Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

Social networking or self-centred networking?

Filed under: Internet and Blogging by Hari
Posted on Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 09:00 IST (last updated: Wed, Jul 16, 2008 @ 20:10 IST)

I've never been a big fan of Orkut-style social networking websites where you create user profiles, add friends and exchange messages. Somehow, I've not got into them. These social network sites, in spite of being so feature-rich and user-friendly are nothing more than glorified online contact lists. Yes, you collect a whole bunch of "friends", but what does that really achieve? A simple e-mail address book is a much better social network tool and much less clunky. After my initial burst with social networks, I've not found anything to draw me back to them. I hardly log into Orkut these days. Even the excitement of discovering my old school mates through such channels has died down. I feel that those sites are nothing more than self-centred networks. Your main focus is your own profile. And everything else centres around you. To me, at least, these self-centred networks don't have a great deal of attraction. My blog does a better job in that case.

Oh, I am aware that you can build discussion forums and communities around these social networking sites, but discussion communities are not unique to social networking. Discussion groups and online forums have existed in a far simpler form long before the whole "Web 2.0" phenomenon came into existence.

And then there are the link submission-style (social bookmarking) sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. Once again, I'm not a big user of those. Yes, they do help you get a link back but most of these links are worthless from an SEO point of view (unless your article gets to the front-page somehow). It's true that you might get a lot of traffic for a couple of days from such sites. But then again, it does nothing to promote real social interaction. Additionally you are bound by the likes and dislikes of those communities. I generally find that the communities who use social bookmarking are extremely unreceptive to topics other than technology (and to an extent politics). Thus they are useful to you only if you follow their trends and write about their kind of topics. Besides most of the visitors who come to read your website after clicking on such sites never return. Finally, to the best of my knowledge (and from what I've learned from others), the traffic from social bookmarking sites never generate much advertising revenue anyway. It's merely the internet equivalent of 15 minutes of fame.

I know a lot of you will disagree with this. In fact, I have no doubt that most people will have made better use of social networking and social bookmarking tools than I have and see them as very valuable online resources, but then this article is about how I see them. It seems to me that the whole social-networking thing is overhyped. I always follow my own path in this - most of my friends online are people who've been interacting with me regularly by e-mail for years and those who I've come to know over a period of time. I know I'm old fashioned ;)

20 comment(s)

  1. Hehehe.

    A reason I use facebook: the perceived security. While I would love for my friends to get flickr and twitter and a blog, something about facebook has made people sign up. It's trendy, maybe. Also, since you restrict who can see your profile, it seems more secure/private.

    With out facebook, I probably wouldn't have seen pictures of my friend's engagement ring- they aren't close close (to warrant an email) but it is still nice to keep up with them.

    I know there is a lot of self-centredism out there- but isn't that the fault of the person/culture rather than the social network?

    (yeah yeah, you're old fashioned. Hari = "get off my lawn!" :D )

    Comment by titanium (visitor) on Mon, Jan 21, 2008 @ 17:06 IST #
  2. I understand that these communities serve a purpose.

    What I felt was that they added nothing more than a glorified e-mail and address book function with a few extras.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Mon, Jan 21, 2008 @ 18:36 IST #
  3. the "few extras" are what make social networking for most people.

    And, people *are* self-centred. :D It's what makes these things popular.

    Comment by titanium (visitor) on Mon, Jan 21, 2008 @ 22:51 IST #
  4. Once Mattel stomps the Scrabulous guys out of their most excellent creative existence, I doubt if I'll have a reason to continue to use Facebook with much frequency. As for, Digg, I couldn't get into it, and the others require far too much work. And, hey, if I visit from work, my browser might crash...

    Comment by MrCorey (visitor) on Tue, Jan 22, 2008 @ 06:30 IST #
  5. Yes, I understand that people are self-centred. That's why I prefer the topic-oriented (traditional) discussion forums to social networking sites.

    MrCorey, I don't know much about facebook. But all of them seem to be pretty much build along the same lines.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Tue, Jan 22, 2008 @ 07:18 IST #
  6. You know what's really sad, when I read somewhere that you can buy friends. Yes, you can buy friends to join and add you as a friend on social networking sites, like myspace from what I read. Yes, you too can have beautiful friends to make yourself look more popular. I'd rather have no friends than fake friends and no one should ever have to buy their friends, that's not being a friend. The internet is a sad sad world when it comes to reality for some people.

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Wed, Jan 23, 2008 @ 02:41 IST #
  7. Buying friends haha. Sounds a lot like what politicians do...

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Jan 23, 2008 @ 11:48 IST #
  8. You have some good points, Hari, all around. I've been invited to, and joined social networks in past. I no longer do that unless I want to see what all the hoopla is about. I've been withdrawing from social sites quite a bit for the past few months. I even deleted my profile at MyBlogLog.

    The biggest problem I have with them (except for StumbleUpon and BloggingZoom) is all the messages saying something to the effect of "come look at me, come look at my blog". That crap gets old really fast.

    It's kind of like the Digg shouts. It was okay at first -- until I started getting a thousand shouts a day. I'm not exaggerating.

    Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on Wed, Jan 23, 2008 @ 11:55 IST #
  9. RT, yes. I found that topics on Bloggingzoom quite repetitive, even though it's much better than Digg in that respect.

    The point was, I am not the "you scratch my back, I scratch yours" kind of guy which these social network sites seem to promote.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Jan 23, 2008 @ 12:11 IST #
  10. The back scratching thing doesn't bother me too much if it's kept in moderation, but it isn't. I especially dislike the "I visited your blog, now visit mine" remarks as well as the "thank you for visiting my site" notes. Some of these are automatic responses. Yuck.

    Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on Wed, Jan 23, 2008 @ 12:28 IST #
  11. Well I have a facebook and myspace account myself. I don't really use them like others do. Facebook is just confusing to me and myspace I only use to look for bands. What I really hate is the damn bulletins with the 100 question surveys people post and pass around. It's like they have a total of 5 of the same ones that keep getting passed around, that gets really old. I don't know what's worse, my family sending me the forwarded jokes they sent a year previously or reading the same damn survey questions over and over again.

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Wed, Jan 23, 2008 @ 18:39 IST #
  12. "Facebook is just confusing to me"

    Amen to that! I often change my status message to something that indicates confusion, as it makes me feel better (especially the part where I've figured out how to change my status message).

    Comment by MrCorey (visitor) on Thu, Jan 24, 2008 @ 06:22 IST #
  13. I'm going to start a community called FeetPaper. :p

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Thu, Jan 24, 2008 @ 20:12 IST #
  14. Let's start an anti-social network community. Not sure how it would work but I'm sure people would be dumb enough to join and be anti-social to one another..

    I should go patent the idea before someone steals it.. ;)

    Comment by drew (visitor) on Thu, Jan 24, 2008 @ 21:18 IST #
  15. In general I think I agree with you.
    I never really got into stumbleupon or digg or any of those. Its too much work!
    I do use Bloggingzoom, but to be honest it isn't a social thing at all for me. It is a way to promote my own, self centered work. But I did find a lot of good blogs to read through there, and I have been experimenting with helping other people's articles move up. Obviously I don't have many real 'friends' there!
    Through BZ I have found about 6 people that I communicate with by email, so we're back to your email address book, Hari :)

    Comment by Tim (visitor) on Sun, Jan 27, 2008 @ 21:28 IST #
  16. Thanks, Tim. yes, we always end up going back to e-mail, don't we?

    Maybe a generation older to us would say, they always went back to the good old hand-written letter.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Mon, Jan 28, 2008 @ 13:09 IST #
  17. Hari,

    I'm with you on this one (but maybe I'm old fashioned too!).

    I have various social networking accounts, but almost never use them.

    If you're after social interaction, a much better option is to visit the sites of your blogging buddies and join in the discussion in the comments.

    My 2 cents...

    Comment by Stephen Cronin (visitor) on Tue, Jan 29, 2008 @ 14:41 IST #
  18. Thanks for your comment, Stephen.

    Yes, I'm definitely after the interaction.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Tue, Jan 29, 2008 @ 19:37 IST #
  19. Well what i know is social media allows us to discover, connect and engage with new people of interest. While most people are open to new connections and receiving messages from people they don’t know, there is a fine line between reaching out and spamming.The challenge is to make a connection clearly and effectively without wasting people’s time.Many of us are on both sides of this relationship-sometimes making the connection,sometimes receiving the invitation.

    Comment by cheap r4ds (visitor) on Wed, Feb 3, 2010 @ 16:06 IST #
  20. Yes and on that note, please use your real name while commenting. I will remove your links otherwise.

    Comment by Hari (blog owner) on Wed, Feb 3, 2010 @ 17:23 IST #

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