Every time some new social network site springs up one of my many friends or colleagues just has to invite me. And of course I have to try it out to see if there is really anything special about it. So far I’m not too impressed. I’m on Myspace, Orkut, Linkedin, Yahoo 360, Facebook, etc. Pretty much all of them. Have been since the beginning. I never send invite requests to my friends. I’m afraid it might be annoying to them. Most of the kind of people I hang out with don’t appreciate having their email addresses given to third parties without their consent. I get nearly a thousand spams a day now so I don’t blame them.
I know lots of people visit these sites and some have market valuations in the billions. And if there were just one and everyone used it I might be more into it. But I just can’t see using the site as my only means of communicating with people. I hear some folks do all of their messaging etc through it and they consider email to be out of style. I suspect these people are high school and perhaps college kids. It might work for gossip and kid communications but I suspect that for getting stuff done in the real world email has little to fear.
And what’s up with the horrible page design and user interface? It seems everyone has to customize their page and make it impossible to read with lots of widgets and play a really sappy song in the background when you load it up. I’m not whether my ears, my eyes, or my browser are more strongly offended. I recently found an article somewhere lamenting this same problem but alas I cannot for the life of me recall where it was to link to it.
And now I have clients saying they want “social networking” added to their website designed to sell widgets because they hear about it all the time and think it will attract people to their site and sell more widgets. sigh