Thoughts on social networks

Sure, signing up on Orkut is fun, but there's no there there. The only ongoing activity well-supported by the system so far is the competition to have the biggest friend count (which the system foolishly encourages by printing number of friends after one's name and by listing people consistently in descending order of friends). That's certainly not going to continue to engage most people's interest over time. There are communities, but there isn't enough basic functionality to use them for anything other than an expression of one's interests. It will be interesting to see if they can get some useful functionality into this site or whether this YASN (Yet Another Social Network) will just fade into disuse or misuse.

The real value of social networks, generally, has to do with the loose connections: people you have a distant or tenuous connection with, who by way of the social network, become more closely tied to you. Much is said about the alienating tendencies of computer-mediated communication, but this is one of the ways that the net brings people closer together. Sometimes it's by creating a channel of contact that wasn't there before. Sometimes it's by making explicit a connection that was only there implicitly, unobserved. YASNs can do this, as can blogs. Some of the blogs I follow most closely are written by friends of friends, or by friends I only kept up with occasionally before. Through Orkut and LinkdedIn, I've reestablished connections with several wonderful people I thought I had pretty much lost contact with for good. All of this is bringing people closer together.

Comments

[Karl Ramm]

On the other hand, it's the relentless push to collect more "baseball cards" that leads to you being able to find the people that you've reconnected with. So it's not all bad.

[Eric Akawie]

I think the killer app for a social network is going to be something like the Sims Online, or www.there.com (or the Metaverse.) An environment where the members can create objects and places, show off, create an economy, have relationships. The invite and Karma systems hopefully keep the space self policing. (Orkut should show who invited any given member and how many refusals or drops each person has - negative Karma.)

[Joseph H. Vilas]

Seems like someone may have heard you: Orkut now lists community members differently -- not ranked by number of friends.

[Joseph H. Vilas]

Found the explantion. I assume this won't work w/o logging in, but communities and lists of user friends are sorted now by most recent login.

[mg]

Karl, you're right, but I think the baseball card game only works to develop better connections as long as you're willing to take it seriously. So far, not a problem, but imagine how it would be when there are millions of users. I think this could be corrected by having different types of connections, instead of just "friends", there should also be "acquaintances", "people I want to meet", "people I am related to", "people I am very close to", etc. This would be supportive of people taking the connections seriously.

Eric, I suspect that Google is looking at social networking and blogging as part of a strategy of constructing a portal kind of environment to have locked-in users, but I think there is an even better killer app. here. Think of it this way: with invitation-only memberships, the graph of connections between members is fully-connected, which yields interesting mathematical properties for search engine technology to exploit. Somewhere out there is the search engine/social network/recommendation engine just waiting to happen. If I could get good recommendations of books, movies, software, etc., from friends and friends-of-friends, that would be so much better than the lame recos I get from Amazon. Ka-ching!

Joe, thanks for the pointer to Orkut Times. I love the change in ordering. It now encourages frequent logins, without obscuring the number of connections. A win-win.

[Eric Akawie]

Michael: I was thinking along those lines myself, this morning. How about a "Google Me" button in your profile that gives your friends the results of a search you have customized so that it shows results mainly about you.

Another extension: Google could integrate Orkut with Blogger, making your Orkut profile a one-stop shop for personal data and info. Perhaps the blog could be either public or friends-only, or friends-of-friends only.

And on your comments to Karl, I agree. I'd like to have an "acquaintances" label available, for people like Kevan Kerby, or Karl, whom I'm happy to be reminded of, but whom I honestly hadn't thought about in years :-).