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The crisis of the Social Networking Sites

In Development & Computer, Thoughts on 28 November 2006 with 4 comments

This morning I’ve read a computer magazine (suposed to be a development magazine, but it was not…) and I’ve found some terrible forecast for the Social Networking Sites like Digg and similar. Few minutes later I read this post on the false myths on the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, related to the risk of another .com bubble, and then another post (always on Webomatica) on the Digg problems…
There are a lot of things that are not working, but mainly these sites are plagued by the worst thing possible: human stupidity! If you don’t have a blog you probably don’t know that SPAM is not e-mail related only, and spam is one of the reason I don’t like some sort of “News Aggregators” or, to call them in the Cool (?) way… social networks. There are thousands of interesting things there, but too many times posting there means receiving a lot of spam (if not worst… my auth.log is full of hacking attempt).

If I want to increase the number of visitor on FCHouse, I don’t like to have three thousands visits, which 2500 are spammers. Now, this blog is not widely read: 30.000 visits in one year and a half (less than 100 per day), 450 posts, 620 comments… and 1500 spam comments deleted! It means that 10% of my visits are spam. I’m sorry if this blog is “limited“, but I like to have few, intelligent readers more than millions of bots and ba** bre***r!

Social Networking Now, returning to the main idea: the Social Networking is a dangerous idea, because it is based on the interaction between (sometimes stupid) people. Posts that are badly rated without having been read, posta that are target of Spam-Storms… and this is only a taste.

The idea behind the social networking is really cute, it has always been, but there are some limitations. We are going to move to a Web 2.0 out of the beta version while some of the most important site about it are dying… so the thought that those sites are NOT the real Web 2.0 is starting popping up in my mind. So What is this Web 2.0, and even if it is a rhetoric question, if we are still fighting the problems of this, why someone is going to talk (because everything I’ve heard until now are only words) of Web 3.0?

This is a strange world.

This site (and its owner) support the idea of the Semantic Web, but it DOES NOT support the stupid naming convention of Web 3.0. Let the children play, for the serious things talk with intelligent names. Semantic Web, it is not that bad, right?


4 Comments

Human stupidity.. yeah that sucks big time. Digg is turning into a mess while it gets more memmbers. Because more member means more stupid people and an average crowd. Becoming less geek, less nerd, more average. Also when you write a comment, more stupid people to not understand you but try to answer to prove you wrong.

Posted by jedi on 28 November 2006 @ 11am

Hi Jedi.

There is a nice things I try to remember:
Mr. Cole’s Axiom:
The sum of the intelligence on the planet is a constant; the population is growing.

The Social Networking is an interesting stuff, but we have always to remember that we are dealing with Human Being (faulty by design?) and not with computer. You refer to Geeks and Nerds: yes, when they were the only surfer (because technology was not transparent) it was better, but it wasn’t Social Networking, it was Geek Networking (of which I was a proud member!)

Cheers

Posted by Carlo on 28 November 2006 @ 11am

Human nature is what it is, there is no avoiding it! I think like open source software, there is potential but there also has to be rules and guidelines. A certain amount of constraints to guide the chaos of human nature. Maybe the social networking thing needs an algorithm like Google’s page rank? Who knows.

Posted by Webomatica on 28 November 2006 @ 8pm

Hello!
I think that too many times we are trying to be connected to the rest of the world, without being ready for this. I mean that sometimes we do things we don’t need, because it’s “cool”. The perfect example is last.fm: we ususally don’t care what our neighbour is doing, but we are happy to now that on the other side of the world there is a geek that is listening the same music we are listening to.
WHY?
Sometimes the “Social Networking” is overrated, I don’t think it will be the real engine of the next generation of internet. Yes, you can find examples of companies that have make a fortune with it (YouTube), but let’s dig in the real need of the “semantic”…

“I need to travel from New Cross to Cannon Street. What is the best way to get there?”

or

“I have found a flat in Wherever Street in London and I want to know if it is a good zone to live in.”

in these cases both companies (train, tube, bus) and Social Networking (neighbours, postmen, ecc) could help… but the boundaries are still strong and the Human Behaviour in the Social Networking is still a precious variable, both good and bad.

Posted by Carlo on 29 November 2006 @ 9am

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