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5 Comments

  1. Yeah you gotta draw the freaking line somewhere. The increasing pervasiveness of the “social networking” (read: personal data harvesting) business model of most web apps these days is troubling. Best not to think about it.

  2. I’m on 13 of those and Orkut, XMRadio, LJ and a few others I can’t name. I decided I’m going to let last.fm, Friendster and Vimeo lapse. The nice thing is that you don’t have to check more than two of these in any given week (LibraryThing, Netflix, delicious and Flickr are archival tools, more so than social networkers, right?)

  3. You’re both right. Social networking is at the core of some of these and has been added to others after the fact (like Netflix). Mostly the social stuff is an adjunct that adds value — I’d use del.icio.us even if it had no social component, just because it helps me. Flickr is an archival tool but there’s no denying the intensely social value of sharing baby pics with far-flung relatives. But for some services, social networking is the core function: LinkedIn, Friendster, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut. (Thanks for reminding me I have an Orkut account Maitri.) For these sites, it’s not “something else” plus social; social is all they got. When some people use the phrase “social networking” they’re thinking of these sites specifically.

    I’m not so much troubled by the ubiquity of these features (maybe I should be, but I see their appeal) as I am annoyed at the prospect of initiating the process again and again each time a new service pops up that I want to check out.

    Maitri, I actually think of last.fm as more of an archival tool. I like how it indexes all the music I play and builds up a profile. (Wow, I didn’t know I listened to the Beatles that much.) I don’t use the social or recommendation features hardly at all these days.

    And ye gods, how I loathe MySpace. It sends chills down my web-developer’s spine.

  4. What no Jaiku, Pownc, Yahoo IM…and not to mention a halve dozen email accounts. When communication is your forte, every new avenue is a road that must be traveled. One must assume you’ve overlooked your most pervasive social networking tool because it as become so much a part of your life…b.rox.com!

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