Years ago at BYTE Magazine my friend Ben Smith, who was a Unix greybeard even then (now he’s a Unix whitebeard), made a memorable comment that’s always stuck with me. We were in the midst of evaluating a batch of LAN email products. “One of these days,” Ben said in, I think, 1991, “everyone’s going to look up from their little islands of LAN email and see this giant mothership hovering overhead called the Internet.”
Increasingly I’ve begun to feel the same way about the various social networks. How many networks can one person join? How many different identities can one person sanely manage? How many different tagging or photo-uploading or friending protocols can one person deal with?
Recently Gary McGraw echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/02/social-network-fatigue-and-the.html
2 responses so far ↓
Matej // Jun 5, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Ah, that famous O’Reilly’s article. The most interesting debate of last year was formed around issues like this one, which is a very obvious point. Apart from the LAN metaphor there are other cases where resistance to internet was futile: Microsoft was working on Blackbird before that famous Gates’s mail, AOL wanted to grow their own walled garden and some liked to observe some months ago how Facebook is the new AOL etc.
So now everyone is trying to free our data: people of DataPortability.org, Esther with her Lufthansa story, Doc Searls with the vendor relationship initiative, Iskold and the attention economy angle, Google with FriendConnect/OpenSocial, Facebook with the new APIs, Microsoft with LiveMesh etc etc.
Information wants to be free and eventually gets its way and this case won’t be an exception.
Gregor // Jun 5, 2008 at 7:16 pm
And what’s the answer? How many friending protocols can a person deal with? :)
There are soooo many communities out there, specially this mini brand/product/firm communities. I’ve read a good advice on this topic somewhere: don’t always think about creating your own party (=community) - rather be a star on someone else’s. I think it’s interesting piece of advice for a company trying to develope 1001st community (of the day). :-)
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