Slashdot posted an article over the weekend on 35 Perspectives on Online Social Networking. Things like:

2. The youth perspective

Social networking sites are places that help young people be young and let them “practice” youth. Therefore, the sites are mainly a reflection of youth culture.

3. The friendship perspective

Social networking sites are places where young people can maintain and nurse their existing (offline) friendships and create new (online) friendships.

4. The identity perspective

Social networking sites are spaces for identity construction. Here, young people are continuously constructing, re-constructing and displaying their self-image and identity. Also, the network sites make them co-constructors of each other’s identities.

It reminded me of what I thought was the best part of danah boyd’s Incantations for Muggles keynote at ETech.

I want to address four key life stages that i think are relevant to folks interested in social media:

1) Identity formation and role-seeking (aka youth)
2) Integration and coupling (aka 20somethings)
3) Societal contribution (aka “adults”)
4) Reflection and storytelling (aka retirees)

I’ve been using that list to address adults who say things like “I don’t have time to hang out on a social network.” Not every network is about hanging out. Nobody ever hangs out on LinkedIn. That’s a network for adults in phase #3. That’s also been the phase where I’ve seen the most successful uses of CrowdVine networks. People who create networks for conferences or for niche professional communities are trying to be more social because being more social helps them be more effective contributors (and a little bit because being social feels good).

The 35 categories might be good when you’re categorizing the behavior of an individual social network user but danah’s categories are a lot more useful when you’re trying to categorize the value of a particular network.

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.

The PEW Internet and American Life project released Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview.

danah boyd provides summary and commentary:

I would like to highlight the fact that 91% of teens are using social network sites to stay in touch with friends they see in person while only 49% are using them to meet people (ever). I hope that this makes people realize that, for teenagers, these sites are *not* about networking. They are about modeling one’s social network.