Monthly Archives: February 2007

26th Feb, 2007

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Make Friends With Obama Supporters

Timothy Moenk reports on his experience signing up for the Obama social network and then going to a meetup of Obama supporters.

I enjoyed going to this event because it gave me some perspective on how social networking is going to be impacting the political process. First off, I noticed that many of the people there were meeting face to face for the first time, but already knew each other through my.barackobama.com. For at least a few, this was the first time they had actually met someone in person that they’d first had contact with online. A few mentioned that they had never joined a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook.

Tim’s identified one of the primary use cases for niche social networks, start friendships online in preparation for offline meetings.

I signed up for the network also. I haven’t looked closely at Obama’s policies yet, but on the surface he represents a change to a course where intelligence and diplomacy matters.

13th Feb, 2007

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Social Network Fatigue is a Red Herring

Jon Udell and Tim O’Reilly both posted entries recently using the phrase Social Network Fatigue, implying that the friction of joining new social networks was going to slow the adoption of new social networks. That idea is wrong (and it obscures their other point that our social networks could be implicitly calculated from our other internet activities, email and IM).

It’s easy to see that you could improve the social networking experience by creating a way to centrally manage your contact lists or to implicitly generate a social network. I’m not going to deny that, but there’s a lot of things I’m noticing that make me think people who use the phrase Social Network Fatigue don’t have any idea what’s going on with social networks.

1. I look at my own social networks, I’m an active member of Flickr, Twitter, MyBlogLog, LinkedIn, Digg, and netscape. I’ve joined other networks which I now hardly use, not because maintaining my identity is such a chore, but because I wasn’t having any meaningful communication there.

2. I invited my sister and cousin to Twitter (both younger than 23) and they immediately became active users. They’re also both very active MySpacers. I just found out that neither of them invited any friends to Twitter beside me and Sarah. They’re happy to maintain a four person social network and haven’t had any impulse to consolidate networks.

3. I setup a social network for the SoCon conference with a life span of about three weeks (two weeks leadinig up to the conference and one week of followup). I haven’t heard a single person complain about the trouble of inputting yet another profile and collecting yet another batch of friends. On the contrary, attendees seem to have liked the experience very much.

4. The rapid growth of Flixster, a social network for movie lovers, is more evidence that niche social networks are taking off.

Social Networks are communication tools. Some geeks can’t seem to recognize social networks as communication improvement because there’s so much friction around managing friends and identity. They’d taken identity and relationships out of the first suite of communication tools for efficiency, but that’s not what people want. Having identity and relationships are fundamental human activities and fundamental part of communication. Social networks are a big enough improvement in communication that the majority of people aren’t phased at all by the friction of joining new ones.