Social Networking - Where Do We Go from Here?
Has anyone besides me noticed that the trend of social networking sites has been to gather as many contacts as possible and then inundate them with with posts that don’t really pertain to anything they want to hear (or read) about? It is as if we are meant to believe that our networking contacts want to hear about the party we are planning for this weekend, or that our friends want to hear about our next corporate meeting.
Let’s take a look at this theory. I have an account with a popular social networking site. Let’s call it “Pace Brook”. In my contacts, I have several personal friends, my fiance, my mom, and several “networking contacts”. I go to my “wall” and in the morning and there are an average of 160 posts there waiting for me to peruse. Another of the sites to which I belong (we will call it “pwitter”), has even more “pweets”. Unless I am going to spend the better part of my day going through them all, how do I sort out what I want to read and what I don’t before starting my work day?
It’s not like I have a ton of contacts, mind you. Compared to some people that have thousands of contacts on their list, mine is quite small. I have found some contacts that I would like to add to my list, but I often decide not to. The last thing I want to do is add to the overwhelming noise that my grandfather used to call “raucous cacophony”.
The other problem is that my friends don’t really care about my latest blog post on the advantages of micro-niche marketing, and my coworkers don’t really want to hear about how Jason ended the evening with a lampshade on his head. As a matter of fact, every single post that I send out will wind up on the wall of people that care about the topic and people that don’t. The more “noise” I introduce to a segment of my contacts, the fewer of my posts to those people will get read.
I am not alone here. The more contacts you have, the smaller percentage of posts you actually read. The percentage of your contacts that actually read your posts goes down as well. Seems a bit counter productive, doesn’t it?
How about your “bio” page? Have you found yourself wanting to put something there that your friends will see, but decided not to because you don’t want EVERYBODY to see it? I would love to have different bios for different segments of my contacts. I refuse, however, to open multiple accounts for different contact groups. That just seems like too much work, but I know many who have done just that.
So what do I propose? What if I had all of my contacts categorized for me, with a separate “wall” for each category? I could choose my “friends” wall and just see the posts by my friends. I can post to my “friends” wall and only those people will see it. I could even do a search for keywords and have a list of friends pop up that match that keyword and quickly post to all or some of them. Each category would have its own bio associated with it, so only my friends could see my “friends” bio, and only my coworkers could see my “coworkers” bio. All my friends could see the pictures of me being drunk and silly, without worrying about what my coworkers might think.
The best part is that since I am only sending posts to people that I think will want to read them, more of my posts will actually get read! I can send out party invitations to my friends in San Jose, or quickly update my coworkers about a change in plans for the next meeting.
In essence, what I want is a “buzz conduit” that will direct the buzz to where I want it to go and give me just the buzz I want to hear at any given time. I want that, and I want some privacy back.
While it seems that the web 2.0 giants are not likely to do anything like this any time soon, there is a site launching that will. It will enable you, me, and everybody else that wants to to have their very own buzz conduit. It will be called buzzduit.com, and it’s being built as we speak.
Go to buzzduit.com if you want to know the second it is ready to launch. You can even send suggestions or ask question by replying to your confirmation email.
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Tags: friends, networking, social networking, Society, web 2.0