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January 25, 2004
the fatal flaw of formalised social networking
As you've seen, I've been playing with Orkut, and previously with Friendster and Tribe. My general review is "mnyeh", and I'm beginning to put my finger on why.
This is the basic setup of social networking sites:
You have friends, who have friends. By declaring your groups of friends, you gain easy access to their declared groups of friends.
Now here's a big assumption: social networking sites actually work, and you genuinely meet and interact with new people (I don't think this is true, especially on the newer sites, filled with the same people as all the other sites).
The folk math of this says that everyone is related within 6 degrees - a chain of 6 friends of friends. If you convert friends-of-friends into friends, these chains get smaller.
Taken to its conclusion, you have no friends of friends - anyone you like has become a friend, and anyone you really don't get on with is disowned.
This isn't just happening to you - everyone's doing it. Everyone becomes one degree away.
Then the only way for sites to keep going is to attract new blood. Only new people cause new connections. To foster this, members become incentivised to sign up new people. Maybe you can only remain a member if you keep on signing up people.
Luckily, life isn't like social networking sites.
Currently there are technical limitations - these sites only let you have 500-2000 friends. I can think of several people who have complained that they have reached them.
There are, I feel, bigger social limitations: how many friends can you really support? Can you really keep in contact with 500 friends all the time? (Orkut in particular encourages mass friendship, as many pages are ranked in order of number of friends).
I remain unconvinced by the big assumption. Friends will introduce you to friends in the real world if they see a link - technology doesn't foster social etiquette and skills.
Technology can help introduce complete strangers with a common interest, and it's a pity that there hasn't been much movement recently on topic-based community sites (I still mourn Usenet).
Maybe after the social network bubble bursts we can get back to designing for community, rather than spending all the time on the hard UI and technical problems of social networking, and tacking communities, or dating, on at the end.
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