If you’re reading this near a computer, take a moment to visit the Common Craft website (www.commoncraft.com) and watch its “Social Networking in Plain English” video. It’s clever, fun and will set the stage for the rest of this column. If you can’t watch the video right now, I’ll summarize it quickly here: Social networking uses technology to make the relationships between people visible and useful. Examples of social networking websites that you may have heard of include MySpace (www.myspace.com), LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), and Facebook (www.facebook.com), all of which are free to join.
From a business perspective, social networking is important, because it represents new opportunities to create relationships with customers who may be interested in you or your company. For individuals, it’s a way to expand your business and/or social contacts. Social networking sites hit the mainstream when News Corporation (Rupert Murdoch and company) acquired MySpace for $580 million in July 2005, a little less than two years after its founding. Since I don’t like to rush into things, I’ve let another two years lapse before mentioning it here in TechTalk. No need to act precipitously.
The basic idea behind a social networking site is that you join it and create links to others on the site who are friends, classmates, co-workers or who share some common interest with you, such as a hobby. You’re encouraged to invite people you know to join the site, thereby expanding its reach. Business-oriented sites, like LinkedIn, emphasize the power of your network in finding a job, pursuing business opportunities and finding answers from knowledgeable people in your network. LinkedIn’s tag line is “Get the most from your professional network.” Facebook, on the other hand, is more general, describing itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.”
MySpace is perhaps most removed from business, tagging itself as “a place for friends” (not withstanding the fact that many youth-oriented businesses—especially musicians and bands—use MySpace as a way to promote themselves to that demographic).
All the sites require you to set up an individual profile, which you can personalize in a variety of ways. Although it’s not often described this way, a profile on a social networking site functions as a personal Web presence to show people who you are in terms of the photos, videos, articles, links and writings you choose to make public. People can contact you via your profile without knowing your email address, and you can block people who bother you. Your profile aggregates things that are of interest to you and your network, lets you share them (or not) and be notified when profiles of others in your network are modified.
If you’re a professional, there’s a lot of sense to devoting some amount of time to Facebook and LinkedIn, particularly if you don’t have a blog or a personal website. LinkedIn is more definitely focused on professional networking and is worth a look. I have a profile there as “Michael Duffy.” I’ve added 18 contacts—people I know from prior lives who have invited me to link to them, or whom I’ve invited to link to me (hence the name “LinkedIn”). What’s interesting is, those 18 contacts link me, in turn, to more than 2,300 contacts (one degree of separation), and those links, again in turn, give me access to a whopping 339,100 friends of friends of friends via my LinkedIn network.
Now, of course, the question is whether I can actually make a request of a friend of a friend of a friend. And the answer is, it depends. Obviously, I can’t ask someone at that remove for $1 million. But I might be able to ask them a question or for a referral. This illustrates the limitation of large social networks: The further out you go, the weaker the bond of trust and familiarity that makes it all work. That’s one of the reasons LinkedIn strongly suggests you not accept a link from someone you don’t know well, because essentially you’re vouching for their behavior in an extended network of people.
The downside of social network sites is spam. My MySpace profile receives at least a couple requests a week from “people” wanting to be my friend. Of course, the natural response is to look at the profile of that person—a profile that, more often than not, is just full of advertising. The sad truth is, any service that aggregates people is going to attract some sort of spammer, because it lets the spammer blast their messages cheaply (and indiscriminately).
In some ways, Facebook is the most interesting offering, because it seeks to go beyond simply being a social networking utility by creating a social networking platform on which you can build new social networking applications. One very successful computing platform is, of course, Microsoft Windows, which supports a wide variety of applications that make use of the underlying computer hardware. To do this, Facebook has created an applications programming interface (API), which makes it easier to construct applications that use it as a platform. The advantage is that Facebook could potentially get lots of people developing for its platform and creating new, cool things for its users, which attracts more users and developers. This strategy worked well for Microsoft in the desktop computing era.
The best way to gain a better understanding of social networking is to sign up for accounts on each of the big three sites. Although they offer similar features, each has a distinct personality and user base, and it’s worthwhile to spend some time getting familiar with the pros and cons of each. If you’re willing to put in the effort to expand and use your network, LinkedIn is probably the best choice. Facebook is definitely the innovator. And if you have kids, they can probably set up a MySpace account for you. In fact, that’s what my oldest daughter did for me so we can share videos and other things.
It’s nice, because I get to see the face my teenage daughter presents to the world. I know not every teen will want their parent joining MySpace. So do it anyway. How often do you get to irritate the kids?
