Tag Archives: linkedin

My perfect social network: inefficient and sometimes unreliable

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Danah Boyd has an excellent post on why efficiency and reliability are not necessarily good things in a social networking application:

Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other person, that we value them enough to spare our time and attention.

When an application such as Facebook makes it too easy to send a Cause Invitation to 100 “friends”, the invitation starts to look like spam. When it’s too easy to invite 800 people in your address book to Facebook or Linked In or whatever new social network someone dreams up, it feels fake. Why don’t applications developers purposely make it difficult to choose which friends to invite — make people type in each email address or click on each friend’s name.

My prediction for the coming year: we will see more invite-only, closed social networks.

Simplifying life and creating a zone of silence

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Until today, I maintained two blogs, this and Pajama Entrepreneur. I decided to merge Pajama Entrepreneur, my other blog about entrepreneurs and technology, into this blog. Why? I have no time to maintain two blogs. It means updating two different sites every time WordPress updates its software. That also means updating all the plugins. Too time-consuming.

The end of every year is a good time to examine what we can simplify in our lives and how we can use our time wisely. This means:

  • leaving social networking sites that waste lots of time and give nothing in return except endless spam from “friends” or dubious requests for an endorsement (why I left Linked In);
  • limiting the number of blogs I read everyday (deleting RSS feeds of blogs that say the same thing as other blogs);
  • unsubscribing from newsletters that provide little value and only regurgitate what I already know or what’s posted elsewhere (I unsubscribed from almost a dozen telecom-related newsletters whose content is absolutely worthless — the same blah-blah about mobile advertising, mobile Internet, MMS, SMS — really the same stuff for the past few years);
  • managing email: not responding to everyone’s email, putting people in the Junk Mail folder, checking email only twice a day.

I will be looking for other ways to streamline my life and expand my zone of silence so I can focus on the things that mean a lot to me. There’s too much noise out there and it is distracting.

Facebook problem: when everyone is on it, time to leave

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Cory Doctorow has written an excellent piece about how Facebook suffers from exactly the same dilemma suffered by earlier online social networks: when everyone’s on, it’s not cool anymore. And worse — you’ll need to “defriend” people. Oh how to do this without offending people? You can’t. Here’s an excerpt from Cory’s article:

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please. It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war.

I left LinkedIn, a popular business networking site precisely because lots of people wanted to be my contact and began pestering me for endorsements even though I hardly knew them. It was a complete waste of time. If I need to contact someone, I don’t need to go through LinkedIn. I have a very good network already and my friends are more than willing to make introductions to other people.