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1/4/2005

Best and Worst of Social Media 2004

Cynthia Typaldos posted to her excellent Web Communities Yahoo Group her best and worst of the social media in 2004:

BEST:
Dogster
Amazon.com’s Listmania: the best way to find what you really
want even when you don’t know what it is
www.paidcontent.org great newsletter/blog about the content industry
The Social Software Weblog by Judith Meskill
All of Robin Good’s stuff (MasterNewMedia)

Dogs that Blog and the dog blogroll- there are now 6 dogs in the dog blogroll (which I maintain), 3 of which are written from the dog’s point of you. Yes, laugh all you like, but a major newspaper will soon be publishing a story on blogging pets. This could be the hot social networking topic of 2005.

WORST:
Social Networking website business models (are there any?)
BzzAgent (NYTimes article)
Too many social networking sites

Cynthia is one of the long-time experts in this field, for whom I have tremendous respect (we worked together before), but we don’t always see entirely eye-to-eye. Here’s my list in response:

BEST:

Have to agree with Cynthia on:
The Social Software Weblog by Judith Meskill
All of Robin Good’s stuff (MasterNewMedia)

I’m also a big fan of:
- Corante Many2Many and GetReal
- About Weblogs, the most consistent and thorough blogging resource site I’ve found
- Lee LeFever’s blog’s Technology in Plain English category. Especially see Comparing Social Networking to Online Communities.
- Judith Donath and danah boyd’s Public Displays of Connection
- AlwaysOn Network
- Ziad Abdelnour’s Global Capital Access Club on Ecademy (my vote for best network/group/club within a social networking site)

And my bit of shameless self-promotion:
- The Five Keys to Building Business Relationships Online is really good (and some other people think so too).
- [UPDATE March 30, 2005: The Five Keys is no longer available, but check out our new book, The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online]
- I think it’s pretty cool that my coauthor and I have a monthly column for FastCompany.com about online business relationships / social networking - so far as I know, the first in a major publication (OK, it’s online only at the moment, but that’s still a big step):
     Crossing the Social Networking Chasm
     The Next Generation of Contact Management Software
     I Am Not a Number!

WORST:
I agree with Cynthia about Too many social networking sites - there are too many that are entirely undifferentiated. Technology doth not a social network make. Going back to Cynthia’s 12 Principles, the one thing missing from so many of them is a clear and abiding purpose.

That said, top of my list are: :-)

1. People saying there’s no business model for social networking, when Ryze, Ecademy, Tickle, Contact Network Corporation, et al., are profitable. Others, like LinkedIn and Tribe, haven’t even tested their models yet. To say there’s no business model for social networking simply because some of them haven’t made money yet is just in utter denial of the facts. What about the 2,000 people who have signed up to pay $4,500 - $5,000 for Ecademy Blackstar membership? If they add 250-300 a year like they plan to, that’s $1.5 million a year for that program alone. Regardless of your opinion of Ecademy, that’s not bad for a 6-person company running open-source software.

2. Corollary to the above: people saying that social networking sites don’t work. The truth is simply people don’t know how to use social networking sites. Pundits can say all they want to that they should be intuitive, but the issue is not the use of the site - it’s the social practices online. The typical 40-something professional has around 200,000 hours of experience interacting with people face-to-face, and less than 5,000 hours interacting online. As the human race, we have tens of thousands of years of face-to-face interaction, and barely 30 online - 20, really. What do you expect? It’s we who need to learn how to interact online effectively - the social networking sites can’t do that for us. They’re a tool - nothing more, nothing less. And most of us can even learn to use a hammer more effectively.

The worst offender regarding the above?

Far and away, it has to be PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak, who has posted multiple rants about business networking sites, blogging, Cluetrain Manifesto (talk about killing the sacred cow!), and instant messaging. There’s so much good commentary out there about how off-base he is that I won’t even
attempt to list it here.

It might help if these people actually talked to someone who’s using them effectively instead of just ranting about how inadequate they are based on their own experience. Talk to the people who it is working for. Seems simple enough, yes?

Posted by Scott Allen   ()
in Web 2.0 Sites

11 Comments »

  1. If I were to go out and look for people who had good experiences with all these miserable systems, what would be the point? How does the reader learn anything? People read me for my perspective on things. I have to be consistent. And yes it is my experience. Let other people write about their experiences themselves. It’s funny how in an age of personal publishing, personal journalism, personal content all of a sudden people want old-fashioned reporting from an essayist like myself just because they don’t agree with my opinion about my experiences. Baffling.

    Comment by John C. Dvorak — 1/4/2005 @ 3:54 pm

  2. No fault for having a strong personal opinion, John, but you generalize to the whole world based on your experience. “It didn’t work for me, and therefore it’s useless and nobody should waste their time with it.” Simply put, John, you’re a pessimist, not an optimist, and you’ve developed a reputation — maybe even a brand — around that. It’s embedded in the way you talk — “miserable systems”? Please! What does the reader learn from that?

    And maybe you can fault me for being towards the other extreme. But I see the people who it IS working for (not to mention that it’s working for me), and I want to share that with everybody. It CAN work — and VERY well — but it takes some knowledge and some effort. Based on your description of your experience in business networking sites, I don’t think that you ever gave it a fair shake.

    I do, though, have to commend you for taking the dive and trying blogging yourself, even if your number one reason for it was:

    I’ve always been a believer in knowing about something before you criticize it. Often that means being in the community somehow, even as a lurker. This allows me to continue to criticize without hearing “try it, and you’ll like it” or “what does he know about it anyway?”

    See? A pessimist. The thing is, John, pessimism is self-fulfilling — if you go into it with a negative attitude, you tend to get negative results.

    What does the reader learn from that? A lot of people end up learning (wrongly) to not try it because it didn’t work for John Dvorak. What they need to learn is “It didn’t work for John Dvorak, so I’ll do it differently than he did.”

    Of course, this dialog is proof that “blogging works”. :-)

    Comment by Scott Allen — 1/4/2005 @ 4:20 pm

  3. The exchange between Scott Allen and John Dvorak reminds me of the heated debate in psychology circles — that the reason why many psychologists get things wrong is because way too much of the research from psychologists is from their time with people who have mental issues without equal time with research on people who are excelling psychologically.

    I agree with Scott. John — no question that you are entitled to your experience. But how about sparing some thought for your contribution to the planet’s memeplex? What are the flow on consequences thus costs of not finding the lesser evil/greater good on getting more humans to get onto the same page via relationship networks (aka social networking)to symbiosis? If you are aware of the costs and enunciate them, cool. If not, especially with me writing from tsunami lands, I’m afraid that’s not cool.

    Simply put there are costs, benefits or a mix of both to the stands we take. If you and your readers are aware of them, that’s fine — the problem is when we are in blindspots that opinions do not have ramifications associated with them.

    Comment by Bala Pillai — 1/4/2005 @ 6:27 pm

  4. On business models, I would urge Cynthia Typaldos and ilk to try a dose of common sense:-

    What is a business model?

    If you

    a) perceive and solve a problem out there
    b) make a significant difference to the problem (eg from “researching without Google” to “researching with Google” days)
    c) charge a fraction of the costs of the problem itself (i.e. not solving the problem has its costs too)
    d) invest in enabling people to grasp how your solution solves their problem first with the early adopters than with the rest
    e) do this in spheres where the solution is not available for free

    That is the basis of a business model is it not?

    Merely echoing that there are no business models for social networking is a case of not applying minds to the DNA of business models are and arriving at them. Or under-prioritising this cognitive activity.

    Comment by Bala Pillai — 1/4/2005 @ 6:47 pm

  5. I have to agree that there are too many networking sites out there. Why are there so many? Because they each try to solve the missing components of each one. All together in one would be good. Ecademy is ambitious, but the open source platform needs more development. LinkedIn is at a more serious level, interacting is difficult and networks can only grow through permission granted from one of your contacts.

    Comment by Dimitri — 1/5/2005 @ 1:37 pm

  6. There is more to tools than the tool
    Scott Allen of the Online Business Network Blog suggests that social networks “don’t work” because people don’t know how to use them, not because they are defective by design. This leads to some of my own thoughts that any tool has a contextual as…

    Trackback by Knowledge Jolt with Jack — 1/8/2005 @ 1:47 pm

  7. Hi, I’m a bypasser, but liked your evolutionary spin and thought you might be interested in a reference (if you didn’t know already).

    An excerpt I cited in a term paper:

    “…Darwinian evolution endowed modern humans with a brain that is ill adapted to CMC, because that brain has been designed, through recurrent use and evolutionary adaptation, for modes of communication that incorporate many of the elements associated with face-to-face communication” (p. 341).

    Kock, N. (2004), The Psychobiological Model: Toward a New Theory of Computer-mediated Communication Based on Darwinian Evolution, Organization Science, V.15, No.3, pp. 327-348.

    Comment by Kathy Lee — 1/12/2005 @ 7:05 am

  8. Nice.. that made me laugh.

    “What about the 2,000 people who have signed up to pay $4,500 - $5,000 for Ecademy Blackstar membership?”

    They never had 2,000 signed up - another example of ecademy statistic inflation. BlackStar is still stuck on less than 150 members. There are only so many mugs out there.

    Comment by Ste Andreassen — 6/27/2005 @ 11:31 am

  9. Just for clarification, that’s how many people applied, Ste, not how many people were accepted. They have said all along it was going to be a limited number of people - no more than 20 per month.

    I know there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, but I have a really hard time believing that they would just fabricate that number. That would be fraud, and would require the complicity of half a dozen or more people who I know and trust. Highly unlikely.

    Comment by Scott Allen — 6/27/2005 @ 12:25 pm

  10. Fair enough Scott. I think the original wording was misleading.

    In other news, re GCAC…

    Please take a look at what I was sent about Ziad - http://ecadeblog.blogspot.com/ - and at a recent post on ecademy - http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=50701

    I hope, for your sake, that Ziad isn’t included in the half a dozen or more people you know and trust!

    Comment by Ste Andreassen — 7/3/2005 @ 3:32 pm

  11. Dogster is a great site!

    Comment by jay — 8/5/2005 @ 2:55 am

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