3 Problems with Social Networks
November 2nd, 2007 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 7 Comments
Here at WWD, we’re bullish on social networks. It would be hard to be otherwise; we use everything from Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn on a daily basis. And it’s clear that the current web boom will continue to be fueled by social networks for some time to come; the Google-backed OpenSocial is just the latest evidence of continued interest.
But all is not strawberries and cream on the social network front. Spend enough time in this arena and you’ll inevitably find a few unscratched itches and intractable problems. Here are three areas that we think are showing the limits of social networks as we know them today.
Identity Management - There are a couple of issues here. It’s growing increasingly tiresome to set up new accounts for every new social network that comes along. And now that OpenSocial promises to link together the various social networks through common widgets, reconciling identities (is Paul Q. Spooner the same person as Paul Quincy Spooner?) is going to become a thorny problem as well. In theory OpenID was going to solve these issues for us, but in practice, it doesn’t seem to be getting used very much.
Diminishing Returns - The more services there are, the harder it is to get value out of each one. Some of this is because communities get fragmented among multiple social networks (do you need to maintain ten accounts on ten different services to find all your friends?), some of this is because we have limited time and screen real estate and attention. Most people seem to pick just one or a few social networks to call home, which limits their number of available contacts. Solutions? Watch for some sort of OpenSocial-based federation, combined with a market shakeout that eliminates some less-popular services entirely.
Too Many “Friends” – If ten friends are good, are a hundred better? A thousand? Five thousand? A very few people who blog for a living may be able to interact with huge networks, but most of us quickly discover that our ability to find interesting people exceeds our ability to relate to them in any meaningful way. Increasingly, people are being forced to maintain separate private identities for their real friends, declare social network bankruptcy, or otherwise pull back from contact lists that threaten to overwhelm them.
Have you found your own dark side of social networks? What issues are causing you pain in this new web 2.0 world?
7 Comments Post your own comment
Anthony Russo says: November 2nd, 2007 3:01pm
Here’s one. I need a universal AFK tool. If I get up from my computer for lunch or something, I have to let my Skype, Bitwine, Tangler, LivePerson or whatever other little thing that is showing me “Online/Available” that I am not there for a while. I need an app or widget or something that can set all those notifiers and status symbols to AFK for me, and then back to normal when I return.
Anthony
Jamie says: November 2nd, 2007 3:19pm
Your criticisms of social networking certainly apply to short-sighted attempts at social networking, such as MySpace. But, you are missing why Facebook became the highest quality social networking site. Unlike MySpace and most other social networks, Facebook began as an umbrella of smaller social networks formed in the real world: college campuses. Membership in a campus network requires that a member is actually a student of that university. This exclusivity set it apart from other networks because it created an “in-crowd” of individuals who were already friends or acquaintances in real life. Facebook has been very valuable for me in keeping up with friends I have in real life and those I have met from other universities during internships, etc. It’s allowed me to keep up with professional contacts, addresses, email changes, birthdays, and general “this is what’s happening in my life” information. For me, Facebook has done exactly what I need it to do. The same cannot be said for MySpace.
Aswath says: November 4th, 2007 10:58am
Some of your readers may be interested in a web application called EnThinnai (www.enthinnai.com) that we recently introduced for public alpha testing. EnThinnai addresses all the three points: it uses OpenID exclusively for authentication; it allows for any number of friends, but you decide what information you share with which friend(s) and finally the design allows for (the deployed version does not) each user to run an instance in their own server, but collectively will be able to realize the services of social networks.
Los usuarios encuentran posibles problemas en las redes sociales - elWebmaster.com says: November 5th, 2007 7:25am
[...] Fuente: Webworkerdaily [...]
WWD Coffee Break « Web Worker Daily says: November 5th, 2007 8:44am
[...] Says OpenID is Useless? – I was just complaining that social networks aren’t leveraging OpenID, and along comes EnThinnai to prove me wrong. [...]
dylan says: November 23rd, 2007 4:40pm
I just wanted to point to the work that Barnraiser.org has been doing. One of their projects AMPi is free software that provides you with your own OpenID account and a completely customizable website around that identity. Anyone with an OpenID can log in or be made a part of your “friends” network. It seems to be a great start on the road to the decentralized social networking.
links for 2007-12-27 | Ed Tech Hacks says: December 27th, 2007 3:36pm
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