We're all familiar with social networking; it's been around in popular form since 2002 or so with Friendster. Myspace came along in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. Since then, hundreds of networks have cropped up, all trying to fulfill some sort of self-proclaimed social need. How social are these websites, and what do they add to the quality of communication over the Internet as a whole? "Social" networking has many issues with it. I'll try to cover the most important and/or grating issues. The first is competition. Many networks publicly display how many views your profile has received and how many "friends" you have. This publicly available information doesn't mean much to some people, but among the less mature and/or intelligent, it gives them a vector for competition. By assessing profile views and the number of "friends" you have, you can estimate how popular you are. At least, in their eyes... So what's relevant about this nitpick? Well, it affects the way people behave. Many users will add others to their friend list merely to pad their friend count. It increases people's desire to friend them (because most users assume a high number of friends is equal to popularity, and being friends with popular people is surely awesome... right?) This results in many people being added as friends but no real communication happening. Where's the "social" in this equation? The truth is that most people cannot maintain meaningful friendships with more than 10-20 people. From there lie about 10 more semi-friends, and the rest range from "complete stranger" to "acquaintance". Given this information, why should anyone have more than 50-60 friends? Even that number is semi-unrealistic. So, what can people do about this? Users generally act upon what information is available. If existing social networks got rid of the ability to publicly display friend counts and profile views, then the competition (in this field, anyway) would be diffused. The problem with this is that when you introduce a feature to millions of users and then take it away, you cause a LOT of anger and confusion. The networks shouldn't have had the feature in the first place because it's not relevant. Moving on, the next issue is privacy. There are many facets to privacy. Thankfully some users have expressed interest in keeping their privacy, and the networks have responded by adding privacy features. This is good since it allows the freaky college student to hide his drunken party pictures. But more importantly, these features could also be seen as a user's excuse to supply the networks with more information, since they believe they are protected by the features. The core problem here is the lack of discretion people use in publishing information on the networks. If they don't want the information to be seen or accessed, perhaps they shouldn't publish it! Another concern is the persistence of the data. Most, if not all networks keep concurrent backups of their data; this data sticks around for varying amounts of time, even after your account has been "deleted"! Some of the networks; Myspace and Facebook in particular, use this information to provide target advertising to users. Basically, they sell the information to marketers in order to make money. The networks justify this activity by pointing to their Terms of Service. In practice, however, no user actually reads the lengthy, legalese outline of terms. What needs to happen in that regard is full disclosure of a network's practices, in concise, human-readable language. This will make the relationship between user and network more clear, and users will be better educated on the nature of the network, so they can use proper discretion over their information. Once it hits the network, the user has little control over the information's access. Another concern regarding privacy is the way that professionals use this information. Law enforcement regularly sifts through profiles of people they may suspect to be doing things, and employers will judge applicants according to their social networking profiles. The former is acceptable with a warrant, but the latter has no place at all. What a person does outside of the workplace is not the employer's business; they have no right to know anything outside of the applicant's merit and abilities in the workplace. This falls back to user discretion and their knowledge of privacy tools; a smart user can alter their profile to make it so employers cannot judge them on irrelevant criteria. So the solution to the privacy problem is for networks to remove all user data when a user has their account closed. Permanently. They should also not maintain more than a week's worth of backups. This ensures that user data is not held onto for too long. Users can publish less information and restrict access to their profiles so employers cannot access them. The problem of selling personal information to advertisers is still there, though. I can't think of a practical way to fix it; they have to make money somehow; perhaps ads can be targeted to less personal information, such as an IP address. It would still give them somewhat relevant ads (since IPs are distributed according to location) and still put money in the network's pockets without sacrificing user privacy. Next up is the crux of this whole argument; between the frivolous adding of people and ease of finding out what your "friends" are doing without actually talking to them, the quality of interpersonal communication is not improving with these networks, but instead devolving. Twitter champions this de-evolution by limiting input to 140 characters. On one hand, it encourages users to say what they have to say quickly and get it over with. On the other, it encourages unwarranted self-importance and a lower signal-to-noise ratio. On Twitter, you cannot have a meaningful discussion, debate, or conversation. 140 characters isn't sufficient for everything. Thankfully, other networks have better means, such as private messaging and bulletins. Have you noticed anything fishy yet? Private messages and "bulletins" are nothing more than a centralized e-mail system and message board system, respectively! This technology has existed for decades and is still in use by millions of people across the globe. Why, then, do social networks get so much use when they're not introducing anything new or innovative? The only reason I can think of is convenience, which the mainstream will always be in favor of. So what can you do if you're sick of social networks but want to keep in touch with your friends? Forums, e-mail, IRC, and instant messaging networks have existed for many years and are still effective and commonly used methods of communication. They each have their quirks and limitations, but you're guaranteed to find at least one method to be good enough. But what if you actually used all the features of a social network in the intended way? Is there a modern replacement for the social network? Sort of... it comes in the form of Google Wave. In its current form, however, only Google has a "service provider" server, and given Google's not-so-great privacy practices, I don't recommend using it. However, they are working on an open-source server package that will allow people to setup their own servers and communicate with people on different servers. This is effectively the same way e-mail works. If Wave catches on, you will be able to choose your Wave provider (much like you choose your e-mail provider) and talk to people through that. Wave seeks to replace all existing communication mediums, by combining them. But it also has limitations. So.. in a nutshell, social networks are actually less social than the pre-existing communication mediums since they encourage stalking and the large amount of visible information turns people into nothing more than the labels they use to describe themselves. It also forms social competition, which is not beneficial in any capacity. In the end, it comes down to how you use a social medium, so social networks can be used to a good extent, but their features and limitations make them a poor choice compared to e-mail, IM, IRC, mailing lists, and message boards. So what are your thoughts after reading this wall of text?
I agree with you...Social networking sites are too overrated and sincerely I think they are stupid...You just stalk people basically, because they post their info in they'reprofile and such...And yes I've experienced various people that just add you as a ''friend'' on Facebook or such, just to increase their friend count. You do not gain popularity by having some online friends frankly. Some do but it's most unlikely to happen. Thus said I am ashamed of owning a facebook account :\ ..I use it mostly to advertise my site that's all.... PS: sorry if I misspelled some words
social networks are a great way to get in touch with people you havent seen for years, for example, i got in touch with my best friend from primary school 20 years ago who now lives 200 mile away. Theres always friends online so its hard to get bored, its free to chat so no huge text bills on your mobile. Theres groups, business pages, fan pages etc and you can play poker with your friends for free. I dont see any downside if you use them properly, turn on your privacy for photos and such. people who post their address/pics/phone number and make it public are just fucking stupid.
Well its good opportunity to to see what kind of people live all around the world we can learn a lot but the use of it should be limited not like a crazy book geek who is attached to books all the time...there is so much in life plus our social lives are that we live offline not online...so basically there is no social networking but i wont deny its importance i have found few good friends overseas
I use my facebook as a messenger and to see my friend's plans to see when I can hang out with them, since they live hours away from me, it's extremely useful, versus calling them up or any other method. MSN messenger gives me so many problem with my internet connection, so the best option I have for IMing is facebook. Besides that I have my family and my close friends, any people I barely knew in high school, I don't add, if they ask why, I just say "I don't know you". People rely on it too much. That being said, giving out your facebook online takes away the whole point of facebook in my opinion.
OT: Have you tried using pidgin? I pretty much only use facebook to keep in contact with friends, I don't even have a real picture of me for my profile pic! It's handy for keeping in contact with acquaintances. I feel it has too many extra unnecessary features which get in the way of the social aspect of it, I prefer the more streamlined approach of Google Wave.
I hereby claim this post in the name of a proper reply to write up when I'm not busy. Here's hoping six posts isn't too far down for people to read, lazy buggers.
I've used Pidgin, same result. I find that people are more often on Facebook versus MSN, and that there are a lot more people without a Windows Messenger application than people with a Facebook. Facebook is a lot more convenient in that aspect for me. All the distractions in Facebook, like the games, the dumb groups, people who update their status every 5 minutes detract from it's more necessary features, like the chat and the event thing. Along with a silly market place and generally useless apps. Good god. Every time I hear about Wave, the more confused I get about it. I still have no idea what it is really. I'll have to wait for it's release.
Yesterday a girl showing her ass in the profile pic asked to add her to friends ..that's not being social. That's being a whore for friends
Privacy-people need to learn to not put every single bit of info in their profiles (some people I know use fake names just incase ) as well as setting it to private-you can't see one's home adress/phone number if on private. How social are they-some people like having numbers and thus pad...but in some cases they are just people they "knew" on their list... I only have 75 approx friends on facebook, I only have 5 friends, rest are family i never see, people I once went to school and felt pity...and only a few random adds because I found them funny... But I seen (and experienced sadly) wars on facebook, from helping a friend destroy a common foe to myself becoming the so-called evil one (If people can't stand who I am and turn on me-wtf would I do-I was tempted to learn to hack email adresses and shut their facebook down until I got talked out of it). Learn to block dicks instead of leaving them to insult you, don't leave them to have fun because at some point they will get you, especially people you once cared about who suddenly say "YOUR A F***ING RETARD" despite knowing your background...and knowing how painful it is to hear such a phrase... And while facebook/myspace games can be fun, the chat is NOT nessacary unless they lack mns-come on people nearly everyone has a proper dedicated IM chat client now don't they now? I only use facebook now to keep in contact with family, myspace I'm planning to kill (it was made when I was in a depressed state...one of my aunties overseas saw it and verbally attacked my mother...god that was made 3 years ago when she saw it!) and windows live is just a shell.
