Social Networking in the Digital Age - Welcome to the next generation of online communications

MSN Mobile ^ | Monday March 22, 2004 | Philipp Harper

[anymouse]

It used to be if you wanted to win more friends, influence more people or make more money, you bought one of those self-improvement tomes and tried to pump up your personality.

These days, all you have to do is go online and join a "social networking" site. The pumping will be done for you.

If you haven’t yet heard of social networking, stay tuned because it’s the Next Big Thing. New Economy magazine Business 2.0 named it "technology of the year" for 2003, and venture capitalists have started throwing money at social networking startups with a zeal not seen since the first generation of dot-coms came down the pike.

Don’t be surprised if a year from now your everyday conversation is peppered with references to Friendster, Spoke, Ryze, LinkedIn, Tribe.net, ZeroDegrees — or to other sites not yet launched.

The phenomenon is new and it’s hot, but it has a very old soul. In fact, the process that drives social networking is found at the heart of all societies and civilizations: the human need to make common cause, to cooperate with others of the species to achieve a whole variety of goals and meet a whole variety of needs — physical, emotional, social, economic, political.

Degrees of Separation

In our own comparatively gentle times, schmoozing has become the preferred networking method and the rolodex its indispensable tool. The drill by now is familiar: You need help accomplishing something ¬— finding a date, completing a deal — so you call someone in your primary circle of friends and acquaintances, not necessarily because you think they’ll be able to help directly but because they might know someone who can.

You make a call, and another, and another, working your way toward the outer limits of your social reach. Generally, if you keep at it — and persistence is as much a key to success as style — you find who or what you’re looking for.

Social networking sites speed and expand the process through digital technology and the Internet, allowing users to create searchable databases of friends and business contacts. Still, the underlying principle is the same: Who you know now is key to who you’re going to know in the future and to what you’re going to achieve, whether in love or business.

(Snip)

The functionality of some of the business-oriented sites is even more impressive. Spoke, for example, analyzes a participating company’s e-mail archives, contact lists, address books and calendars to create a detailed map of all the organization’s internal relationships as well as those emanating out to other companies.

(snip)

Another Internet Bubble?

Millions already have. Silicon Valley-based Friendster, a focus of much marketplace buzz, has enlisted 4 million members since its founding early in 2003 and by year’s end was the recipient of $14 million in venture capital beneficence. At about the same time, its Palo Alto neighbor Spoke Software, a 2002 startup, scored more than $9 million in venture funding.

All the fervor has skeptics talking of a social networking bubble and its inevitable collapse. While such speculation is premature, issues do have to be resolved — functionality and privacy concerns among them — before the sector can be judged a safe bet.

(snip)

More troubling, because of their numbers if nothing else, are the non-obsessives who get caught in traps that, while certainly of their own making, are constructions unique to the Web.

(snip)

And let’s be honest about chat rooms, putatively the cyber equivalent of the office water cooler. Yes, they are convenient places to trade information and establish relationships, but that’s not the whole story.

Around a water cooler we deal face to face with people who, if we don’t personally know them, at least are identifiable. This means that bad or boorish behavior has consequences. Not so online, where chat room visitors hide behind pseudonyms, secure in the knowledge that the worst penalty they’ll pay for the worst sort of behavior is banishment from the board.

By making identities known and relationships transparent, social networking has the potential to set a salubrious precedent. And if a few gutsy entrepreneurs make some money in the process, so much the better.

[anymouse]

Some of us prefer FR. :)