(The only reason I actually ended up submitting this post was because I spent all day going back to it in between doing other things. I feel like the effort shouldn’t be for nothing.)
Honestly, I’m really not into the social networking thing. It’s really just annoying to me. I see it as just kind of pretending to network and keep in touch with people, but not actually keeping a real connection with most people.
I remember when Friendster was THE site for social networking–actually, I used to go to Makeoutclub every now and again before that, but we’ll keep this limited to sites that I actually signed up for. A lot of my friends were on it and it seemed to be very popular, but still mostly within a niche group, say the “indie” kids. It was alright, but the site was a bit slow.
Then MySpace came along and there was a pretty big movement over to that, but the site was and still is horribly designed. I find it just plain annoying to use. It’s slow and I often get server errors from it. It’s very sloppily designed and makes me think about the kind of website that a middle schooler might make in 1999. There is tons of spam and I get super annoyed when I go to a page and music starts playing automatically. You people need to realize that if I’m on my computer, I’m probably listening to music already. I don’t want it polluted with some band that you think is awesome, but in reality kind of blows! And who thought it would be a good idea to allow users to use HTML on their sites to make them completely unreadable? I joined anyway though and quickly stopped using Friendster since most of my friends had also made the “transition” leaving Friendster to become a virtual ghost town.
Not too long after that came Facebook. But this time, there wasn’t really a transition. Everyone kind of make an account on Facebook and kept their MySpace ones as well, choosing to live a life of social duality. I guess this works for some people, but I find it less than appealing (more on this later). Facebook actually has a decently designed site. It’s pretty fast and takes huge advantage of AJAX technologies so that you’re not just futzing around with static pages, but you get something that works more dynamically like a desktop program. This is the way that something like this should work (AJAX isn’t for every site though). Then they added the application support which was a nice way to make things more dynamic and spice it up a bit. Developers have been making add-ons to add just about everything to Facebook profiles.
There are also a few other more specialized ones that I signed up for as well. LinkedIn which is a career oriented site that centers around making professional connections. Last.fm which is music oriented. And Shelfari which is a book related one that I have actually gotten a bit out of on a more intellectual level. There is also Orkut (Google’s attempt) and some other book site that I don’t even remember the name of that I haven’t visited since signing up. And that’s not too mention the social aspects of blogging sites, social bookmarking sites, photo sites, and youtube.
So why am I even posting about this? Well, just this morning a friend commented about how I’ve been updating my MySpace and Facebook accounts. Nothing major, just changing my picture really. The reason why isn’t really important here. What is important is that every time that I go to any of these sites I’m reminded about what my biggest gripes with social networking are.
The first one I kind of mentioned earlier. I really don’t feel that most people actually form real connections. That’s not to say that it never happens. I’m sure that it does happen thousands and thousands of times a day (let’s remember that social networking users are measured in tens of millions). My personal experience and what I seem to notice with others is that it just adds another form of communication–on top of email, phone, text, IM–to talk to people that you already talk to or see in person. It doesn’t really keep you in contact with people that you don’t otherwise talk to much. At least nothing more than the obligatory “hey, how have you been?” message once every few months that leads to nothing more than a handful of polite replies. Do people really foster new friendships and maintain old ones because of social networking sites? I mean yeah, it’s one place to go for a lot of this and if you use it as a primary way to talk to friends, that’s cool, but if social networking sites didn’t exist would people stop talking? Do you really read every bulletin you get on MySpace? I don’t log in that often, but when I do it just seems that there is an insane amount of them and they all just get buried by people who are way too bulletin happy. In the end I don’t even see the ones that I would actually care about.
Yes, I know! It’s supposed to be fun! But that brings me to my next gripe, there are so many different sites and profiles to keep up with! It’s too much. I’m sure that I could just use Facebook and be fine, but Last.fm and Shalfari have some content that’s not on Facebook and bands put up so much stuff on MySpace (why can’t they just put everything on their website too and have RSS?). You really need to have an account for all of these sites. And while I don’t need to actually update my profile on any of these sites, I feel like I should because people are always finding me on there and I’d like to at least keep my information current. For example, my girlfriend signed up for Facebook and we linked our accounts, but then I felt like I needed to at least put up a recent picture where I don’t look like I’m still a stupid college kid and update some of my info for when her friends click the link over to my page. After all, I don’t want them saying “eek! What does she see in that guy?” I mean, they probably will say that anyway, but why add fuel to the fire!?!
So keeping all of these profiles up-to-date on top of doing my blogs is just too much! I’d like to have one universal profile that I can blog on, put pictures on, make a profile on with information about myself that I want to make public, and connect and communicate with friends. Then you could go to other specialized sites and log in with this single profile to change stuff or add stuff related to the content that that site offers, but when you viewed a friend’s profile, it would pull stuff from every site into one page. You would just have to connect to each person once and only have to view one profile to get everything. Your profile could be hosted by whichever site you choose, but all of the content would be standard and you could add what you want. So much easier!
It’d be kind of like the idea OpenID only insanely expanded and with a profile to connect it all to.
Granted this sounds like a pretty big task that would require one central group to link it all, but all of the special content could still be served up by individual sites based on one standard and a link back to one universal ID. And when you add a friend, you can select which sites’ content they can see in your profile so that you can keep things private.
This seems like a real network to me! I sign into one site and I see everyone I know and I can see all of their content that they want me to see. If I want professional connections, I only allow them to view information from sites like LinkedIn and hide the stuff that’s for my friends only. If I want to see what books my friends are reading, I can check that too by pulling information from my friends that have shared content from Shelfari. Same thing with pictures, blog postings, etc. I think you get the point.
Am I making way too big of a deal about something small and silly? Yes! But this is what happens when you’re bored at a job that you are leaving in just over a week.
