Wed 17 Feb 2010
How Many Social Networking Sites are Too Many?
Posted by Heart of Lincoln Land under 80s, social networking, technology, thoughts, web 2.0
6 Comments
225 channels and nothing’s on?
Short answer: Two. We only need one standardized method per communication medium that does the job right – just like with face-to-face contact, phone, email, etc.
The long answer: Social networking is not a novel concept. It has existed since the dawn of humanity. Since then, we’ve had inventions – like the written word and letters, telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, and email. In the past decade, hundreds of “social networking” sites have appeared. Recently, I’ve been getting burned out using them, and that has got me thinking “why are there so many?” Part of the reason they’re referred to as a time sink by so many people is because there are too many. Google Buzz just added itself last week – do we really need another social network?
Those of us that grew up in the 80s know of a time when there was no Internet. If you wanted to talk to someone remotely, you got their phone number and called them. You didn’t have to have the same phone or the same phone company as them to talk to them, you just dialed their number. Think about that for a minute – isn’t that incredible? You didn’t have to have AT&T to talk to somebody on Sprint, you just dialed a number, and talked. The system didn’t care what network you used, or what model of phone you used. You could use one of those fancy office phones to call somebody using a simple touch tone phone, and it’d work just as well.
When the Internet became commonplace, everybody had email. Just like the phone, you simply typed the person’s email address and your message and hit “Send” – off it went. It didn’t matter if they used a different ISP or email program. I still remember how neat it was to see a message arrive in somebody’s inbox in a different part of the world, nearly instantly.
Now, we have the so-called Web 2.0 “social networking” websites. There’s over 200 of them! And on each one, you can pretty much only talk to other people on the same network. They all work in different ways, each serving as their own “walled garden” where you can only talk to other people in the same network. This leads to a lot of repetition of information.
What’s more, each of these social networking sites has their own rules and etiquette – for each site you have to remember what the rules are and how they work. Because you have to spend so much time on these sites to actually communicate, very little of that gets done – I often feel like social networking is just a bunch of people shouting at each other on a street corner, rather than a group of people having a discussion in a coffee shop. It can be hard to get a reply to what you’re saying, which just creates frustration and noise, and makes “social networking” feel more like “social notworking”. It makes me long for the “social networking” of the Web 1.0 era that worked perfectly well – like forums and bulletin boards and chat rooms. People actually listened on those (although I must admit I never really cared for chat rooms).
If only it was this simple…
It’s interesting how social networking has evolved in my lifetime. Over the years we’ve gone from:
1985: “What’s your phone number? I’ll call you”.
1998: “What’s your email? I’ll email you.”
2010: “Do you have a Facebook? Do you have a Twitter? Do you have a Flickr? Do you have a MySpace?”
How many ways do we need to contact someone? I really wish the open source community would get together and make a single social networking protocol. It could be accessed using an appropriate client, like how a web browser acts as an HTTP client for websites, or how an email program acts as an SMTP/POP3 client for sending/receiving email. The Internet would not be what it is today without these standards. Social networking now is like if Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but somebody else made another phone that worked differently, and another person made another one… you get the story. The phone would’ve never taken off as mode of communication if it wasn’t standardized. Imagine how the phone would work today, using the models the social networks use right now:
Twitter: You can only make a phone call that’s up to 1 minute long. If you want to reference someone, you might have to use an abbreviation for their name because speaking it would take too long. To call someone, you’d have to find out their phone number and add them to your followers list. The phone would have a “retweet” button that would allow you to share the call with a third party.
Facebook: This phone would allow you to send pictures as well as text. It would also come with little games you could play with other people if you called them, or if they called you. You could only call someone if you added them as a friend first in your phone. If you wanted to reach a business, you would have to go there first and tell the owner that you were a fan, and then you could add them as a contact in your phone. There would be no yellow pages, only a generic search for an exact business name, so unless you knew the name of the business you wouldn’t know they existed, let alone their location or what kind of business they are, unless one of your friends told you first. The phone would have “like” and “share” buttons instead of the # and * buttons.
Feel free to add your own analogy to the comments section!
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Interesting and I exceptionally agree with it!
Well, I just typed a long comment and it failed…it wouldn’t have been so dramatic over the phone…lol
Anyway, thanks for commenting on my thread. One thing that I think is interesting is that social networking beginnings are the opposite of Bell/AT&T. Whereas the bells had a monopoly on the market of communication. Social Neworking is everywhere and everyone has access to it, basically for free. I think eventually the stronger players will remain, pushing out the weaklings. Then we will have a monopoly in this market. Which will then lead to standards and then perhaps pay to play. I saw something this morning that Facebook will be going public next year…
I think with so many places to be seen it is causing a lot of stress. I also think that it is wasting a lot of people’s time and keeping them from their creative efforts. So, my point in writing my articles is to help people focus in on where they need to spend their time. I think there are a lot of people out there without the experience or formal education to understand business, marketing, or advertising. They spin their wheels a lot and get taken in by other’s making promises. Mostly because they don’t know how to measure performance. Thanks again!
Thanks for the interesting comment on my blog!
You are right, the phone system did start out as somewhat of a monopoly. I used it as an analogy to illustrate how a network needs to be based on a single standard that works the same way everywhere to gain mass adoption. However, not all networks became standardized as monopolies. The Internet became popular because HTTP became a standard, so that anybody could access any website using any web browser. Same with SMTP/POP3 and email. Those are all open standards, controlled by open standards bodies like the W3C, instead of companies. This is what the web was built upon.
Even in the 19th century, the railroads had to agree on how wide the tracks would be so that they could inter-operate with each other for their own mutual benefit. If one railroad deviated from the standard, they’d lose business.
Right now, the social networking sites are like if the railroads all used different trains that ran on different tracks and if you bought a ticket, you could only access destinations that that railroad served. You couldn’t transfer. If they didn’t serve your destination, you would be out of luck. You could say everybody has access to the stations, but that’s not the same as having access to the railroad. So I’d disagree that everyone has access to social networking, at least not in the sense that everyone has access to the Internet.
There needs to be a standard for social networking. It could come in the form of a nice open standard like HTTP, a “collaborative” standard like the railroads, or an oppressive monopoly like Mircrosoft or Google. I’d hate to see it go down that latter route – all that data being controlled by a single network like Facebook would not be a good thing. It would pose a significant threat to privacy, security, and freedom of speech, among other things. Already, Facebook’s CEO has said "the age of privacy is over", which is scary if you think about it.
You are right a standard would be good…like ISO. Thanks for the link to that article. Very eye opening and causes you to rethink if you really want to join, or remain a part of a site with that type of underlying motive. People are already mining all of this information and now our email accounts are being bombarded with even more junk mail. Makes one wonder how this invasion relates to the current law that you have to agree to receive someone’s email campaign before they start sending to you. Kind of like the fax number mining that goes on.
I’m not sure that I understand your analogy about the station and the tracks. Well I do understand, but not how it applies in this situation. What I see is that anyone with a computer and knowledge can join a site and begin using the social networking aspect. They may not like the interface, but they still have access and the ability to try and learn how to use. I would draw the analogy of airlines. Not all airlines go to all cities. They all have a different way of doing business…how they handle their customers. I may not even like airline XYZ, but if I want to visit a city that they only service, then I have to use their service, or take a different transportation method.
Don’t you think that sites like Etsy, artfire, 1000markets are in the same boat as Social Networking…once again there is no standard?
I used the railroad analogy to illustrate how access to social networks is different than access to the Internet, and more importantly how the social networks are “walled gardens” – that is, they aren’t interconnected, they’re closed spaces where you can only talk to other people in the same network. It’d be like if one railroad decided their tracks should be 6 feet wide, and another 3 feet, and so on, and if you bought a ticket you couldn’t transfer to another railroad (the railroad would prohibit this). If I had a friend in Peoria and they only had MySpace and Twitter stations, and Springfield only had Facebook and Flickr stations, I couldn’t get there to see him unless I used another travel method.
While you are correct that anybody can join a social networking site (at least with some sites), anybody can access any site on the Internet just by typing in the URL – no membership required. So, social networking access isn’t the same as Internet access, because you have to be a member.
It would be different if an open standard for social networking (similar to HTTP) was developed, and you could access the network using a social networking client program. All you’d need to know is the name of the person or entity you’re trying to reach, and you could reach them through the program. There could be different social networking clients just like there’s different web browsers, and there could even be different “sites” with different features – they’d just have to interoperate with each other, using the social networking standard, so anybody could access anybody anywhere on the network.
I don’t see sites like Etsy, Artfire, and 1000 Markets the same way. They’re basically like online shopping malls – they differentiate each other through features, layout, structure, types of shops, etc. You wouldn’t want to standardize shopping malls, since having different malls with different stores and layouts benefits the consumer. If I don’t like one I can go to another one. But social networking sites are a communication medium. Just like the telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, and email, they’re supposed to facilitate more efficient communication between people. The problem is, the current social networking landscape is anything but efficient or easy, because there’s too many sites, none of them work with each other, and they all work differently (not to mention you have to be a member of each one).
I highly agree, whats the point in copy cat programmers creating another communication channel with the same idea just different peripherals? eventually, we’re going to clog up the WWW.
i think web feeds are soliving the problem, like spiders pull the information from one site to gather it up into one area – where it can be seen, but, it’s still in principle, pointless having different people using so many different sites.
its like resubmitting forms every time you join a new site, why not one (or two max) permanent ‘profile’ data files, like, ONE or TWO of them, and that sits on your computer and sends itself to forms like a key, so your data ‘web feeds’ to the site automatically.
we’ve got the technology ut we’re clogging up the net with same old ideas…creativity is great but copying formulaes is not..