March 10, 2008

The Next Social Network

Could the WordPress blogging app be the next "social networking" platform? A blog post about that from last December just crossed my digital radar screen, and I found it interesting - especially these thoughts:

In contrast to social networking, blogging offers a person-centric way for individuals to come online. A social network like Facebook gives you your own place online, but it's not really your own place. As Copyblogger Brian Clark recently said in a blog post, "For me, there's really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating 'user-generated' content via a social networking application. That's like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent."

Clark was responding to an ongoing conversation launched by blogger and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who proposed that blogging is far more important to him than social networking. Bloggers including Stowe Boyd and Darren Rowse seconded the idea. This growing disenchantment with social networking and return to blogging suggests that in the future we could see a migration, at least among tech bloggers, towards more distributed social networking - along the lines of what [Chris] Messina [co-founder of Citizen Agency] envisions.

Not a week goes by that I don't get invited to join some new social network - most of which I've never heard of. I decline pretty much all of them. There are simply too many of them and not enough hours in the day to maintain one's page on that many social networks. You'll find me on LinkedIn and Facebook, and that's about it.

What I'd like to see created would be a single "meta-social networking platform" from which one could manage all of one's disparate social network accounts. Oh, and a social network that, as it grows and enriches its creators, also enriches its members.

Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old who created Facebook is worth $1.5 billion. Why don't the members of Facebook - whose presence on his platform is the sole reason for his wealth - get to share in it? Seems to me a social network that was also a $ocial network would do pretty well.