In the center of attention right now is the social networking site Facebook. The best new thing around for a lot of people. And like in every social networking site, there are people that have 1000+ ‘friends’. I wonder what the use of that is anyway. They are probably not able to have a real good relationship with either one of those ‘links’. What are they aiming for? Do they derive status from that amount of friends? I think they’re just connection hounds.
A couple of days back, Esme already wrote about her and Om Malik’s observation that more and more people are turning away from Facebook, because it is only time consuming. I agree. With all the social networking sites that I’ve been a member I turned away in the end. What was the point? What was I doing there? Nothing.
What does it still mean when you are connected to someone on such a network. It is much easier to establish a connection there than it is in real life. But that doesn’t mean that the value of that connection is the same. A similar argument can be made for the endorsements people get on a site like LinkedIn. In the old days you had to step into the office of your boss to get that letter of recommendation, and it was valued as highly valuable. But now? Does anybody who hires somebody actually pay attention to those endorsements and are they valued as much? I don’t think so.
I think Om Malik is right when he says that: “What we need is something more intimate, more private. It’s not about the number of friends, but it’s about connection“. It is simply impossible to have the same sort of valuable relationship with a 100 people as it is with having a relationship with 5. So the more connections are being made, the less valuable that network becomes to the users. A development to more privacy is a trend towards more personalization.
I get it from the companies perspective though. Expanding the network, means creating more eyeballs and that means that more money can be made from advertisers. But hasn’t that ship sailed a long time ago. Isn’t that putting a very old marketing model on a new medium?
Facebook, was accessible only to people attending colleges in the US. Now it is accessible to anyone, by opening it up, the value decreased. They’d better sell out quickly, because the attraction will fade away sooner than they think.
Your article made me think of an other article I once read, “Toward a Network Sociality” by Andreas Wittel (worth while reading).
In his article he talks about the commodification of social bonds. He defines Network sociality as “social bonds that are continuously produced, reproduced and consumed“. He states that there is an increasing perception of social relations as social capital. Relationships are moving from ‘doing’ towards ‘managing’.
So the ties formed in this kind of network often differ from the deep meaningful relationship.
And so the sorts of value derived from those relationships also differ (e.g. status, social capital). Social capital is often associated to the business world. But I think people not related to this world also want to create social capital. Connections become possible opportunities for whatever an individual is searching for.
(offtopic: how do i create hyperlinks in the comment?)
we are working on ‘wysiywig’ editing of comments. but for the moment you can use a basic number of html tags. one of the possible tags is <a href=…>…</a>. you can also insert images with the image tag.
I agree with you, but I think that a lot of the focus has been on the quantity of connections and not so much on the quality of the connection. That is what I don’t like about Metcalfe’s law, that it is mainly based on the amount of connected members. I do think that people (maybe unconsciously) strive for social capital. As Robert Putnam has written, it is one of the key ingredients of democracy. Still I think that in a network that is more ‘private’ the value is much higher than in open networks. Should we bring back the velvet rope, to maintain our social capital?
i totally agree with your observation. if there is nothing to DO it is just not fun. and when it is no fun i leave.
but i think you misread metcalfe. while you reason about absolute value for an individual he argues about the potential network as an infrastructure. if i read him correctly he uses quality as a measurement of potential information flow between nodes. not as the quality ‘of life’ for one node.
i think metcalfe would agree with you, though. i would even say that he might be horrified that these ’social networks’ misuse his thinking. i think he might reason that by wasting the the potentiality of the individual (by not providing something to do while claiming it is so much ‘network’) you destroy the network, inevitably.
True. Maybe I misread him on purpose
And maybe my plea should be for a new way of ‘measuring’ the value of a network. Especially if you put ’social’ in front of that. I do think that it has to do with privacy, with personalization and intimate relationships. Somehow those elements are not reflected in Metcalfe’s Law, indeed, because his value is something different.