Why Join Another Social Network

Aloha Chris, I appreciate your sharing our conversation here, for it’s always good to get more thoughts … and I’ve been known to change my mind!

This is the (current :-) thinking I’m at; dedicated quality versus web-candy quantity. I own a full-time business that is blessing me with tons of activity both offline and on, and there are only so many programs I can concentrate on and sound half-way intelligent with.

And Chris, we’ll always be connected; even if the web sent away tomorrow in some magical puff of smoke.

Keep up the brilliant conversation you energize us with, Rosa

It’s interesting to read this and then consider the ramifications of it all. I was invited to Pownce today and tried it out. I really like it and it has some huge potential. The ability to send to specific groups of people? Heck, the ability to GROUP people rocks.

I’ve already invested so much time and effort creating a community of friends on Twitter that the move to Pownce seems such the daunting task. It is incredibly interesting and like I said, it has potential. I’m vested in Twitter and that’s where people know to look for my updates about personal, business or fun.

It’s saddeningly time-consuming spending time working and conversing within each of these different social networks. Yes, it builds great conversation and community for friendship and my business; if only I had a clone of me to manage and converse within those networks so I could spend more time getting the actual work done.

Is the idea of getting an account with each of these social networks, posting your website or social network of choice and pointing them in that direction to converse with you out of the question? But then does it come back down to each user’s preference for a social network? I wonder.

Maybe it’s a matter of staying focused and being realistic.. setting boundaries for ourselves and creating goals in which we use these networks for.

With a bit of work you can route all the status updates from all your friends on all the services into one place. Typically using Twitter to combine them all. Note here that Facebook is the least open of all of them. It’s Ecademy centric but I wrote some instructions here
http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=86531

You wrote: “Twitter and Pounce and Jaiku are conversations. “. They’re really not. Like Blogs, they’re monologues. One-to-many, one-to-few. Neither of them answer the need for few-to-few conversations. Few-To-Few is a neglected area of study which is ironic when Mailing lists and IRC are some of the oldest technologies on the intarwebs. It’s somewhat comical watching people try to use the @name convention on Twitter to turn it into something it isn’t.

You know what’s funny? Twitter is just like a really poorly designed BBS with a catchy web/IM/sms interface for the “new” digital age.

It’s no surprise to me that Twitter has caught on so heavily with the SL crowd since SL provides absolutely NO reliable asynchronous message system for a group audience/conversation. If I had any doubt, reading the comments convinced me since the single feature that seems to be distinguishing Pownce is the ability to group your mates and have more specific conversations with a more specific set of people. Rooms anyone?

Maybe I’m just showing my age, but tweets are like x messages over time, over IM, and over the phone and now Pownce is trying to get back to grouping your conversations around a common topic.

So do I need another? Like a hole in the head, but my BBS community is stagnant so I keep searching for good conversation with smart people and Twitter is partly filling the niche but doesn’t do it all, so I’ll keep looking for the right interface and the right group of people that suits me best. And every time I try a new app, I find at least one or two new people who make an impression or become a new source of information and you can’t beat that with a stick.

Even if it did overrun my email with all those notices. Yikes.

Hi Chris,
First of all great post…thank you. As you know this is something I have struggled with as well. How many social networks is enough, but yet I still keep joining the new ones and playing with them. :-)

The only problem is that for the most part besides Twitter and Facebook it is the same group of techno-geek friends that I am associating with in most of those social networks (myspace is a bit different because that is more mainstream and common ) so I am not really expanding my universe in the social media realm. However, occasionally one of my friends introduces me to a new friend and makes it all worth it.

Social networks are definitely addicting and fascinating. I was in love with Facebook for the lifelogging aspect long before the open API, however, now I really am. Personally for me even though all these new social networks take up a bit of my time they are all also passions and interests of mine. I still have my favorites that I return to and regularly use, but I definitely like to be in on the new/hot ones….even if it is with just me and my posse.

Why do I join endless social networks? Networking, education, new forms of communication, and simply just because they are fascinating. :-)

Good points everyone! For me, it is more about experimentation in connectedness and avenues to cultural channels and information feeds. The social dialogs, focused threads mixed in with randomness, are stimulating and create a convergence buzz. The challenge for me, is to wrangle the various models and channels into one centralized feed – an “über social network” of sorts. There isn’t enough time in the day to sift through the complete aggregation, but found gems and nuggets are true intellectual treasures. The dynamic nature of personal relationships and social bonds evolving make the quest very worthwhile.

As we join more and more of these, we really need Marc Canter’s vision of being able to easily:-

1) Populate a profile with standard text from our definitive source

2) Import our list of friends list from our other YASNs.

There’s not a lot of mileage in the first for the YASN owner except to reduce friction during the signup process. But the second should appeal to them. Which is why the few that do it tie it into their invitation system. But even there it’s usually one way. “Give me all *your* email addresses so I can send invite spam but no you can’t have the friend’s list you’ve built up in *our* system.”

Julian- I totally agree with both those needs. I definitely want to do that sort of thing.

It’s funny, when I joined Twitter I couldn’t wrap my head around what it could do for me, especially having no friends. But it opened up my world and I have friends who are active in social media like you and Jeff Pulver, Jim Long, etc. By being active on Twitter I stay connected with the ever changing world of social media.

I resisted joining MySpace for such a long time but ended up joining because that is how my nieces and nephews connect with each other and I could become part of their network.

Facebook has become an extension of my Twitter friends and contacts I have made in the blogging world. It’s nice to be able to follow what people are up to and joining in on different groups. It is more a professional networking tool than MySpace.

I agree with you that LinkedIn is really just a large address book. I don’t visit that site daily or even weekly.

Twitter resonates with me because of its ease of use and the number of tools available (see my post 4 Tools That Make Twitter Easier For Me (and Maybe You)). Pownce is nice but lacking the tools to make keeping track of friends and sets easy. Hopefully those tools will start appearing because Pownce does have potential to really fill the microblogging/instant messaging market with its ease of posting content, sharing files and links.

I would love a desktop app that ran in my system tray that would notify me of new messages/posts for all of the different networks I belong to and when I open it up would allow me to see all of what is happening under each of my profiles while allowing me to post content. Sort of like a start page of my social networking profiles but making it so I don’t have to have a browser window always opened. Does that makes sense?

Honestly, I dread it when a new social networking site emerges. I KNOW I’ll end up joining it, not particularly because I want to but because that’s where all my friends are and I don’t want to be left behind talking to no one but myself if I don’t. sigh……

I have accounts on them all but Twitter and Flickr are the ones that I use faithfully and check daily. All the rest, I join but don’t really push or get that involved in. I read all of the email, and click on the links but I don’t aggressively promote anything myself (just not enough time in my life as it is…) Of course, if everyone in my social circle abandons Twitter for Pownce, things will change and I’ll go with the crowd so as not to be on the outside looking in…

Hi Chris-

I use G-Talk as an extension of Gmail, AIM, Facebook, and Livejournal. I have a linked in profile, which I should leverage more.

I got “suckered” into Facebook when it was just a new way to organize contact information with a reliable way to reach people system built in. No one had to sell me on the benefits of “social network.” The Harvard online facebook sucked and this was easier than going into SSH and using PH to get someone’s info. I wasn’t looking for more than an address book that I never had to update and a failsafe messenging system. By and large, I don’t use it for much more than a “Directory+” suite of services. Walls are fun, and mini-feeds let me “stalk” all but effortlessly. I like to know what’s happening in the lives of my friends.

When I started, I wasn’t concerned with “building a brand” or “my online presence.” Now, these concerns are inescapable.

Sometimes, I kind of want my innocence back. I’m not saying I was EVER the type to do “CRAZY SHIT”(tm) and have pictures of it everywhere or things like that but there are things I consider it useful to let my friends know that I don’t know it is as useful to let anyone who might contact me for business know. Without groups (and you know, even if facebook HAD groups, I feel like I would shy away from setting it up that much for this purpose) it’s hard to filter.

Meanwhile, I want to categorize my contacts, but everyone else* wants me to have them everywhere at once so they can know about ANY opportunity for ANYTHING ever, cause even if they can’t help, maybe one of their friends can. Even ideologically, social networks work cause they break down boundaries, right?

For example, I’m getting friend requests from 2 degrees removed, people I really don’t know.

Am I obligated to say yes to these people just because they may be “useful” to me as a social networking tool, because I might meet them and people take rejection badly? Should I let them see/know as much about me as people I actually consider my friends?

LJ seems to have a pretty big disconnect from the blogosphere as a whole. I can keep that personal pretty easily, but Facebook lost that when they became a “platform.”

So, is there something to do about this issue? Other than be Friends with EVERYONE you know and deal with businesswise too? (not easy in many cases, not possible in some). Not that I’m unhappy that you and Jeff are on Facebook with me, but I think the answer for some is that maybe, different platforms for different actual networks. It gets VERY tough when platform identity = your name/your real identity, as it does for Facebook. You balance these concerns wonderfully. Do you just not have them?

-Dave

*(“I” and “everyone else” are generalized pronouns representing people with competing interests in this situation based on perspective.)

As has already been said, its a full time job to keep up on all these sites. I use Twitter mainly, have a MySpace page for gardenfork..tv, a linkedin page for myself, and will start a facebook page. But one can’t work and join every new social media platform that launches, its too much social media clutter.

There probably isnt too many, each usually has some unique quality thats makess joining sometimes irresistible. I just recently joined
http://www.caribnu.com which is tailored more to the caribbean,so i had to join