Brendan Peveril . net

October 19, 2008

Social networks

Filed under: Yes I do have friends, Internet, A thought, networking — Brendan @ 1:10 pm

So, I was thinking about social networking. It’s fun, but it’s useful too. Lets you keep in touch with your friends, meet new people, blah blah blah. Great.

Now, if we take a look at the big social network sites, we can see how much fun this all is, but we see the drawbacks too. It costs a lot of money to be myspace. Everybody uses it. It’s noisy and confusing. These are all three linked together, and to eliminate one you have to eliminate the others. What are you left with, though? Is that something you’d be interested in?

At this point, there are two kinds of people (for the sake of this argument). There are the people who use social networks, and the ones who don’t. People who do always use more than one. Even if they don’t right away, they will eventually. It’s like instant messaging. We’ve all got our favs, but we’ve all got accounts on several others too. Even if I’m not on Orkut and Six degrees, I am on Facebook and Myspace, though. If I meet an Orkut user, chances are that they’ll use one or both of the ones that I’m on. Giving established users a reason to join one more is not a big deal.

For non-users, well, they’re a different animal. For the ones who don’t use the social nets because they’re afraid of recieving emails, or talking to strangers, well, not a whole lot I can do. For the ones who just like being a dick and saying, “No, I haven’t got a facebook.” an elitist, invite only community is perfect.

The proposal here is something that internet heads have been talking about for a while, and it’s been happening kind of just off radar for most people. There are some fairly well known cases, like comic space (which I ought to update…) where a social network is set up to serve a specific community, but it’s still big. Picture this, though. A small community of just the people I know, then the people they know, etc. out a few layers, set up to be invite only with only a few features implemented. You could use it for social networking, a discussion forum, blog aggregators, maybe photo sharing, maybe even a game or two.

Without the heavy traffic of the big sites you don’t need advertising, or all of the extra attractions, to make the site economically viable. You just need a benefactor who’s willing to lay down a few dollars/month for webspace and someone to kickstart things again when it breaks. Without this large expense, you can trim all of that fat, leaving a much more streamlined experience.

The fact of the matter is, while Mousehunt and Bloodlust are fun, they take away from what the social network is good for; making connections with people. If I want to talk with someone new who doesn’t have fucking brain damage about politics, or play a game of chess with someone who has interests outside of playing chess with strangers on the internet, Facebook is of little use to me. If we narrow the group down to, say, only people who friends, and friends of friends, have vouched for personally, though, I’ve got a good shot at finding someone to talk to my first try. Likewise, I know that the people that have been invited aren’t too creepy (well, in my case I know they’re not creepier than I am, because, you know), so a lot of the need for privacy is alleviated. People behave better when the official TOS is “don’t be a dick or Brendan will probably punch you in the mouth”. Likewise, if I need to find someone to, say, write me a computer program, or play photographer at my book release party, or recommend an honest mechanic in Seattle, or let me sleep on their couch because I’m marooned in Calgary, there’s a community of people right there who I can trust, because they’re all friends of friends.

So, what do we say, kids? Anyone into that? Maybe I’m just being cagey and isolationist. I know that Warren Ellis talks about this every once in a while. A quick dredge through the archives of his blog turned up some relevant links:

Buddypress: It’s a wordpress extension, which is a little gross.

Folkstr: Site seems to be down. Don’t know what’s up with that.

Top 40 Free Downloadable Open Source Social Networking Software: Haven’t gone through these yet.

Comments (4)

February 18, 2007

I feel like I ought to plug this…

Filed under: writing, Yes I do have friends — Brendan @ 9:12 pm

So, one of my oldest friends wrote a story and tricked someone (or bribed with all of the finery a grad student’s income can afford (bjs are free!)) into publishing it. I am hell of jealous.

You can read about it here. The publisher’s site doesn’t really seem to work in the usual sense (read: at all).

Comments (1)

October 19, 2008

Social networks

February 18, 2007

I feel like I ought to plug this…

Artists

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