June 06, 2005

Over the last six months I got sucked into five Social Networking Services, and I still don’t get what they do. I’m pretty dumb, you see.

For a while Orkut was all the rage amongst my friends. We all signed up en masse, and started discussion groups about obscure topics just to see our conversations fizzle into nothingness. Orkut allowed us to visualize each other’s sexiness quotient, while making it infinitely hard to have decent conversations with people we knew.

Then everybody switched to Friendster, which proved to be as fucking useless as Orkut.

On a conceptual level, I don’t understand how SNSs work. I can grasp simple, concrete ideas, but abstractions leave me kind of cold. Take LiveJournal or Flickr for example — it’s easy to grasp what these sites do: they allow people to share words or pictures. As a result of this sharing wonderful communities develop, and I have fallen deeply in love with these sites.

SNSs do things backwards: they being with an abstract concept (social connections) and expect people to build something meaningful but undefined out of previous (real life) interactions. I still don’t know what SNSs like Orkut or Friendster are trying to do, but they’re clearly failing. These services simply demonstrated that if you put enough intelligent people in the same virtual environment and leave them with nothing to do the results will be mind-numbingly stupid.

And it’s not just the big, conceptual forces behind SNSs that puzzle me — it’s the small things too.

For instance, I don’t understand why Orkut is so consistently slow and painful to use. You’d figure that the internet company with the largest computer farm in the world could afford to throw in a few extra servers to keep the users happy. But somehow Orkut predictably stalls. I blame it on the Brazilians.

I also don’t get why SNSs lock away valuable content behind privacy screens. Hi5 is notorious for this. Even after you sign up to their service, you have to request authorization for every subsequent action you take. You want to read someone’s profile? You’ll have to ask their permission. You want to read postings in a group? You’ll have to join first. Most sites are designed to make it easier to access information, but SNSs play by their own rules.

And why don’t different social network sites socialize amongst themselves? I don’t need ten profiles for ten groups of people on different (and equally useless) services. Why don’t SNSs use existing tools to simplify the process.

I hope Social Networking Services die a slow and painful death. I’d rather have porn than shiny machines that eat souls.