Contrary to Social graph-iti, Social Networking is more than a Fad

This must be like the glitterati, and the technorati. A somewhat condescending article appeared in the Economist recently titled, Social graph-iti. The article leads off with “There's less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye. A NEW fad is sweeping across Silicon Valley, causing excitement, confusion and hyperbole not seen since the dotcom bubble.” So we know we are in trouble.

After dumping on all the hype, the article does say that “Facebook has made two genuine breakthroughs. The first was its decision to let outsiders write programs and keep all the advertising revenues these might earn…The entire internet industry reckons this was clever and is planning to copy it.” Many already had as Google has been doing this to their advantage for years.

It goes on to say that “Facebook's second masterstroke is its “mini-feed”, an event stream on user pages that keeps users abreast of what their friends are doing…For many users, this is addictive.” I do not find it addictive but I do find it useful. These two features are one of the reasons that Serena is using Facebook as their intranet.

The article then gets back to bashing with, “Silicon Valley's craze for the “social graph”, however, is overdone. The term has been around in computer science for decades, says Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, so it is puzzling that Mr Zuckerberg should get any special credit for using.” While I agree that Facebook did not originate many of the things it does including social graphs, it certainly has implemented these things well. Google also did not originate many things that it implemented well. It is easy to dump on the hype.

Then it goes to say something useful but obvious to anyone who blogs, “the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline.” Just has there is not one blosphere and its success is that there are many ones of varying sizes. So this does not negate the usefulness of social networking, it reaffirms is value.

Thanks to Valdis Krebs for pointing this article out. Here is an online community diagram from Valdis, that adds some context to the idea of many social networking communities. In the diagram, every node in the network represents a person. A link between two nodes reveals a relationship or connection between two people in the community -- the social network. Most on-line communities consist of three social rings -- a densely connected core in the center, loosely connected fragments in the second ring, and an outer ring of disconnected nodes, commonly known as lurkers.

Comments

[Dan Di]

You gotta check it out:

a new website that offers you events (parties, shows, performances - etc..) that you can add yourself to
then, you wait for other users to react - thus can meet new people!!!

go check out their event list of ~~New Years Eve 2008~~
http://www.wannago.com/EventsSearch.aspx?type=events&tags=nye&location=