Not the end of social networking!
In september I wrote a blog post titled “The end of social networking“. It was quoted on a few blogs and I got a lot of, euh, feedback from people who either slightly disagreed or fanatically agreed. Anyway, the title was slightly misleading because I didn’t exactly say that I thought that all Social Networks would end. What I said (or wanted to say) was that social networking just for the sake of social networking is not going to be interesting very long. The novelty will be gone pretty fast.
Unless…
Unless Social Networks improve and start adding interesting tools to their services. Then Social Networking will be a means to an end. Instead of just a fun thing to waste time on. I think most people agreed with that. Hyves is adding new services almost every month to make their service more interesting for their users.
So today I have another opinion about Social Networking that I want to share with you. Now that I have made clear that the era of Social Networking is not about to end I have some improvements I want to see implemented.
Here is one:
When I add a friend or a friend adds me we have to say how well we know each other. The choices could be “friends” or “Never met” or “Family” or something similar. This isn’t usefull at all. I know who my family is and don’t need a service to remind me of that.
What I would like to have is a plug-in for mail that shows me who the people are in my life that I am actually connected with. This could be usefull. The service would be able to tell me who I spend a lot of time talking to and who I have been talking to in the past but not a lot lately.
The service could say “You have been emailing with Karel a lot in August but not as much in Oktober. His birthday is in 3 weeks so you want to start emailing with him again.”
Another thing that Social Networks don’t seem to do is recommendations. I love Amazon Recommedations and regularly spend too much time browsing them. It would be nice if a Social Network could tell me that because if I like Karel and Daan I might also like Scott because they work in the same industry and you have been emailing the same people.
So this is not the end of social networking?
No, only as we know it today…
If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thank you for visiting and I am looking forward to hearing your comments!
Want to ask me a personal question? Contact me at boris@bomega.com
Subscribe to my Feed!
Post that are (could be!) related to this post:
The Next Web Conference and Social Networking?
... The end of social networking
... NRC interview
...
Yme Bosma said,
October 31, 2006 @ 2:50 pm (14:50)
Ik vraag me alleen af of het de social network diensten zelfs zijn die zaken als recommendations moeten gaan aanbieden. De reden waarom ik graag een Hyves API zou zien is juist omdat dan iedereen met een bestaande dienst gebruik kan maken van het feit dat Hyves weet met wie een specifieke gebruiker verbonden is. Dus wel ‘Powered by Hyves’ wat mij betreft, maar niet zozeer ‘Hyves Recommendations’ zeg maar… Er is zeker een grijs gebied, maar Hyves (en vergelijkbare diensten) moeten in dit opzicht meer een platform dan feature zijn.
Sjors said,
October 31, 2006 @ 3:09 pm (15:09)
What I would like to see, is a feature to “own” my contact list and to be able to take it with me to other places. I think it kinda sucks that on every social network I join, I have to start all over again with adding people that I know to my network. Why cant I just import my social network contact list from hyves on myspace and see who matches already. If one of my contacts joins later, he should simply get a reminder “Sjors was looking for you, ad him to your friendlist”.
Another example I want to share is this one: http://www.threadless.com/profile/15230/svirsk On the Threadless network all the extra things I can do on Hyves and Myspace are imported from services that do it better: Flickr and wordpress (and del.icio.us and last.fm(Upcomming would be a good extra one)). So the only core business of social networks should be: making it as easy as possible for me to manage my contact list. (And not save photos, allow blogging, save videos, share events etc.).
I do really like the idea of recommendation, cause it will also allow you to use/blame the system as an excuse to contact someone one business level, on friends level or on dating level. A dutch site who offers that allready is Paiq (still in beta) http://www.frankwatching.com/a....._Dating_20
October 31, 2006 @ 3:46 pm (15:46)
I agree that social networks lack function. Communication and objects(music, photo, clip) are the obvious route. I am not sure about recommendations. I think the users should recommend(like in LinkedIn since a couple of weeks). Object oriented recommendations are easy to implement if your social network is big enough.. Problem is that on Flickr I am all alone..no network so no recommendations… Otherside.. the social network sites don’t have the content( I mean the long tail variant)
Raimo
Joey said,
October 31, 2006 @ 5:13 pm (17:13)
You are right about recommendations. You would like to know on which basis you match with other people (given by your friends/colleagues) and even search on specific items.
But like you mentioned there is a shift coming in the social networking area, about implementing features that really add something to the whole networking-idea. What only can be done by the service on the internet.
I wanted to point you to Sossoon (www.sossoon.net), which is a business social networking tool, where you can view each others network, search the whole network and all based on tags and values you’d like to give those tags.
So it is not like a list (your recommendations) but more in a visual way it is being presented.
Mail is a nice idea, while you use it often, and maybe GMail will incorporate that in the near future? Or Live Mail? Just a thought.
Willem said,
October 31, 2006 @ 5:42 pm (17:42)
En wat is jullie mening over vertical social networks zoals http://www.spotajob.com ?
ben erg benieuwd naar de haalbaarheid en inzichten
Wouter said,
October 31, 2006 @ 7:22 pm (19:22)
Just read about the e-mail based social network Hoover’s Connect, it resembles your suggestion.