Social Networking

The key to social networking is, much like the Verizon guys, all about the network itself. Too small a network, and it becomes a group of unrelated people. The more people that are on it, the more people you're likely to know.

Yesterday or so, I was deciding to add "friends" based on alumni from Cornell who graduated the year I did. This lead to about 100-200 people that I had to sift through. Out of this bunch, I probably vaguely knew 2-3, knew one guy reasonably well, and wasn't 100% sure on another person (I had the name, and the city seemed right, and he probably had a unique enough name to be the only one by that name).

It seems, short of something coincidental or fishy, someone that I haven't spoken (or in this case, written) to in almost 20 years. I can't say I remember half the people I went to college with. I vaguely recall what they looked like, but the names escape me. And since I went to college nearly 20 years ago, these are folks that, while computer-savvy (most likely), might find Facebook to be a bit childish, something they lack the time to deal with, and something teens do, not adults with real jobs.

When you lose track of someone for that long, usually a lot has happened to that person (and yourself). Still, I would imagine that there are some personality quirks that haven't changed much since then, for either of us.

I noticed my friends list is around 80 or so, and there are people with hundreds, and I'm sure some folks who claim to have thousands of friends, making it challenging to even remember who those folks are. And that's assuming you are legitimate in finding your friends and they are legitimate in finding you. Pick any well known celebrity and search for them in Facebook, and you'll find that they are at least half a dozen copies of this person, most likely none of them real. A celebrity has many more people interested in being their "friends" who aren't friends at all, but fans.

But beyond these anomalous cases, I've found people that have accounts, even though they are comparably aged to me. To be fair, most people are younger than me.

Regardless, the point is that people used to lose track of other folks over time, and there were no easy ways to get in touch. Alumni networks are one way to keep in touch, but there should be the equivalent of Alumni Facebook, and there isn't. Indeed, when I check my alma mater, they're more interested in having people enter their real phone number and address rather than an email address or screen name for their favorite IM network.

I could imagine you could create screen names for yourself which would really be an alias for your email, and so you could have people communicate with you without revealing real email addresses or screen names (in case you've become, you know, famous and like the anonymity).

I should note that this took a little effort on my part. I think I did a search by name, but you never know when someone decides to get online for the first time. Just because you didn't find them a month ago doesn't mean they didn't open an account last week.

Periodically, I'll try to search folks out on the Web hoping they might have a web page out there. I found someone from college doing a search ten years ago. That webpage is no longer there, so if I tried to do the search, I'd find pretty much nothing. But he still uses the same SN, even ten years later, so I talk to him every once in a while.

Ultimately, these kinds of networks allow you to keep a fringe group of friends, either people you couldn't really consider yourself close enough to as friends, or people you've really lost touch of. On this outer fringe, you're still in touch, because the network still exists, and you can look them up. Prior to social networking, you'd simply not keep up with these folks because there would be no convenient way to do it. Merely having them on a list and being able to contact them at some point becomes a way that you can say hi, even years later.

The question is what happens to this network if something else comes along, and the feeling is something else will come along. Will people abandon it en masse? Will they be in multiple networks?

Technology has created an interesting way to stay connected. Once upon a time, technology provided us letters. Due to the time it took for these letters to make their journey, the art of letterwriting became important. You crammed detail. You used good penmanship. You took the time to write something meaningful. Letters could be pages long.

But people hardly write that. You can now send a message practically instantaneously, and because you can, those messages are less well thought out, much shorter. One might say that the old way lead to something more informative than the brief snippet of emails or IMs or text messages we send, which have become something of the heir apparent to telegrams, those ancient form of abbreviated communication.

But now, we don't even have to communicate. We can merely have the option to communicate, and keep lists of folks, and as long as that list is nice and convenient and up-to-date, there's always opportunity.

Opportunities that we didn't have even ten years ago.