Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I'm with you on the social networking stuff. sheesh. Kids these days.

Also with you on the fate of e-newsletters. I've stopped cranking out my two electronic newsletters because it seems to make less sense these days. Plus, I got lazy.

And at not quite the complete other end of the spectrum...

OK, admittedly, I love online social networks. They work for me. They get me business, and not just the business of being an expert on online social networks.

But I think my main objection, David, is that you're ignoring the fact that real-world social networks are closed, too. In fact, closed networks are sometimes the most powerful ones.

Every single professional association, alumni association, networking organization, chamber of commerce, etc., is a closed network. The data's private. The only people who can get a mailing list with all the contact info of the people in the CoC are other CoC members.

So in that sense, SNS are a perfect parallel of what goes on in the real world.

What membership in an SNS does is say, "Hey world, I'm open to being contacted." Sometimes, it's not about contacting a specific person, it's about contacting a certain type of person, and you want to know who's receptive to being contacted. Presence in an SNS is a way of saying that.

I know that if I PM someone on Ryze, even someone very senior, I'm likely going to get a direct, personal response. On the other hand, if I e-mail a prominent entrepreneur and blogger blind through her website, I just get a polite brush-off response from her assistant.

Today, in fact, I connected with someone I've been wanting to connect with for months. I had tried three different routes via good old conventional email from people I know knew him. Finally, on Thursday, I put the request through Spoke. Today, Saturday, he answered.

I don't think it was a matter of receptivity on his part -- I think it was a matter of a trivial effort savings on the part of the intermediaries. That's the only rational explanation I can come up with.

Any way you cut it, they're working for me, and they're working for people I know. Could people have accomplished much the same thing with personal web pages, blogs, and e-mail? Yes, but they DIDN'T. People could have accomplished blogs with traditional web publishing, but for the most part they didn't.

The seemingly trivial efficiency improvements in mediating the communication makes SNS a more effective tool for initiating contact than other previous technologies. Do they work for everyone? No. Could they be better? Yes -- a lot. But I'm not about to discount their utiility, because I see it proved day after day.

- Scott -

Excellent point, Scott. But, keep in mind how ambivalent I am about these social networks. I don't mean to say that they're useless or evil; instead, I'm interested in why I have a negative reaction to them despite the fact that they work for lots of people. My explanation of why I have that reaction isn't a justification. (Although, as I say, I'm ambivalent.)

Ah, I'm glad this is here. The email I wrote you in response to your piece about social networks was my lame attempt to make a point. It was lame because I'm having trouble articulating the point, which works in my head but doesn't quite play through my fingers as I type.

I think the term "social network" is throwing you, and I don't think you're alone. In fact sites like Friendster and Tribe and Orkut are not social networks, they're social network *portals.* Though it's obvious that social networks are not technologies, I think the combination of social networks and network technology can throw even very smart people a conceptual curve, resulting in map/territory confusion.

When you look at the abstraction of a piece of your social life on any of these networks, and think "this is MY social network," that could be depressing unless you're an avid networker like Joi Ito or even yours truly and are accustomed to devoting some part of your life to the cultivaton of connections anyway. These sites can be a real killer app for people who do a lot of networking just because that's who they are. In my own case, figuring out how to build effective goal-oriented online social networks is a big part of my professional life and consulting practice, and the idea of portals that give visibility into my own and others' social networks is promising, but my experience readily tells me that the views I'm getting are inherently limited and, though useful, incomplete.

The way I see these sites is that each gives me a set of tools for identifying and working with actual social networks. One thing I do professionally is consult about online best practics and environments for collaboration and community, and I'm finding that the social network sites are useful and compelling aggregations of tools for group forming and (potentially) group work. So to me the best of these sites are an important part of the evolution of social software.

This is all way philosofikil. I did not realize that the "newsletter" was a seperate entity, but apparently, it causes a stir among blogosophers!

But if we allow social networks to exist, then won't that lead to gay and lesbian social networks, then networks for threesomes, and them to even more deviants like former newsletter writers?