Ryan Carson on Why I don’t use social software:
I’d love to add friends to my Flickr account, add my links to del.icio.us, browse digg for the latest big stories, customise the content of my Netvibes home page and build a MySpace page. But you know what? I don’t have time and you don’t either…
It’s an interesting read (and I recommend subbing to Vitamin, they got the quality right).
I did the social networking before, and subbed out. It was fun, I met a lot of cool people, but … life happend.
There’s a lot of social app going on right now, part of it is MySpace, part of it is the social aspects of Flickr, del.icio.us and their likes. But I wonder, does building social networking into every single Web site really pay off?
I like the fact that del.icio.us can recommend tags for me based on what other people tagged. I think that’s a social aspect. But I could care less to creat a network of “friends” on a site I only use as my link blog.
I like the fact that Flickr helps me find photos for events, based on tags of people I know who attended, and has a huge pool of Creative Commons goodness, which I use regularly on this blog. But I don’t care to friend the people I already know in real life.
I get event feeds from Upcoming.org, but, would I recreate my social network a third time?
There’s only two places where I keep tabs on my social network. And no, it’s not LinkedIn, although that one is a good contact manager that never gets out of sync. I do that with Dodgeball … without friends it’s practically useless. And I use Bloglines to follow on the people I like and the people I like reading.
The social aspect, as in community of people who contribute to a shared resource, is great. But are too many sites taking the word social literally and creating islands of LinkedIns for the sake of locking users in? And are those early adopters really going to stick out of intertia?
Me, I don’t have the time to maintain the same network all over the place, Dodgeball aside, it never actually helped me get things done. I just want my services simple, functional, working. Better but not by asking me to work harder.