Are We Ready for Social Networking?

The web world is filled with people trying to change the way we do things.

You know how they say, in a relationship, that you should never try to change the other person to be who you want them to be? It invariably fails, and you irritate the heck out of the other person as you try to get them to be some idealization.

I realize this isn't the same thing, but the alpha-geeks want us to look at the next bright shiny thing. I realized that there are plenty of people who just don't get it. Why do we need RSS? What is RSS? Why do we need Wikis?

There are some applications people just get. Email, people get. Photo uploading sites they sorta get. Wikis they don't get. RSS they don't get. Browsers, people get.

The latest trend, even since Flickr was the darling of the Web 2.0 crowd (before people realized that Photobucket is King, and no one gets Flickr tagging, and lacks the patience to use tag), is social networking.

Oh, I'm not talking about dating services, though people get that, and they get eBay (I don't get that) too. I'm talking about sites that try to get its members to share stuff.

I was listening to a discussion at Bloggercon. Many people, even those in the know, don't use bookmarking sites. They often use their own blog to store bookmarks, or use the old standard, del.icio.us. Did I mention? People don't get bookmarking either, at least, not outside their own browser (upload bookmarks? why on earth would I do that?).

Every year, the Web 2.0 community implores us to do things we didn't think we wanted to do. Do I really want to bookmark? Do I really want to share my bookmarks? Or my photos?

The need for constancy, for things not to change, at least, not so fast, may be one reason why Blogger still sucks. The folks doing Blogger feel there's no compelling reason to change its look each year, and so they keep it old and reliable, and unchanging. Some sites still do this. Yahoo, for example, runs a bracket software thingy for March Madness. Even though it updates your draw in real-time, it doesn't update your points in real-time. Instead, hours and hours must pass before it's updated. I don't get it. Fine, you can wait hours for the rankings, but for a few relative points? I don't get it. It's easy to fix, Yahoo has a year to do it, but no. Same old crap.

Even so, some people find comfort in the same thing over and over. Software companies hate this. They feel they aren't innovating, don't you know, if they don't change something. For three years, Office hadn't changed. Now, they are designing a huge makeover. To be fair, Office sucks, and therefore I welcome the new makeover. But it goes to show you that in this business, things change. You're almost afraid a company won't last even two years before it folds. Where will it be twenty years from now? Does anyone look that far ahead?

But back to social networking. Does it work? We're asking people to be more public than ever, to make their lives a matter of public record. While there's some evidence that people are willing to do that--witness MySpace--what about people that care about their privacy? They simply avoid the web, I assume.

You know, though, there's still something I haven't seen a while on the web, possibly because I'm not looking yet. I recall many years ago, before blogs were blogs, reading several blogs whose authors lives were soap operas. I wouldn't trade my life for their dysfunction, but boy was it fun to read what happened. Most blogs are functional blogs. Learn about Rails or something useful. There aren't so many popular blogs about people who really you wouldn't want your kids to hang out with.

Now that's not social networking, but I'm surprised that blogs like that aren't part of, say, the top 10 MySpace blogs (maybe it is--I don't pay attention to MySpace).

My feeling is that there is a small adventurous crowd willing to try out new things on the Web, and the vast majority who are content doing what they've done for years. They're not looking for better ways to do things or different ways to do things. They need to get the idea of why they should be doing something. For example, my brother understands surfing. My parents don't.

I understand social networking, my brother doesn't. Not because he's not bright enough, but simply because he doesn't care. It's just not that important to him. For example, you really don't need an RSS reader if you only check out 5-10 sites. But once you get one, you start to realize you can add more and more to your list. But then, after you add too many and it's sapping your time, you may want to completely shut them down.

How many people are listening to podcasts? I'm the perfect demographic for that kind of audience, but I still don't listen. I'm told the Gillmor Gang is fun to listen to, but I haven't checked them out.

These days, I do a semi-reasonable job of keeping up with the tech world, in its odd way. I check out reddit and occasionally digg. I check out TechCrunch. I scan TechMeme. This has made me aware of a certain crowd. But, a few years ago, I couldn't really stand to check out Slashdot or Kuro5hin. I knew they existed, but it bored me silly to head over to those sites.

And yet this still puts me in the minority of folks. There's plenty of people who don't keep track of any of this. I'm not even talking about folks like my brother that aren't tech geeks. He can be forgiven for that. I'm talking about people in the industry. People who write software for a living. Some of them have no idea about any of this either, because it simply doesn't impact their lives. It's just nothing they care for. They should know better, but really, it's so geeky even for geeks to keep up.

So are we ready for social networking? What's the next cool fad?