Social networking is everywhere. we’ve got news websites, personal sites, business sites, online produce sites, and wal-mart jumping into the environment. Is this healthy? Sure! Is social networking really all that useful? Not at all, that is, at least not in its current state…
Social networking websites are going to need to undergo a major change soon or else they’ll die out from bland-ness and boringness. There was a time once that I was obsessed with Myspace.com, but that time has since floundered…ever since I realized that all 700 of the “Friends” that I had acquired really aren’t ever going to talk to me.
What does that gain? Popularity? No, and that’s because your other friend just got 1,200 friends…BOO-YA!
About the only thing it gains is more and more people to spam your picture comment request bulletins to.
Social networking needs to become useful. It needs to be an environment that people can actually find people they’d like, and could potentially become friends with. It needs to be a place that bands can get in touch with their fans, and promote their music to the people that haven’t heard it yet…without a lot of work. Currently, the social networking environment sucks. It sucks bad. If I am a person and want real friends, it would take me a lot of profile jumping, searches, browsing, you name it. Why can’t social networks just do this for me? I mean really, how hard is it? You already know all this crap about me because of what I post in my profile, why can’t it just find my friends for me?
And maybe I’m wrong…Sometimes this model works and sometimes it doesn’t. You can see this in college dormatory matchups. They try to base it off what kind of music people like, and all that crap. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But then again, I guess one main part that’s different there than social networking is that you’re LIVING with this person.
So I guess I’m still right…it would work. Yes. I should be able to go to a site, look up people I’d like and it would return to me people that match certain criteria, and match it perfectly with my profile, or however I want it to search. This is already out there…in dating websites. But who says matchmaking is only reserved for dating? I know I’d love to find another person that obsesses over the band Muse as much as I, and is a die-hard liberal, and could argue with me point for point over whether or not wind power could save the world. So why do sites that are supposed to network people together make this so hard? Well, that’s just because they haven’t innovated enough folks.
Give it time. Someone will come into this space and bring REAL networking to the world. Not this “Friend Request” crap where porn stars want to be your friend and give you access to their “Free” webcam.
Oh, and one last thing I’ll leave you to chew on…why do your friends all have to be lumped into one category. Because God knows, your friends don’t all fit into the same category and you might not like someone seeing parts of your profile that doesn’t meet a certain friend status…
Pretty soon you’re going to hear this type of discussion in the forecoming digitalsoap podcast, “Soapboxing”. I’m excited, we’re all excited, and you should be excited too…
Later Kids,
- Matt
For good commentary on the current social networking scene…head over to Gym Class Heroes’ Purevolume and listen to “New Friend Request”. Pay attention to the lyrics…you will be sure to laugh your ass off…
[tags]digitalsoap, social networking, myspace, tagworld, facebook, friendster, friends, friend request, social, society, internet, gym class heroes[/tags]
