Social networking services — one year on
Posted by Alec on 2 September 2008
Updated Nov/08 — added link to Twitter Tips and Silk Charm post
Some of the problems of Social Networking « Alec the Geek
issues with this type of online social networking
It’s actually more than a year since I first blogged about social networking and the world of web 2.0. The web, and the practices that surround it, have moved on so I thought I update my thoughts as well. By a strange coincidence, just as I was starting this post I came across crazeegeekchick’s thoughts on how to use social networking — well worth reading before you carry on.
Generally social networking has been a huge consumer of my attention and time; and to be honest I don’t think the medium given me a very good return on my investment, except as a learning exercise.
- LinkedIn has become an online list of business contacts. But of limited use because I can’t add my own notes to profiles. I have had some networking activity — but to be honest it has not made a huge amount of difference to my working life. I think now the number of people on the service is becoming so large anyway that it’s becoming less useful, but I hope I’m wrong
Updated 13/Nov/08 — You can now add notes to your LinkedIn contacts - Facebook has become pretty pointless. I don’t have time to become a zombie and most of the other stuff I do use is not terribly useful. e.g. I just became a facebook fan of Gordon Ramsay — but so what? Nothing happens much.
- Blogging gives me a certain amount of satisfaction and I often refer back to my old blog posts for information. I also know that a few people have found help from ramblings so I count the blog as a success. However it’s rare for me to get over 100 readers a day so it’s not a huge success
- Lifestream (twitter, jaiku,identi.ca). This is very distracting and I need to find some way to stop keep looking at my friendfeed stream. However on the positive side it does provide me some of the support that I miss being a solo worker. It’s probably a good idea to whittle down my ‘posse’ to as few as 10 people to reduce the noise; question is which 10 — I’m generally pretty choosy who I “friend”. Problogger has a site introducing Twitter, and by extension most of the other micro blogging site, and Silkcharm also posted some suggestions
- Geo Location (e.g. brightkite, dopplr). I am just so over that. In Australia it’s hard to use anyway because we have limited network coverage and I don’t have an iPhone. I keep thinking they a potentially huge personal security issue as well
- I have accounts on delicious and flickr which I find useful. Delicious in particular has proved very useful professionally and personally.
As I mentioned earlier the major upside is that I now think know a lot more than the general population about this stuff — perhaps I can become a media pundit? Easier than doing real work, talking of which…
Kate Carruthers said
Hey twitter came in handy for drinkies & catchup the other day, it was good to see you
sinewalker said
Sacha Chua (a gen-Y and web2 evangelist, plus Emacs hacker) might be able to shed some more positive light on useful potential for social interactions in internet and intranets.
My take on this stuff (in a nut-shell) is this: it’s very easy to become distracted with new media and a lot of the content is rubbish (see television for a good example of the previous media revolution, which has this same trait). The big advantage of the so-called “web 2.0″ stuff though is that the barrier to interaction is lowered now, which has the pro- of letting us contribute in meaningful ways.
The con- of course is there’s a very low signal-to-noise ratio
I think the potential applications in work and enterprise are very promisisng, so long as we can keep from being distracted by the gee-whiz and focus on what we are trying to achive.
It was most enlightening to me to discover I have collegues here in Sydney, in my current company, working in the same building, that have similar professional interesests, but that I didn’t meet except through online chanels. So it’s not a waste of time if it’s not abused. Breaking out of the isolation that matrix organisations put their people into is the hugest advantage for this new media.
sinewalker said
oops. a link would have helped: http://sachachua.com/wp/2008/09/05/new-presentation-new-media-new-generation/