Thinking About Social Networks

continuations:

This morning on Techmeme I ran across three interesting and thought provoking pieces about social networks (all from within the last 24 hours it seems):

1. Maciej Ceglowski’s “The Social Graph is Neither” (10 points for great title alone) is a hilarious dissection of what’s wrong with explicitly declared relationships and even with the act of declaring relationships. It is also a blistering critique of Facebook and a bit of a paean to the message board. Very much worth the read and I found myself agreeing with many of the points.

2. Farhad Manjoo’s piece in slate titled “Google+ is Dead” argues that Google fatally wounded its own social efforts by ignoring important user needs. In particular the author points to the fight against pseudonyms and the delayed and incomplete brand pages as examples of making Google+ unwelcoming from the start. His argument rests on comparing social networks to bars. While I agree that these were big missteps I think it is premature to ring the death knell for Google+. There are parts of it, such as hangouts, that work quite well and those are actually the most like bars.

3. A piece in Fastcompany by Matt Haber on a site I hadn’t heard of before called Whosay that lets celebrities post information and keep control of it. The article points to Twitter’s terms of service (which allow Twitter to use content with partners) as a reason that celebrities wouldn’t want to put pictures there but rather put them on Whosay instead. This seems like an interesting experiment to me because we clearly live in a celebrity culture (Exhibit A: the Kim Kardashian wedding, I mean divorce). Yet networks like Twitter and Youtube are all about undermining the existing ways in which people become celebrities.

All good food for thought. A huge takeaway for me from reading it all is that despite what may feel like a huge chokehold by Facebook, we are still in the early innings of what the Internet will mean for how our relationships work online and more generally how society is organized.