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november 05, 2003
Kritiska röster om Friendster
Den senaste tiden har det kommit lite kritiska röster om Friendster och liknande social mjukvara/sajter.
T.ex. Friendster: is the honeymoon over? på den utomordentliga bloggen Many-to-Many:
Articles on Friendster have focused on the tool, the business, Fakesters and the less-than-kind portrayal of Jonathan Abrams. But today, the press took a new twist: they finally critiqued the underlying theoretical model on which Friendster depends.
...
The critique is dead-on. 1) Are friends of friends better partners? 2) Can your friends really do you justice in connecting you to their friends? 3) What happens when that relationship fails?
Ovenstående anteckning är skriven av Danah Boyd (länken funkar tyvärr inte i skrivande stund) som även skrivit papret Reflections on Friendster, Trust and Intimacy (PDF, funkar i skrivande stund). Se även t.ex.Social Network Fragments.
I dag kan man läsa i Why the Friendster bubble 'has peaked - will pop' om investeringsyran kring social software-produkter/sajter, såsom Friendster etc. Grundaren av en av dessa sajter, Friendfinder, säger följande:
"It's a bubble. Social networks have been around for a long time," he says. "Friendster is feeding off the hype. People get excited about joining a network and use it for a couple of months but once they get to know people they'll use other communication like email or IM." He likens it to fads such as weblogging, which has a higher abandonment rate, or flash mobs.
[En aside: Texten "higher abandonment rate" länkar till en artikel om övergivna bloggar 'Blogosphere' to reach 10 million, almost all dead - report. Se även original-rapporten The Blogging Iceberg - Of 4.12 Million Hosted Weblogs, Most Little Seen, Quickly Abandoned.]
Artikeln fortsätter:
"The technology is easy to mimic and very straightforward. The issue is will the hype of trying to get all your friends to join wear out?" A flaw in many of the networks' assumptions, he reckons, is that only a subset of one's friends will ever join a social network site. And at a certain point the networks themselves become redundant. "Once I know you, it's just as easy for me to contact you directly," he says. "A social network is simply a directory."
In other words, Friendster's obsolescence is built-in.
...
"It's a very romantic thing to get everyone in the world on the same network," he says, noting the difference in approach between his company and the techno-utopians. "Some people really want to let the network do our socializing. But once people have met other people, they get on with the rest of their lives."
Jämför detta med min anteckning härom dagen The Technology of the Year: Social Network Applications.
Jag bör nog också tillägga att ovanstående program/system/sajter som går under namnet social software eller social network applications inte är samma sak som social network analysis. Det senare är matematiska metoder för att analysera sociala och liknande nätverk. Däremot utgår de ofta från samma typ av fenomen och relationer, nämligen sociala nätverk. Se alltså även Social Network Analysis och Complex Networks - En liten introduktion.
Posted by hakank at november 5, 2003 11:40 FM Posted to Social Network Analysis/Complex Networks