The Power of Belief and The Current State of Social Networking
Facebook is a failure waiting to happen, MySpace is a wasteland, and AIM is practically an artifact. O yeah! Did I mention Twitter is going the same direction? It is easy to play devils advocate, especially in retrospect. But Facebook is still a hot tamale in many peoples’ books. These internet ventures, and most others for that matter, share a common thread. They unify people for a moment in time with a new, well-structured technology, but they fail to foster a belief with users that supersedes their own corporate agenda – the belief that it is YOUR network.
Though Facebook started off as a social networking site, I don’t think they are really helping me network better than anyone in the past if they don’t have a plan that can last beyond the next fad website. Monetization is turning out to be quite the task for these social networks. In realizing they have a need to generate revenue, social networks that started out with the goal of designing a friendly user interface to allow users to connect and share with other users in new ways, have lost their core value that drove people to their site in the first place. The need to monetize is obvious to anyone who likes to eat, but hoarding information and users doesn’t help social networks achieve this goal better than pushing connectivity further. For example, users have to go to Facebook.com to connect to one another. I put profile information in, for the hundredth time, and start reconnecting with and making new friends, which is what I did on AIM ten years ago and have continued to do for every new social networking site since then.
So how about social networking sites giving us control over our friends, our profile, and they can just HOST MY NETWORK, instead of insisting that it is THEIR network? Facebook and others aren’t helping me connect to anything beyond their website and the widgets that they monetize through monopolizing code. While widgets allow smaller companies to put their stakes in a larger company’s soil, it isn’t opening up new connectivity for users. It is just giving other companies more connectivity to TAKE your information.
I want my friends to be with me everywhere I go online. I want a detailed profile that I can choose to GIVE to various websites I visit. After all, these are my friends, with loyalty to ME, not the likes of Facebook. They go where I go and if Facebook loses me, my friends will follow. Not because I said so, but because Facebook made them believe they were connecting people, not just now, but into the future as well. I’m sick of filling out profiles, I’m sick of making the same friends over and over. All these sites need to do is standardize my friends as a hosted OPML file that acts as a permanent address book, HOST my resume, HOST my RSS OPML file, HOST my personal information. I want to sign onto any service and start communicating with the same friends that I have on LinkedIn and Doostang. I do not want to have to enter my age, address, phone number, and credit card info ever again. It is possible for Facebook to do this with the position they are in, but instead, they are busy conjuring up new ways of taking my information for money. I used to believe Facebook was a pioneer in networking, helping me to find friends, but I learned they don’t help me KEEP them. Until Facebook sets industry standards for HOSTING (not owning) my life, I don’t believe they will be around much longer.
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