SocialU: It’s All About You, If You’re A Virtually Materialistic Narcissist

SocialU is a new lifestreamingish social application, that goes to enormous lengths to create a cheesy social environment centered on fungible social gestures, like giving a contact an electronic package of french fries. To ‘buy’ the fries, users can apply their initial stake of $500,000 social dollars or earn more cash by doing various social things: adding friends, making comments, etc.

socialu - it’s all about you v0.0.3287, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I am all for giving friends gifts, but the ersatz quality of SocialU is depressing. I can’t see myself participating in a meta-community — the system allow you to open tabs on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Bebo, and just about any other social app out there, in various tabs — that is principally focused on translating social gestures into virtual currency, and then distributing that cash by buying virtual bling, property or other e-goods, and possibly gifting other contacts.

Forgive me for being subject to social physics, but I would like my socialization to be about something, like tachnology, or saving the world, or collecting toy trains. But this ‘hall of mirrors’, self-reflecting social hypodermic needle doesn’t add anything that we need.

Perhaps the sort of obsessiveness associated with Tamagotchi pets plays here — another fad I never thought added up to much.

And it is not the materialism per se that irks me. I am all for sites like ThisNext, where people share recommmendations about stuff — furniture, gizmos, jewelry — because I buy in on the idea that all e-commerce will be social in the near future. But this is phony, like giving food pellets to pigeons in a Skinner box for going through the motions of social interaction. I am all for social karma (or “swarmth”) building up in the innards of social tools, but directly tying actions to specific economic inducements, instead of an algorithmic authority or reputation is a terrible way to go.