Double Blind

If you do any reading on the web, you’ll eventually read stories where people post things on their Myspace profile. Most of the news stories are usually about people trying to pick up underaged people or posting exploits of their illegal activities (or both!). However, 99.99% of the profiles are quite benign, if not horribly in need of a spell and grammar check. Most of the people using the site are in the 15-24 demographic, which is a sweet spot for companies to target their marketing to due to the large amount of disposable income they can control. Friendster used to be the number one “pure” social networking site, but they ran into some serious hardware issues where it took 30 seconds to click through a single webpage. By the time Friendster cleaned up their software, Myspace had already taken over as the number one social networking site.

Since these types of sites heavily depend on the networking effect in order to be useful (just like Ebay). Usually the site that is able to retain the most activity will be able to sustain this advantage and amplify it. I see Myspace being the de facto social networking leader for the foreseeable future, unless if their programmers really screw it up by adding in so much spam as to make it more unusable than it currently is.

I originally had a profile up on Friendster nearly a year ago but decided to get rid of it recently since it was redundant with what I could keep on this site. Most of the content I had there can be found on my About Double Blind page. Friendster recently was trying to open up their site to non-members and I just wasn’t comfortable anymore with people knowing who some of my friends are. Also I would find it much more useful to know who my enemies are! In any event, if somebody wanted to find me, it’s a simple Google search and they can at least find my email address. I’m just thankful my name isn’t Joe Smith, so it can be easily found on the main search engines.

Ultimately the goal of all of these sites is to somehow economically capitalize on the traffic flow and use people’s social contacts as information to find out what content to deliver users. This is partly the reason why I don’t really like keeping information on the site – it’s literally the equivalent of aiding and abetting advertisers, whom I don’t have much respect for.

The other issue deals with authenticity – ultimately there is no way to authenticate people’s information. If all you want is to keep track of what your friends are doing, it’s probably a good tool, however, it’s probably just easier for them to open up a weblog and post stuff that most other people would find absolutely boring, such as what you did on your last vacation.

Whenever you post something on the internet, you always leak information. For example, when you look on this page you get a pretty good idea of who I am, and some people that I am connected to. Social networking sites are designed to explicitly display these links and software takes advantage of these connections to display the most efficient ads.

Five or ten years in the future, I can see how you could have access to better privileges if you were connected to the right person or right group of people on these sites. The best analogy would be a digitization of a referral scheme. I’m not 100% sure how this would work in practice but just imagine if you could get backstage tickets to some rock concert by being friends with the right group. Myspace makes money on you providing information about your friends and interests while they offer something of lesser value to keep your on the site. In real life that knowing the right group of people also confers privileges, just delivered differently – perhaps in the form of future employment, or golf partners, or even a future significant other. I doubt internet social networking will ever be able to surpass this, but certainly it could complement it.

Ultimately, I think the the most useful and least invasive social networking software is the instant messenger. That and this weblog is about as close I intend to get to using social networking sites unless if there is something much more compelling in the future.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 8th, 2006 and is filed under Best Of, Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.