Myspace was founded in 2003 and in 2006 was the most popular social networking site on the web. It’s competitor Facebook was created in 2004 as a spin off of a Harvard University project called Facemash. Two years ago everyone online was talking Myspace and last year everyone was talking Facebook. Having a chat to a lot of people who were users of these sites this year and there seems to be a universal grumble about advertising spam. Anyone who went public seems to have become a target for the usual annoying advertising pests. Moderated users who set up access controls seem to have been spared this invasion. The problem with regulating your access is that you limit your ability to actually socially interact with people that you don’t know but could find really interesting to communicate with. This is fine if you just want to share baby pic’s with family and friends or post your pic’s and experiences when travelling. Having looked briefly at Library Thing, although similar in public availability it hasn’t yet seemed to attract the same level of interest from insensitive advertising spammers. This cultivates an opportunity for people with common interests to find each other and share their experiences without fear of privacy invasion.. yet! I personally prefer Forums out of all the social networking sites. They don’t seem to have the fluff that sites like Facebook and Myspace have, they are more about information sharing and knowledge focused discussion.
My experience with the Gaming community has been that when a community of people with shared interests form their own social networking sites they seem to be a lot more successful than generic concept sites which go for mass usage. Ultimately someone pays to host these sites and you do inevitably get banner advertising and pop-ups in some form but it is easily ignored or switched off. You seem to get a more robust community if the community develops out of the necessity to communicate. I think this is why wiki’s have been such a successful social collaborative tool. People will naturally gravitate to their areas of interest or expertise and if they have something they feel confident in saying will contribute to these forums. I love Wikipedia, I use it constantly to source information for my online gaming and for general here and now thinking. I really like the way it’s uncensored, free and accessible. I like the way you don’t need to sign in and become a member if you’re only viewing information. I personally find sites that have a lot of restrictions and controls incredibly annoying and a waste of my time.
I am still out on Twitter and I can see the purpose in RSS Readers if you have an interestiin following certain sites and peoples activities. It seems to me that the online hype is allowing people to dream up all sorts of new ways to communicate and that the User will eventually filtered out the good from the bad and leave them lamenting. The one constant is that you are not going to be able to overcome people’s time constraints. Time and the amount of time invested into communication activities will always have some kind of boundaries.
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