introductions
- Business Cards
- Phonebook
- Recommendations
- Defining other people with a tag cloud
- Business directory
Anyone see anything new in there? Anything remotely likely to change the face of business? Nope. Gimmicks galore and sure you can make yourself look all hip and web 2.0. Yes it's very important to reach out, connect with your clients and be part of the discussion but social networks aren't suddenly making it possible to do that, they add the burden of yet another way you have to do it and most of them put up all kinds of walls to make it difficult to do so.
Now that's not to say that the idea of social software is bad - just the idea of social software with no point. What if instead of just building up communities for the heck of it, we built up communities to achieve a common goal or a series of goals? In other words, what if there was a point to it all? That's what LiveMocha is doing by building a social network of people who want to learn a foreign language. Dan Kaplan put me onto LiveMocha and he nails the key cognitive change between what we'll look back on as the hype of social networking and what actually stands the test of time:
The key is that, unlike so many of the wannabes in the social network game, LiveMocha’s social network is not the central focus of the site but simply a feature.
Social networks are not the point, social networks are the tool and it's about time we started realizing that and start putting it to work. There are two ways for this to unfold, either we'll start seeing really useful Facebook applications being built - I imagine it would have been possible for LiveMocha to be done as a Facebook application, or the explosion of different social networks will expand to the point where users simply demand openness and the ability to move their social network around.
Either way the time is coming where the social network will be a feature and a tool, not the entire system. Frankly, I can't wait.
September 26th, 2007 at 6:36 am
G’day AJ.
I’ve been musing on the same thing myself. I don’t think Facebook in the work environment is anything but a waste of time. However, for recreational use - I have discovered a few favourite apps that are useful in their own right, and are not a new concept (i.e. just like some other existing non-FB app out there), but benefit from social network integration.
My two top ones have an alcohol theme :)
1. “Wine” - keep a list of bottles you’ve got lying around, and record your tasting notes once done (e.g. that sucked, don’t buy it again). The social network aspect kicks in by seeing what other people are buying/drinking etc, and it’s done in a non-intrusive/non-super-viral way (thank goodness; if I wasn’t unhappy with the colourful language in the group name, I’d join the Facebook group called “f** off, I don’t want to be a pirate/ninja/werewolf/zombie/jedi/etc”).
2. “Cocktails” - There’s a zillion cocktail DB apps on the web, and some have comment boards and user-generated content. The FB app allows you to tell it what ingredients you already own, and it tells you what it’s possible to make, and keep track of what you’ve already tried.
September 26th, 2007 at 6:39 am
I forgot to mention the network benefit to “Cocktails” - it has an iTunes-like “people who liked this drink also liked these other drinks”, and keeps a “most popular drinks” sidebar so you can try something new that’s got a higher probability of not being a lemon.
September 26th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Hey David,
I agree, there is a lot of potential for great FaceBook apps to leverage the social network it’s built and give it a point, at the moment though most people are busy building stupid gimmicks instead of useful applications. The other major problem with FaceBook apps at the moment is that to do anything with them you have to add them and let them have all your data - not sure if this is because app developers are stupid and are trying to artificially inflate their user count, or if there’s something about the FaceBook platform that requires this. Either way, it’s a major barrier to making the network actually be useful.
I’ll be very interested to see if FaceBook winds up being the platform for useful applications, or if people we valid business ideas want to build their own social network instead of ceding control to FaceBook. My bet is on having a proliferation of social networks. I’m still not sure if we’ll be happy with multiple incompatible networks (it’s fairly normal to have different networks for different purposes) or if the push for open sharing of social network data between systems will become strong enough to actually make it happen.
September 26th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Yeah, I’ve been meaning to play with Ning (http://www.ning.com/) for a while.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:35 am
Hi AJ:
Great discussion. After years of playing with Myspace and Facebook, I really hope we don’t end up with the proliferation of social networks, but since at least for the time being it seems like you are right , we will. Then the question for me remains what do we really need? Even with many kudos to LiveMocha for such a wonderful experience and fantastic social language network website (our company, http://www.interlangua.com has also been working with online educated tutors in their native countries to USA desktops, since 2005)in the end it seems we need to link people in to be more creative. Our apps tend to get ahead of us too fast and box us into narrow, often binary paths because that is the root of our computer mediated lives.
Most of my social network sites take a lot of my time, AND they make it too easy to just take pre-conceived ideas (e.g. Tinkerbell wallpapers) and re-use them instead of being really unique, which I find is a huge need across all cultures.