The prospects for social networking (a personal view)

Much of the online buzz this year has been focused on Twitter (founded 2006), and to a lesser extent friendfeed (launched October 2007), just as last year it was facebook (founded february 2004), and before that linkedin (2003), myspace (2003) etc. These are just the tip of the iceberg there are dozens of other social networking ’services’ all vying for popularity and a sustainable business model, but most of them never surface from the bounded worlds of geekdom and social media evangelism. To some extent, at least, each new wave of social networking services steal oxygen from the earlier ’stars’.

So far, facebook is the only one that has touched the mainstream. A lot of my family, friends and colleagues are on facebook, very few show any interest in Twitter. That’s a win for facebook which might see it withstand the new challengers. Facebook certainly makes a lot more sense than Twitter when it comes to communicating with people who are not online most of the day. To me, and I suspect to them (my mainstream circle), Twitter has all the disadvantages of email and none of the benefits.

In my view, most social networking tools do a pretty good job of helping you find interesting articles and blog posts etc but they are not yet as good as the average RSS reader in this regard. In the enthusiasm for twitter and friendfeed many social media evangelists have tended to forget just how good an RSS reader can be. They are much better organised then Twitter and friendfeed which tend to be rudimentary in their structure and organisation. If you just want to find great stuff to read, Google Reader is about all you will ever need. I still don’t understand why, after so many years, RSS readers haven’t become more popular. They are a fantastic productivity tool. Not using an RSS reader makes as much sense to me as not using a search engine. Well, nearly.

The other dimension of these tools, the networking aspect, seems to be either a bit of occasional fun for most people (like hanging out at the virtual water cooler) or something approaching a full-time activity for professional bloggers. In fact, serious evangelists spend many, many hours each day on these things. They do it for (mostly) business reasons, and they do it because their businesses are largely based around relentless self-promotion (aka networking). They are the blogosphere’s ‘big nodes’ and their incessant online networking helps them build and maintain the power of their link structures. That’s not to say that they are not useful; many of them do a fantastic job in bringing new ideas, services, products etc to the attention of broader audiences. But there is a business reality behind their behaviour, one that cannot be emulated by the (largely) amateur blogger.

As with the blogosphere generally there are a (relatively) small number of power users on Twitter with large numbers of followers while most users have very few followers. People love to talk about how many followers they have. The big nodes or power users have a strong interest in hyping the ‘power’ of social networking tools and re-enforcing their own predominant positions along the way.

Many new users will look for power users, with lots of followers, and add their names to the follower list. The whole language of ‘followers’ has a slightly religious and undemocratic feel to it. As with blogging, many little twitterers spend a lot of time trying to get notice and approval from the big fish. This helps to produce that familiar echo chamber quality that many online conversations and it also makes Twitter feel like an online Ponzi scheme with waves of new users boosting the follower counts of the early adopters.

Few people are better at identifying, and monetising, an online trend than Darren Rowse, who has set up another ‘how to’ blog like his earlier problogger site this time called Twitip. This seems primarily targeted at the little twitterers who want to build their follower numbers. According to Darren:

Twitter has opened up amazing opportunity in my life – it helps grow my personal brand, drives traffic to my online businesses and on a daily basis opens up new relationships and networks that I could never have dreamed of having access to.

It sounds similar to the pep talk at a cleaning products sales conference.

More prosaically, Rowse recently reported that he got 11,500 visitors to his Problogger site in 30 days from Twitter, which is not too shabby. Twitter (or friendfeed or linkedin etc), equals networks and self-promotion which equals money. No surprises there the offline business (and media) world has been like that forever.

Not everyone is entirely relaxed about the tendency for social networking to get dominated by bottom-line driven evangelists. Earlier this month, Steven Hodson asked whether social media wasn’t becoming a social mess:

This isn’t about turning back time or putting the genie back in the bottle; because that is impossible and really – I wouldn’t want to. I just wonder if during this process of shaping new landscapes we aren’t getting caught up in a trap. Do we really need to be everywhere having conversations? Do we really need to be the unwitting shills for other peoples brands and marketing jive? Do we really need to get ourselves trapped in the quicksand of hyper-conversations?

More recently, Sarah Perez referred to “the rabbit hole that is the social web”. Perez’s concern centres on the way these tools rather clumsily measure our responses to articles etc. They skew statistics in favour of the revealed preferences of the deliberately hyper-active web citizens rather than the more passive majority of users. To me, that means a lot of people hitting the ‘like’ button, or retweeting, on their mates’ stuff, stuff they agree with, and stuff by big nodes that they want to suck up to. Clearly, as Perez argues, these are not the results we want from the social web. And, it is not what we envisage when we think of social activity on the web replacing today’s newspaper editors.

As diverting as Twitter and Friendfeed can be, and despite their occasional usefulness, I still think that they are a long way off replacing a decent RSS reader. At least, I think I will just stick with Google Reader for a few years and see what becomes of Twitter and Friendfeed and whatever gets the buzz in 2009 (some people see it as the year of the big blog) before I invest any more time in the latest social networking craze.

Bonus link: Followers aren’t friends and you influence friends not followers.