Social Network Fatigue Coming? 196
mrspin offers the opinion of ZDNet blogger Steve O'Hear that users may soon tire of social networks — if they don't open up and embrace standards allowing greater interoperability among the different networks. O'Hear writes: "Unless the time required to sign-in, post to, and maintain profiles across each network is reduced, it will be impossible for most users to participate in multiple sites for very long." In an earlier post he went into more detail on the same subject, with extensive opinions from four creators of social networks. A contrary data point comes from the Apophenia blog, in a post noting the tendency among young users to create ephemeral profiles, and not to mind at all if they have to re-enter data. "Teens are not looking for universal anything; that's far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm." What does Slashdot think — is data portability among social networking sites a big deal or not?
Use a common portal then... (Score:5, Funny)
That may be the key for now, because I doubt any "standard" will develop among different social network sites. (I sure can't imagine how myspace, youtube, facebook, livejournal, orkut, etc. would agree on a standard: they all have their own approaches and problems. Myspace would demand every 1/3 request goes to a "under maintenance" page, still filled with a hundred ads and flash videos and other flash apps to crash your browser... and Orkut would demand every 2/3 requests is a server hiccup.)
Re:Use a common portal then... (Score:4, Informative)
It may not have to. Imagine some software that would come pre-installed with most web hosting accounts or easily installed via c-panel a la wordpress or movabletype and people will no longer need a centralized site in order to connect in the way they seem to want to. Friends lists, message boards, picture commenting and bulletins could all easily be done with a free host and the right software [freshmeat.net]. No need to rely on a central server/company that buries you in ads or censors you [doctorvee.co.uk]. And your less geeky friends could use it from a multitude of free or cheap hosts as their entire page and I could install it in a directory of my site to stay connected in a neat way to my online friends.
Sure, today the software's too difficult to install and lacks some features. But if that ever changes it could mean a big change in how social networking pages interact with each other: No more middle-man.
IT'S ALL TRUE! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Use a common portal then... (Score:4, Informative)
Hey, I'm the main appleseed developer. If you have had any problems installing, I'd be interested to hear them. Anything I can do to make it easier to install, the better. I know there's a lot I can do since I haven't focused much on ease of installation, but if you have any ideas, let me know!
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Oh, okay, I see now. Yeah, those are warnings that I haven't been able to work out yet. The quick fix is to go to code/include/classes/appleseed.php and set error_reporting to E_ERROR (around line 703).
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I just visited the appleseed site. http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
The idea looks cool, but you've got a problem with your page (at the top).
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That's an error that I just haven't been able to track down, and it seems to be a problem with Sourceforge's hosting.
I think it's about users, not software (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think it has anything to do with software or the interface; I think it has everything to do with the users.
Participants will probably settle into communities whe
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Re:We had E/N back in 2000 (Score:2)
We had all this back with the E/N pages back in 2000 before Livejournal (and way before Myspace) but the problem is that non-technical people outnumber the technical so E/N pretty much died out.
It's all about sex (Score:3, Funny)
The burnout is just another way of saying it's not worth the effort for the return on the sex.
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Well, my keyboard will be glad to hear that I'll be giving up internet sex soon.
I don't think there is anything to worry about. I suspect that people actually want to have disparate systems so that they can manage and explore multiple persona's online without anyone making a link between the different personalities. It's like to old story of people making up names when they go to a bar so no one has to worry about a freak traking them down in the morning.
However, each social network has an interest in b
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The key isn't being able to access data from a consistent visual interface - it's being able to choose where your data is stored, and change both your mind and the nature of the data itself. If you've got a file, you
Thank Heavens! (Score:2)
There's goodness in that. Really.
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Let us assume that you have the ability to create YOUR personal image page/blog/forum/datastore.
Let us assume that you have the ability to post that image onto one of 3 dozen different portals.
Now, other portals can "pick up" your portal and present it on their site - the more valuable your content/editorial/novel/art/attitude, the more sites will make it available. Maybe there could even be a percentage of advertising revenues coming back to you if your portal drives more visitors
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We need look no further than good old UNIX file permissions.
Set your document's permissions as you go
. world readable / world writable / world executable
. group readable / group writable / group executable
. owner readable / owner writable / owner executable
Ultimately, it's all about publishing. If you want to store your document for your eyes only, set the permissions and you're done. If you want to make it accessible to the world, you need only change the permissi
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If you consider how difficult it is to explain to people how to cut and paste from one place to another, you can appreciate how much effort people are wiling to go through to create one of those profiles.
I've created my own social networking site [amazing.com], and after a great deal of thought, I decided to support
Semantically Interlinked Online (Score:2)
But I believe that singe-site reliance is inheritently evil, standardisation is required. I think there is a very interesting approach in SIOC - Semantically Interlinked Online Communities [sioc-project.org], which seeks to make it possible to share all data across different sites, make it possible to interlink data in th
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One
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all
We're sort of heading in this direction with RDF.. (Score:2)
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I don't think it'll be an issue. (Score:2)
I use social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and more, to promote my artwork/design services and music. Most of my fans all have profiles on the same sites, and don't seem to have any problems managing their glitter-animated-gif-laiden profiles. Most of those people are also technologically incompetent. I've never heard any complaints (other than the "Why won't my profile load as fast as yours" crap)
Relevancy (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there fatigue over these sites, or just ennui, due to their fundamental lack of any content, other than being circle-jerks?
Re:Relevancy (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously am I the only one that just doesn't get social networking sites?
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Re:Relevancy (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't mean to be harsh, and I'm not looking to get modded a troll, but most people who enjoy using social sites over the long-term (in my opinion) have a lot of friends they actually care to keep in contact with. I'm a big Facebook user. It helps me keep up with my two sisters away at college as well as a lot of old friends of mine from high school and from college that I actually care to keep up with.
This is very different from internet-based relationships. (And that's where "have a life" may be harsh.) If you're into EVE Online or whatever, that's great. But your relationship with those people is, fundamentally, based in a digital medium. Sometimes MMO players get together in real life, sometimes really tight messageboard communities do the same thing. But that's the exception rather than the norm. The norm is for users brought together by a common interest to have little interest in maintaining relationships with those people in the absence of the common interest.
I played Planetside for a while. Not really an MMORPG, but certainly an MMO back in its day. I had an outfit (Guild, if you will) and several people that I considered friends in my Planetside world. Not only were they in my outfit, but we worked well together, laughed at each others jokes, and generally enjoyed playing together. That was the extent of it, however. I'm not saying I would not have cared to know how their day was outside of Planetside, or how their relationship was going. I may have cared, but that would have been a different kind of relationship. It would have been, for lack of a less-harsh term, caring about their real life and not just the game life.
American culture is more mobile than ever. It's normal go to high school in one city, go to college in another city, and get a job in a third city. And even if you don't move around that much, some of your friends certainly will. It's precisely these 18 - 25 year olds who use these sites. They are trying to find a kind of stability in their ever-changing world. If your entire circle of friends is cycled at least every 4 years, you may want to find a way to combat that social churn and get a more stable set of friends. A sense of permenance and community.
As far as the original question about portability goes, I don't think it's that much of an issue. I chose Facebook precisely because it's not MySpace. I have no desire to be a part of the MySpace community, or any other community. If I do want to join another community, then I think re-entering my data would be a minimal issue. Some data portability would be nice, but hardly required. And in any case, functional data portability (e.g. not just my personal stats, but my friends) is really difficult without creating semi-official digital selves or using a lot of personally-identifiable data. Either of these options result in serious privacy concerns, so I'll trade a little re-keying for a new social cite to keep my data relatively anonymous.
-stormin
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These sites just don't offer much. Replacing MySpace could be a weekend project in RoR, for the technology. It's growing only because of the network effect - your friends are there and it seems that you should be too. But, when you've used one or two of these sites you quickly realize that they're all exactly the same and that My
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I've been doing that for years with email and I don't have get smashed in the face with the vast, unaccountable horror that is most myspace pages :)
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Let me respond to this with a question: do you really think that you can have as fulfilling a relationship online as you can in real life? Now you personally might be able to, but I'd say that's a sad commentary on your interpersonal relationship skills. And I don't mean this as a burn. Let's just look at it in terms of data. How much information can you convey with just text? How much with text and photos? How much with text, photos, and
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1. I realize that sometimes people can have more meaningful relationships online, but this is an aberation. It's when something is wrong. Not necessarily wrong with the person. In your case, for example, it had to do with environment. Because of a crappy environment, you weren't able to have normal, healthy real-life relationships and thus your digital relationships became more important.
I'm not trying to attack people who, for whatever reason, are more socially active online than in rea
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You are a geek. You think differently than the non-geeks do. I have three cases of internet users in my house.
Children: These are technophiles that want to use technology because it provides seconds of entertainment but have absolutely zero desire to actually learn about anything related to technology. They are also blindly driven by their adolescent instinct to socialize and use technology as the means to satiatate the need. They easily can spend hours on IM or MySpace trolling for something that the
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-stormin
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It's the fundamental lack of ~intelligent~ content that makes me not care about any of it. Any intelligent comment on Digg or Youtube is like a tree falling in a forest somewhere. The Usenet was exclusive at one time and still has interesting specialty discussions. The WWW has proven that millions of people who can afford Internet access have nothing to say and has become worse than Tee-Vee. The latter is an amoral
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For inveterate poopyheads, there's Digg and hundreds of PHPBB installations.
Re:Relevancy (Score:4, Funny)
So, yeah, okay. Ten points to Gothmolly.
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No, it's not (Score:5, Interesting)
Social network fatigue is not coming.
Why, you ask? The reason is that as the number of things that people do increases, so does the number of things that social networking sites offer. A great example is Yahoo! which I would argue is a social networking site. It offers email, games, news, music, you name it. I am convinced beyond a doubt that they will start offering blogging in the near future, particularly, as competition to Google's Blogger.
Yahoo! is a great example of an all-in-one philosophy. Google is doing similar things. Pretty soon, however, people are just going to have one account on one giant social networking site. There will be competition, of course, and some will have accounts on one but not the other, but pretty soon, very few people are going to actually have many different accounts.
Re:No, it's not (Score:4, Informative)
Yup, Dodgeball [dodgeball.com] (owned by Google) uses your Google Account login to authenticate you. Blogger uses the same authentication whether you are doing a comment or hosting your own blog.
Personally, I would rather see separate accounts for everything but it's not like they can't track just about everything we do already.
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I disagree with this "mondo site" philosophy. Young people drive a lot of what's hip and not hip. Yes, technology can build and gain momentum but social aspects are popularity driven, not technology driven. The tech is not always obvious. MySpace arguably has some of the worse tech and a hideous interface yet it's popular. I believe there will be more fragmentation and popularity will shift from site to site as it always has.
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Arguably?
But seriously, people will keep switching, no doubt about it. What will change is what they switch. Instead of changing small, dedicated services, they will switch larger ones.
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But you make a good point. A place that would allow you to consolidate your data is a good idea. Some personal portals let you do some of this now.
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The answer to your question: The computer does not care what you are talking about.
From a technological viewpoint, all that is relevant is that you have a way to communicate. Sure, you may have 1 or two additional features, like embedded credit card transfers or something similar, but it won't be anything nearly complicated to warrant creating a whole servi
philosophically interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
this opens up new weaknesses in social interaction, and new strengths. in a world where identity theft is a growing menace, why would that matter when your identity is made of mercury anyways? at the same time, how can anyone be trusted in a world where the idea of a solid identity is built on a foundation of sand?
i see weird confluences of unseen consequences coming out of the new plasticity of identity due to how the web works in the generation currently in their teens, making its way into their very psychology. in ways us ancient fossils in our 20s and 30s won't even understand
"bah, kids these days"
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I dunno. "Plasticity of identity" is all well and good until you go try and apply for a mortgage, or manage a career. Plastic people tend to get their attitudes readjusted real fast, when society eventually expects them to go through thei
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About time! (Score:2, Interesting)
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I've been working on an open source software that uses a distributed protocol. It's called Appleseed [sourceforge.net]
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To The Contrary (Score:2, Funny)
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A couple thoughts... (Score:2)
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And if that's the case, you might want to look at indi [getindi.com]. You can send pictures/movies/documents/whatever over channels, but it's all encrypted and only you and the people in your group can descrypt it. Kind of like email without the spam and attachment size limits. But secure.
Single service (Score:3, Interesting)
I was under the impression that most people stuck to a single service anyway. Maybe they have multiple accounts across the board, but they probably devote most of their time to just one.
Which one they choose depends on their "network." Just like instant messaging, some people will use aim, some will use yahoo, some will use msn. Some will try to keep up with all of them, and some will occasionally convert for someone special. The headline makes it sound like people will tire of social networking in general, but typically people will always be social, so that won't hurt the business.
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Sometimes people might go back and forth, spending some time working on their Facebook profile and then a few months concentrating on their Myspace p
Putting it all together (Score:2)
I guess all this has a logical conclusion, where someone sets up a meta-site that pulls together all your online profiles into one 'ME' page. When they do that, it'll be quite something. Imagine all your Myspace friends witho
I wrote my own (Score:2)
I think fatigue as in boredom is coming (Score:3, Interesting)
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Take sex or rebellion. Every generation thinks they've invented both. By the time they realize they haven't, an entire new generations begins the process again.
So while the individual users may get bored or m
fatigue? (Score:2)
Profile data isn't the key (Score:3, Interesting)
The guts of every social networking website is the friends systems, messaging/IM, photos, blogging (of one form or another), commenting, etc. Why would SocialNetworkA want to share that with SocialNetworkB? That assumes they are alike, and for social networking websites to all survive, they will need to differentiate and stay that way. In face, they already have -- Facebook, for instance, is geared more toward the college student/post-college professional. MySpace was started for bands/music. Etc.
When you're posting about your class schedule, do you really care if your friends back home on MySpace see it? Doubtful.
Besides, if all the social networking websites were the same, how could teens carry on their multiple mood swings throughout a day?
Mood: happy
Mood: angry >:\
Mood: horny
Mood: suicidal X-|
Nobody cares (Score:3, Interesting)
1)There's no damn difference between a myspace account and a personal webpage people have had since the 90s
2)Nobody really reads the damn things anyway- people love writing due to the sheer egotism of it, but nobody really reads the damn things except the small circle of friends they'd talk to anyway.
They don't care about signing in (come on, 90% of people just use the remember me or browser password storage anyway). They don't need a standard way to enter text, its a giant textbox everywhere. They don't care about profile sharing, chances are far and away they use a single main site and only update that one anyway. There's no real benefit to a standard for any of these things.
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Just because it's the internet, it's not a criteria for success that you have millions of visitors.
The phone only allows you to disperse your thought to one (or very few) persons at a time, but there are billions connected to the phone network. Yet, phones are still here.
Point: This is talking to a small circle of f
some related efforts (Score:2)
Absolutely, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
It makes perfect sense for people outside of these corporations to see that... But from within, how do you balance interoperability with the business necessity of maintaining your users? For-profit sites aren't interested in that balancing act. They'll keep their walled garden as isolated as they can.
I've been developing an open source, distributed social networking software called Appleseed [sourceforge.net], and honestly, I think the solution is going to have to come from an open source solution. As long as profit and market share are the main motivating factors of companies like Facebook, Friendster, Myspace, etc., there is absolutely no incentive to design things properly.
Appleseed, and open source in general, has the freedom to be able to do things right. Create an interoperable network of social networking "nodes" which use a standard protocol to connect and interact. It's very simple, and the rules of business that these companies have to follow is the only thing keeping that from happening from within the proprietary world.
I see it as analagous to the old days of email. Back in the day, you had Compuserve, you had AOL, and Prodigy, and other competing services that attempted to monopolize their user base by refusing interoperability. But eventually, they had no choice but to adopt standard E-Mail for their users.
Let's face it, in this day and age, there is no single, good technological answer for why a user on MySpace can't send a message or a friend request to a user on Friendster, other than "We [myspace] doesn't want them to." Which is not an answer that people will tolerate for long.
This is an itch, and open source (namely, Appleseed, since it seems like the solution which is the farthest along) is the only way to scratch it. [sourceforge.net]
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Absolutely. I hope to eventually have your appleseed address (which looks just like an email address) work as a Jabber address as well, for those appleseed nodes which opt to serve as jabber servers as well. Possibly even try and make the appleseed protocol more of an extension of the jabber protocol?
I also hope to have a pop-in window for jabber chat, just like Gmail uses.
This is definitely farther dow
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There's certainly a need for distributed Social Networking. I'd love to be able to add these features to sites administered by myself and allow Friend Requests, bulletins, etc to propagate seamlessly between like-minded domains. I'd also like to control the hosting for my own social-networking home page.
Friend requests would come from "name@domain.com" instead of "name", but I can't see that being a problem for people.
I had assumed that the first thing that woul
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With Appleseed, you can set up a node using an $8 a month shared hosting account, and handle probably around 25-50 users comfortably. Or spend some more and make a dedicated site for, say, comic book geeks or cat enthusiasts, and spend a couple hundred bucks a month for a colocated server so you can get a thousand some users. Throw some google ads up on the site, and a donation button, and you'll easily make up your hosting costs if you've got loyal, active u
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Actually, it has not long been claimed by advertisers. Actually, if you look closely, the site expired yesterday (Jan 02, 2007). I've been trying to contact my hosting company in order to renew the domain, but I've been having problems getting in touch with them. Hopefully the site will be available again within the next day or two.
Reminds me of online chat and roleplay (Score:3, Interesting)
Eventually, WBS was shut down as a web-based chat system and people were scattered to the wind. Some smaller sites opened up, some of which are still active today, but none of them ever captured the greatness that was prior to their inception and none worked well with one another. It was during I decided to kill a bit of time and code my own site, being throughoughly disgruntled by the administration of certain of those sites.
The code I built grew in scope, adding features that had been lost when WBS fell, adding my own, expanding into galleries, forums and adding new features including a social network/dating profile addition. Naturally people started to notice and flocked to my site which generated a modest amount of traffic day in and day out.
There was one difference however from my site and others who offered similiar services and that was code released under the GPL and made freely available. While the code to this day is still a bit difficult to install (tons of modules it depends on) other sites managed to get it going and it caused an unexpected side effect. Essentially it allowed other people to create a multitude of splinter sites, without having to know programming, database administration or even administration of a Unix based server.
As a result of the GPL, these sites featured the same options, functionality, features as the main site with a possible lag in development/release time. However even when I closed my site and people moved on, I noticed that the splinter sites kept popping up with (specific niche needs) here and there using the code and the features that had been put into the code for years.
Perhaps social networking is in for such a step. Essentially, a commodity-based approach to the product and through standards/common code allow people to find communities that match their needs. Sure it may not be a Lavalife, Facebook, MySpace in which everyone and their dog is there, but people do seem to find comfort in a little corner to the world being their own, a community of like-minded people a net centered neighbourhood.
On a side note, I also found that once the code allowed for things such as import/export of handles and such, people tended to flow freely from one site to another. I wonder if implementing OpenID on the system would increase that movement?
I think the problem... (Score:2)
Usenet (Score:2)
I'm already sick of them (Score:2)
Myspace is painful to look at, and really, no one I know is so interesting that I need to go read their blogs. The entire idea of a whole page dedicated to me is egotistical in the extreme; I realize I am not that important.
Wow, someone missed the point of these companies. (Score:2)
Duh. The point is the sites are in competition with one another. You're not supposed to use all of them, you're supposed to sign your allegiance to one and ignore people who use the others, kinda like high school cliques in real life.
I was fatigued before I started. (Score:3, Interesting)
The point? These sites aren't just "fatiguing" current users; they're scaring away potential users like me who aren't willing to sit through 5-10 minutes of entering (fake) personal information just to occasionally watch a 3-minute video clip or read a meandering myspace post written by a friend who's too lazy to just goddamn email me.
Not. (Score:2)
Social networking aside, data portability isn't a big deal for 99.9% of computer users.
Not happinin' (Score:2)
This will not happen because these for profit sites do not want you to use other networks, certainly not with theirs.
Re: Social Net Fatigue Coming (Score:2)
The commons hasn't embraced standards in IM, why should social networking be any different? You build a successful on-line community by appealing directly to your target audience:
Countries and Cultures, Age and Sex, Income and Interests. The commons won't care that you've built a walled garden, if the garden is where t
Social networking sites have a life cycle (Score:2)
As I wrote once before, social networking sites, like nightclubs, have a life cycle. They start out, get some users, and if they're well run and lucky, become cool. Then they become too popular, the percentage of losers goes up, the cool people leave, and they go into a slow decline.
This has already happened to AOL (peaked sometime last century), Geocities (peaked before 2002), Nerve (peaked in 2002), and Tribe (peaked in Q1 2006). Facebook, Myspace, and LinkedIn look flat, but it's too early to tell.
1999 called, (Score:3, Informative)
Face it: IM is no more interroperable now than it was then; sure, there's a few niche clients like Trillian operating, but what percent of users use them?
People do one of two things: they suck it up and use more than one service at once, or they pick the one they like (or that serves more of their friends) and bail on the others. I have seen my friends (and myself, for that matter) do this with myspace, facebook, and friendster already. You start out with 3, and you end up with 1.
Teens? (Score:2)
Coming? It got here last year. (Score:2)
Unable to reply (Score:4, Funny)
RSS (Score:2)
What? Why? (Score:2)
I don't think I'd very much care for digg, kuro5hin, and fark to be merged in with slashdot.
Just add a little Google (Score:2)
Facebook and data exportation (Score:5, Interesting)
Back a few years ago, there was a brief time when Facebook let you export your friends contact information as a VCard file. It was awesome -- you could download all of your friends' info to one file, and from there import it into Address Book, or the PIM of your choice. From there, if you had an intelligent enough system, you could have all their birthdays added to your calendar, phone numbers downloaded to your mobile, etc.
They eliminated the feature pretty quickly after they implemented it -- I only got one data download out of it -- due to spam concerns, but I always thought that there had to be a way to balance spam resistance against the obvious benefits of such a system. (Of course, the obvious solution is to only 'friend' people you actually know and trust, and not just anybody who sends you a request...but any security method based on user intelligence is probably doomed to failure.)
If they've re-enabled anything like that, I'd be very impressed. Facebook is by far my favorite 'social networking' site (which isn't saying much, really it's akin to saying 'Facebook doesn't make me want to gouge out my own eyes'), but it could certainly be more useful if the data, both simple contact information and more complex relationship-derived metadata, was exportable for external use and analysis.
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2. Login and post.
3. Repeat step 2 two more times
What's so hard about that? It seems like you spend more time worrying about whether one thing is playing nice with the others then you would simply logging in twice. And why not simply make your WP background white?
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I do not think this word "ironically" means what you think it means... [webster.com]
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unless the major webmail accounts consolidate
Last time I looked you could send email from an MSN account to a Gmail account and then forward that onto a Yahoo account. So yes - The major webmail accounts do consolidate.
Consolidating Social Networks is not about ensuring one login works amongst all sites, it's about making sure that the company I choose as a social networking provider allows me to interact with people who use a different social netwrking provider.