Facebook, My Space, Orkut, and so many more. A comprehensive list is available on Wikipedia.
There is a lot of talk about the demise of eMail in favour of communicating exclusively through social networks. What fun! Log into Facebook, see what your friends are doing, saying, what pictures they have posted, the bits of brilliance emanating from far and wide. Ok, so there goes 30 minutes or more. I have 36 friends on Facebook. Paltry compared to the 360 of one of my friends. How do they keep up with the shenanigans of 360 people?
And what if some of their friends are members of some of the other networks. Do they log in to see what their friends are doing there? Do they get notified of their activities through – GASP! – eMail?
This does not make sense. Don’t get me wrong. I do see the value of the networks. You can reconnect with people you have not seen in ages. Keep in touch with far (and not so far) flung friends and relatives. Sure beats receiving annual updates from people, and more importantly, having to write annual updates. And LinkedIn is proving that social networks can be a very valuable business tool.
But there is something truly amiss with social networks. I am on Facebook and logged in before writing this. I had 17 invitations to take part in various activities and read all sorts of posts from my friends. I had to install SuperWall, and FunWall, and splash something, and an updated version of Shockwave, and… sorry I got lost in there somewhere.
I have now watched countless videos my friends thought I would enjoy. Apparently guessing the right answers to the Are You Irish section makes me a true blood Irish with great knowledge of Irish history. My knowledge of movies is very poor, as is my knowledge of TV shows I never watched, and I am apparently quite smart and… was that a beautiful sunny day outside?
New companies are popping up as aggregators of social networks, while others are creating social networks of social networks. Who has time for this? Far from killing eMail, social networks might just help spur on eMail as the simplest means of communicating between friends.
Now if we could only do something about all that unwanted mail.
