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so i’m reading this guy andrew leonard’s quasi-seminal article (about as long as the iliad) called, “you are who you know” and it appears that he kinda missed the point, took readers in the wrong direction regarding social networking, and generally was like 3,000 words too long. to be specific, he’s talking a lot about social networking on sites like friendster and orkut…but what he really means is ‘online community’ (only spoke offers an enterprise variation for additional network modeling and analysis from the co’s on his list).

he hits some of the key points regarding general uselessness, user stupidity (as in, lack of common sense when it comes to private information), impact on behavior - but then he loses me when it becomes obvious that he’s really trying to write about two things that have very similar names but very different meanings (like ‘angina’ and ‘vagina’)… this is likely a function of some kind of salon.com-pay-per-word agreement that’s going on…

social networking analysis is a discipline that goes back to a time before computers, though he claims that it ‘wasn’t really possible’ until large computers were around. this is wrong: sociograms have been used for a long, long time by sociologists, anthropologists, the military and others. modeling a network by leveraging (for example) real math is quite different from leonard using friendster to get into somebody’s pants (by his own admission in the article, that was one of his stated purposes)…..if you’d like to learn more about the real sna apps, associations and see some real examples of sna in action at public sites, take a look at this resource

“social networking,” on the other hand, is some kind of hip media term that has caught on as a more ‘fundable’ category of interest (because if you use the term ‘online community’ and go knocking on the doors of smart money and venture, you will be laughed right out of the cube farm). sounds new, doesn’t it? it isn’t. it’s old news.

he talks to some interesting folks connected to the academic-ish sna (social networking analysis) side, but doesn’t take it anywhere. instead, he defers to the peter-rabbit wisdom of some of the founders of these money-losing sites, including this gem, “everybody signs up, it’s really fun, and then you’ve got all your friends there…” or, “i know, it’s a start-up cliche to have a dog in the office.”

his lack of comprehension shines through when he mentions the word ‘node’ one time, but doesn’t (for example) touch clusters…writes a tiny bit about spoke selling to enterprises, but doesn’t even scratch the surface of what some of the real sna apps can and will do (surprising, since he appears to have pushed the privacy tack right into the board). so yeah, of all that crap, it was generally well researched…but not an educational article by any stretch of the imagination. you can view it for free by searching for it with a free pass (for a day) at salon.com (”you are who you know“) - but be warned, you will have to watch the most boring and long ass commercial before you ‘click through’ to the actual content.

what WAS funny was that he mentioned the new generation of spoof sites that have been popping up (though he missed politicalfriendster, which is actually a legitimate source of info via stanford university at stanford’s site). my personal favorites:

introvertster - (”use it to avoid invites”)
fiendster (”meet new people to hate, through your friends and their friends”)
enemyster (pre launch, but name says it all)
std-ster (”the new way to track std’s”)

btw, if you want to see the current list of just about every online community networking site, check out meskill’s metablog - it’s quite comprehensive. she also runs a main blog discussing all of these sites and the whole category itself…

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