Social software concerns
I don’t know what to make of Facebook. Honestly. I’ve never used MySpace and doubt I ever will. I started using LinkedIn, but found it of limited appeal because I couldn’t do anything much with it. Then I joined Facebook and used it like a madman for two or three weeks. Now I find I’m lucky if I look at it a couple times a week. And on and on this pattern goes. Trying and sticking with one tool consumes more time than I have and it’s often a hassle trying a new one.
As an agent for change, I see real potential in online community. However, when it comes to casual or fun tools, with every new social software tool, I’m forced to invite a list of users and then go virtually doing things together. I’m afraid after full days in the online world I tend to spend my spare time taking care of my body through real-world pursuits.
Perhaps trying and using new social software tools would be less of a pain if open authentication really took hold. For example, using the OpenID concept, having one central ID and contact list would mean that you could sign into any one of these applications and invite friends without ever having to import or transfer anything between platforms. If using Flickr, last.fm, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and/or any other of a myriad tools meant you could simply sign up and login without creating a new account, I’m sure I’d try and use a lot more software.
Extend this concept to an open API across the social software world and, well …. OK, I’m dreaming in technicolour. Enough of that, because, along with many other things that would probably cripple revenue opportunities the individual vendors.
Webreakstuff got it right, methinks, when they mused about the value of OpenID and microformats to help open up social networks from this perspective:
I want networks to ask me, right off the bat when signing up, if I already have a profile that can be imported in (through hCard+XFN). I type in the URL for my OpenID and the network gets my information (gets OpenID page, downloads hCard formatted information, builds my user information based on that). Then it can grab my list of friends from XFN formatted data. With one textfield (the URL for either my OpenID or a profile on a different network), it would pre-populate both my information and the information for friends I want to add. Sweet.
Beyond the hassle of using Facebook enough to leverage its value, I’ve always had questions about its security and whether it exposed too much. I’ve heard stories about identity theft through a little solid Facebook-ing coupled with a little Google research. The fact that joining groups may expose you to far more openness than you’d like AND that profiles become littered with moronic applications and the lustre begins to wear off a bit.
Like anything new which presents some level of opportunity to be exploited, the hype abounds for Facebook. Applications for the API roll out left, right and centre, but I’m pretty sure almost no one is making real money off them yet.
Newspapers and mock newscasts are making sure they don’t get left behind either. However, if Facebook had not been hyped mercilessly over the past year, do you think the New York Times would bother with it? I don’t.
While I agree that corporations tend to ignore things to which they should pay more attention, I think Stowe Boyd misses the point about productivity. Corporations are notoriously late adopters, and I would lean toward most use of Facebook in the office environment as a waste of time. The nature of the Facebook environment means that doing one thing, leads to another, which leads to another. Updating your status can quickly become a game of scrabble or multiple posts to friends’ walls.
There’s a much stronger argument for using instant messaging, wikis, and employee forums as internal productivity tools and leveraging tools like blogs, forums, and feeds for external marketing communications. I guess that’s the point that I’ve been coming to in this piece. Specific tools are good at specific jobs and, when they have solid rationale, they should be leveraged to maximum advantage, whether it’s for business, personal or community-building purposes.
I’m not sure, though, that the usefulness I see in a lot of social software extends to using every new tool that comes along and taking the time to keep using it, particularly when none of the systems will talk to each other.
July 15th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
[...] I know one thing. From a taste perspective (and this isn’t a knock against hip-hop, MySpace OR those who like them), I’m no more likely to listen to hip-hop than I am to use MySpace. Does that make me an elitist or racist? No. Social software concerns [...]