Cory Doctorow “makes a couple of good points.”:http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=204203573
1) “[Social networks] make it easy for you to be found by the people you’re looking to avoid.”
2) The big social networks – Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, et al – make it difficult or awkward to *end* relationships.
It’s true, and as a consequence, people tend to eventually “reboot” and switch over to the newest player. However, there’s no reason to think that all social networks will have this failing. It’s common to Facebook, Myspace, _et al_, but only because they intentionally turn socializing into a *game*. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with having fun… but if you’re looking for practical, professional, productivity, Doctorow is right — the system starts to break down when you eventually decide to use your networking energies more efficiently.
This is exactly why “Lightstalkers”:http://www.lightstalkers.org has never used any kind of “approval” process in its social networking tools. When you add a person to your network, it’s one-way; you don’t automatically show up in theirs, and they don’t have to be notified of anything. On a practical level, this makes it possible to continually prune and redefine your network however you want, with no social awkwardness. It also means that being popular doesn’t become a problem for you; some of our members have been “added” by thousands of others, and it doesn’t slow them down one bit.
Here’s the fundamental error: the major players (Facebook, et al) treat human relationships symmetrically. Betty accepts Veronica’s “add”, and that’s considered a relationship. But life doesn’t work that way, does it? Relationships are almost never symmetrical. (Sometimes you can even “know” a person who doesn’t know you at all — that’s an extreme relationship called fame.)
A social network that proposes to authentically reflect human life should reflect this, and allow its members to define their relationships loosely and subjectively. Most importantly, it *must* be easy to evolve, as real relationships do.
So, yeah: There is not, and never will be, One True Site. It didn’t turn out to be Friendster, or Myspace, and it won’t be Facebook. Expect to eventually ditch your Facebook account for something more interesting, more specialized, more useful to you personally.
I’m watching OpenSocial closely. Right now, it’s highly politicized because of the advertising cold war between Google, News Corp, and Facebook, of course; long-term, however, some federated, standardized platform for social networking is the right way to go, because that is what will ultimately give us, human beings, the ability to move freely from one site/community/network to another.
