I just found this on the NEW Red Herring.....
Dysfunctional relationships
Social networking systems promise ease and deliver irritability.
By Jerry Michalski
From Ryze and LinkedIn to Tribe.net and Friendster, social-networking Web sites are all the rage. I count at least 18 active social-networking services today, plus several that have vanished or morphed (SixDegrees, for example, one of the earliest such services, is now being relaunched as an upscale-dating site.) They are sprouting so quickly they practically constitute a new Internet boomlet of non-revenue-generating startups.
To these offers you might add similar relationship-building and -mining software, such as dating services (Match.com, SocialNet); webs of trust (Advogato); reputation systems (Slashdot Karma, eBay Ratings); nifty experiments (Friend of a Friend project); and ways to mine all the above through analytic social-network, or "X ray," technology (Valdis Krebs's Inflow).
I am a huge fan of social dynamics, relationship building, and online collaboration. So why do so many of these systems give me the willies? The problems I have with them range from the pragmatic to the moral.
Let me start with the pragmatic.
First, the services generate more complexity, rather than reducing it. Helping groups meet and collaborate is a great cause, but why do we have to use so many different, incompatible services? For example, to manage one community I host, I juggle contact names in Outlook, Trillian (an instant-messaging client), Excel, Yahoo Groups, PayPal, Web-site development software, and other services. Now, in addition to the social-network system invitations, many of which require me to register with yet more services and fill out yet more profiles, I am also getting multiple "update your contact information" requests from people using Plaxo, AccuCard (from CardScan), and GoodContacts. Enough! Even Yahoo doesn't seem to know that the people in my groups are the same as those I want to invite (oops, Yahoo canceled its invitation service!), message, or pay using PayDirect.
The second pragmatic design problem is explicitness. Making relationships explicit, available to any virtual passerby, creates subtle complications. Long ago, when SixDegrees was in full swing, I wrote its CEO, Andrew Weinreich, that people like me were unlikely to enter their important first-degree contacts, because those contacts would be exposed to solicitations from strangers pinging them, saying, "I'm five degrees from Andrew, so we should talk." I take care when I recommend people to one another; SixDegrees disrupts that process and devalues it completely.
Few of the systems I am referring to in this article have addressed this problem successfully. From the perspective of explicitness, LinkedIn may be the best-designed of these services because it masks your contacts' contacts. Unfortunately, LinkedIn trips over the third problem: usability. I can't really figure out what to do with the service. Since my contacts' contacts are hidden (a virtue), I cannot really surf the network for my edification or voyeuristic pleasure. And the request-forwarding process that the site does offer is relatively clumsy to use.
Design problems can be solved by listening to complaints and improving software. Moral issues, on the other hand, are not as easy to fix.
When the information from social networks becomes explicit, either because participants voluntarily enter their information and upload their address books or because management runs analyses on email traffic to see who is talking to whom, the resulting data is catnip for engineers and MBAs. They cannot wait to analyze, reorganize, and optimize the networks they can control, including these new automated social networks.
Unfortunately, social networks are not like clockwork mechanisms or income statements. They are full of human beings, with relationships, expectations, and prejudices, and therefore require a gentle hand from management. They do not teach enough of those skills in business schools, and they teach even fewer of them in engineering schools. All the X-raying and mapping of social networks and org charts and contact lists creates the urge to undertake radical surgery on these systems. That may not be at all appropriate.
Finally, some of the social-network service providers and many third parties are already busy mining the data in networks where individuals disclose their expertise, goals, business links, and much more. In my experience, when the issue arises of how this data is collected and used, the key players all too often have lousy intent. Too few of them are completely trustworthy. Microsoft has had enormous trouble getting people to buy into HailStorm, Passport, and Palladium.
We may not trust Microsoft with this information, but should we trust, say, the Emode Friend Network? Emode has earned its principal revenue for years now by getting people to fill out funny, seemingly innocent personality quizzes with questions like "what kind of dog are you?" It then sells the information (aggregated, of course) to marketers. Tens of millions of visitors have taken dozens of quizzes each, a data miner's mother lode.
I am thrilled that social systems are getting considerable play these days, but I consider the trend as much a curse as a blessing. Here are three things that would improve the situation markedly:
- openness and integration among all these tools, so services interact smoothly and triple-, quadruple-, or even quintuple-entry of data vanishes.
- more training on how to manage social systems appropriately, so productive relationships can be enhanced, not disrupted; and
- more emphasis on rethinking and improving the basic tools we use to express ourselves, so we cease thinking in 7-bit ASCII email, HTML, and PowerPoint, and start communicating better and building lasting resources together.
Now that would launch many new relationships.
I say right on to Jerry. We're working hard on solving some of these rather obvious issues. I've tried to interact with Reid Hoffman about linkedIn's obvious UI "challenges", but so far.....
Well anyway it's great to see Jerry commenting on these issues (and welcome back to America - I'm sorry Hong Kong was such a 'hositle' environment.)
OK - so I admit it. Remember you have to know your competition - well. If we're gonna gateway into Longhorn, we gotta know what Longhorn is all about. Right?
