Please, no more friend requests. If you are like most people - in the last few months you have gone from bemusement as invitations deluged your inbox, to addiction as you obsessed over what people wrote on your wall and finally depression once Facebook was banned at your work. It wasn't the first time you joined a social network. And it won't be the last. But maybe not for the reasons you might expect.
Thank God for wifi. Stuck in transit for 7 hours in Malaysia, en route to London, the only thing standing between me and duty free insanity are a handful of RSS feeds. One of the more interesting ones was Marc Canter's social networking project - PeopleAggregator. Its a terrible brand name - but the underlying concept is right on the money.
Lists. Endless lists. The latest curse of the web are those endless swimming pools of customer data - most popular, most active, most tagged or downloaded. Personally I hate them. They tell me nothing, other than other people’s aggregated bad taste. Worse – they miss one of the Internet’s most subtle and powerful features – the discovery power of networks.
The irony of using Social networks as new age advertising platforms is that anyone can do the same. There have been a bunch of interesting advertising partnerships appearing on MySpace lately - most of which involve a combination of featured listing and display promotions, and a bespoke profile page allowing the brand advertiser to 'make friends' with their target audience.
Every day I wake up and check my RSS subscriptions, I read about another social network that has been funded with someone else's money. Even the majors are tooling up.
"Social" has become a popular prefix lately. And for good reason. It seems to have a positive impact on valuation multiples. Social media, social networking, social mashups. There is no doubt that Newscorp's acquisition of Myspace last year, combined with the hard evidence of gigantic consumer traffic shifts to social media platforms - is a powerful siren song to would be entrepreneurial activity.
William Gibson said it famously in Neuromancer - "the street finds its own uses for things". Playing with some of the current favourite Web 2.0 toys this week - flickr, youtube, MySpace, del.ici.us, feedburner, typepad - I realised how easy it was for users to appropriate these platforms for their own creative purposes.
