Hilarious – from Scoble the other day:
Its interesting, I see many of the same people in my friends list on Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, and now Pownce. Pownce is growing faster than the other ones right now, though. 728 people have already added me on Pownce.
I can’t take many more social networks. These are worse than email and that’s just the “are you a friend?” requests.
Avi Flax said:
Hilarious? More like tragic. This reminds me of the debacle of the IM networks, x10. Seriously, the current generation of web apps is supposed to be so brilliant, but true collaboration, and an open trust-reputation-mediation platform, are egregiously missing and sorely needed. OpenID is a step in the right direction, but a baby step, at a time when big, courageous, ambitious, audacious leaps are truly needed.
Tim said:
Who said we’ve reached a point where all new things are supposed to be brilliant? As long as humans are still making this stuff, the vast majority of things will remain flawed.
I just find the notion of the same group of people connected via disparate social networks funny… hey look at me over here in Pownce, nope, now check me out over here Tweeting, catch me if you can over here on Facebook!
Joel Potischman said:
I still don’t get the whole social networking thing. How can you possibly capture 1/100th of the subtlety of real human relationships? I have a bunch of friends in real life, but I don’t know how many Friends I would put on some putative “FriendsInTheRealWorld.com” friends list (henceforth, friend=person I like, Friend=person on a list called “My Friends”). None of my friends in meatspace have ever asked me to be their Friend. I’ve never tried to make a list of Friends from my list of friends, let alone publish that list so everyone can see who’s on and who’s off. I have people I’m friendly with that I don’t especially want to stay in touch with on a regular basis.
As soon as you computerize your friends into Friends, or rather, as soon as you publish your list of friends, you’re in or you’re out. Either we’re great great Friends, or we’re not Friends at all. You have to invite all your friends to all your Friend lists to stay friends! And with every new site you have to do it again!
I guarantee I could put up a site today that does absolutely nothing but display my list of Friends (other registered users of the site, of course), and I’d have in excess of 10,000 people signed up in a week. The site serves no purpose, and the users get no value, but once you get a handful of people on it, they have no choice under this perverse artificial socialization context but to invite all their friends to join, and those friends have no choice but to accept and perpetuate the stupidity. After all, what kind of jerk doesn’t invite their friends to be listed on their page? And what kind of jerk doesn’t accept? It’s friendship blackmail (or is it Friendship? I can’t even keep track myself anymore).
I think all these things will eventually collapse. We maintain human friendships with the most powerful and complex brains on the planet. Trying to maintain real friendships through these sites is like trying to perform microsurgery with two Duraflame logs. Yeah, it would be helpful to have some shared identity platform so you didn’t have to start on each site from scratch, and the fact that each site is totally independent means that it’s like trying to keep all your secret lives straight.
Even if someone solved those problems, us old folks (30+) have better things to do with our lives than visit 13 sites every day to maintain our Friendships. Structurally, social networking sites have the same customer retention problems as tobacco, except 50 years sooner. Maybe if people tried to smoke 13 brands of cigarettes a day tobacco would close that gap!
Avi Flax said:
Joel, I feel the exact same way, and I’m only 29. Then again I am a curmudgeon.
Avi Flax said:
Tim said:
Agreed. In fact, that’s kinda the point I was trying to make, in a roundabout fashion: that there’s a lot of hype out there right now, and it’s dumb.
Yeah, definitely amusing!
Avi Flax said:
Insightful and relevant post about Twitter and Pownce and what really needs to happen: Interop of Twitter and Pownce.
Avi Flax said:
OK, what’s up with this blog mangling my comments? And why don’t we have a “Preview” button? And why is my email address displayed to the public? And why can’t the blog save a cookie with my Name and stuff so I don’t have to type it in every time?
Whew… ok, better now.
The link I was trying to post: http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2007/07/interop-of-twitter-and-pownce
Avi Flax said:
Google seems to be thinking about the need for an open Social Platform too: Socialstream.