Great topic. It's unsettling to hear people like Valdis Krebs predict the ultimate failure of Facebook, as not sufficiently replicating the IRL social experience, when an online social network is your bread and butter (I work for a top-5 social network).
Btw, if you don't know him, Krebs is an excellent source for understanding social networking, online and off. http://www.thenetworkthinker.com/ >From what I can tell, the usefulness of an online social network is all about context and control. So, here are some examples (no, I don't work for any of them!). - LinkedIn is designed around the clear-cut context of professional networking, and allows you control of your content, whom you accept in your network, etc. Anything that can get someone a job *and* help them develop within it is clearly useful and will probably be around for a while. Sites using social media to address very specific topics are also useful. For example, some medical self-help & awareness siteshave been well established since the '90s. - Facebook allows some control, but is a bit challenged re: context. They seem to want to do everything. I was pulled into Facebook by colleagues at my previous job who were communicating about work accomplishments via status updates; old friends have found me on it and I now follow their updates; and my new employer likewise has team members on it, who sometimes share about private things I should not "know" about in the workplace. This, combined with the strong meme and gaming element that further confuses the context, make it harder and harder to know what is appropriate to share in my feed, and to track who's going to see it. Yes, I know Facebook has Friend Lists, and they are using the Friends, Family, Coworkers, and Public Profiles distinctions in the new pages - but what about coworkers from different companies? Friends who can't stand each other? Acquaintances I met through Facebook political groups who are "friends" alongside people I've known 25 years? The level of effort to differentiate between these is one of the primary challenges Facebook must address. Perhaps the subscription model will help. MySpace seems to be crumbling (3 top execs left this week), and I think much of it's failure was due to the lack of focus (alongside a challenged corporate environment and overly difficult business approach). - LiveJournal has extremely easy privacy settings and customized friends groups. The ability to control who sees what is stable and easy, which means I'm able to read public blogs from professionals writing about their field of expertise, chatty personal posts, and occasionally the deeply private joys and woes of close friends whose friendship I developed online. A couple of these have turned into IRL friendships. There's also an extraordinary level of loyalty to the site among many members. The challenge is to be not only well-designed, but focused - and if you're not inherently focused, make it easy for the users to sharpen focus on their own. IRL we can easily slip into the different kinds of communication we use with everyone we know - online, this can be much more difficult. So that's my 2 cents. Enjoy! bests, Alex O'Neal UX manager -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
