[...] couple weeks back, Koster commented that there is a glut of social networking services. He’s right — most grown-ups don’t have time to maintain profiles on whatever the [...]

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make regarding Second Life. You can’t compare an apple to an orange and complain that the apple falls short on orangeness. Facebook isn’t trying to be purely a networking tool any more than World of Warcraft is purely trying to be a virtual world. That doesn’t make Facebook somehow worse than LinkedIn, nor does it make World of Warcraft worse than Second Life. They’re just doing different things. And if you try and judge something on what it’s not doing rather than what it is doing, then of course you’re going to have a skewed perception of its usefulness.

If you started broadcasting random quizzes across your instant messengers for ‘synchronous’ feedback, then you’d start getting blocked rather quickly. The kind of information that Facebook and MySpace users want to broadcast tends to be the sort of thing you don’t want to be compelled to respond to. It’s like placing the articles in an RSS aggregator, in the full knowledge that you won’t care about most of them.

Whether chat is synchronous or not depends on what sort of chat you’re referring to, though I suppose it’s often synonymous with instant messaging. If you look at web forums, USENET, mailing lists, they’re generally a slow-moving form of chat, and Facebook/MySpace do that sort of communication very well.

With your comments on wanting to discuss quizzes in person and to take chats to IM, it seems like you’re faulting Facebook on not covering every possible way you might want to interact with another person – but since when has that been a significant downside to a service? It doesn’t provide instant messaging, but then it doesn’t provide music recommendations, auctions, or rats to kill either. (Excluding the various add-ins, anyway.) What it does provide is a suite of functionality that a lot of people are finding useful because it does what they want, which isn’t email, or IM, or blogging, or disparate web forums.

*glances at Second Life*

The gallant thing for me to do would be to not say anything.

He continues, Nobody would want to receive that sort of data ’synchronously’!

I used to post quiz results on IMs with my friends and we’d talk about it and gather interesting philosophicals from the conversation. I’d love to do quizzies synchronously.

And concludes, At a risk of further butchering unnecessary buzzwords, it’s Chat 2.0, not Email 2.0.

But chat is synchronous, which is one of the two central issues. Facebook is painfully asynchronous, and this makes it, for me, an email app with more features than gmail. I’ve done wall-to-wall conversations in near real-time, and then I got sick of it and demanded we take it to IMs.

I don’t know. I’m not sure where Facebook is going, but I get a very bad vibe from it when I think about its future. I can’t back up my feelings, or I would, but I don’t see a future for fb. Something’s wrong with it.

[...] maybe that’s a little harsh.  but, it’s not just [...]

It has been my experience that as we go through life, our in-person social patterns change. In high school, the forced close proximity of people with no other connection aside from the place that they live, results in a perception of a massive social group. News travelled fast, and gossip was power. Then you leave for college, and your perceived social group size tends to shink (as you are no longer in such forced proximity to 600+ others all the time), but they also grow closer. You’re now living with your peers, studying with others who have chosen the same subject, and can find societies with shared interests. Remember how dead the summer can seem, away from your new friends? Then comes graduation and getting a job. Your college friends part ways, and it’s suddenly harder to actually meet people outside of work. There’s a reason many universities end up with an ‘old fogey’ following in the local area. As you move around from job to job, only the closest of friends tend to stick, especially since the pressures of work and home life result in less time to spend with friends.

I really need to find some data to back this up, but I’d argue that most social network users (before they get too kind and add everyone as a friend) tend to fall into two distinct groups. There are those who use the social networking site to network with where they are and the culture of that place. They are likely to have hundreds of ‘friends’ and to write on ‘walls’ a lot, prefering a style similar to their lives in person. These people are most likely at school or their first college. For these people, Raph is undoubtably correct in saying that if they are actively asynchronously communicating, they are probably synchronously communicating in person also.

Then there are those who use social networking sites as a means to aggregate communication with but those people they really want to keep in touch with and tend not to see regularly in person. These people have likely moved on from their college, and now have jobs or have moved away from their old friends (who may also be getting work). They may well frequent forums when they may once have attended student societies, so their social place networking happens on the forum itself. They are likely to be more self-concious about their profiles, as their workmates may have requested to be a ‘friend’ and they do not wish to rock the boat. Due to work and family constraints, communication with their friends is generally fairly infrequent or asynchronous, and indeed the asynchronous nature actually can help in arranging to meet up with their old friends. They’re likely to have less than fifty listed, but each friend to them actually means far more and is more likely to actually be a friend. Just like the social place networkers cannot synchronously communicate with all their ‘friends’ regularly, neither can the social friend networker, but the social friend networker still manages this despite the distance. They are highly likely to instant message and phone a few of their friends several times a week, making time between work and home.

Trivial interactions, such as those offered by twitter or the ‘walls’ are important to human communication. Life itself is generally fairly trivial. Again, I should look into this before making wild statements, but I’d hazard that the exchange of trivial information helps people feel closer to eachother. However, in the long term, this is only of value for those absolutely closest to you – with time comes confidence in friendships, with which comes a lack of fear of the absence of communication.

One thing I suspect facebook may be able to lever is it’s ability to offer you a local network. Certainly it can be very hard for someone moving to a new place of work in a new town to feel like they are part of any community. The modern internet generation is less connected to their local area than any that have came before, but facebook’s local community offers a protected means to feel a member.

Interestingly enough, however, I actually found setting a primary network on facebook reduced it’s usefulness for me. I use social networking sites to keep in touch with old friends that are distant, but by adding a primary network shared by some lesser acquaintances, these more important friends were relegated to be behind a link.

Posting flippant messages on someone’s ‘wall’ communicates some information without the implied requirement to reply that you have with email or instant messaging. It’s also a shared space where third parties can view and comment, much like your typical web forums. As Michael W said above, email and instant messaging is too personal in some cases. Similarly, the numerous quiz results that many people broadcast to their friends on MySpace are not there to impart information but to provide entertainment to all who choose to read it, at a time of their choosing. Nobody would want to receive that sort of data ‘synchronously’!

I also disagree that extensive use of social networking implies a lot of synchronous interaction in person. Just as with other online situations, there are many people who seem to do a lot more talking online than off. Indeed some seem to use Facebook and MySpace as a way of getting to know vague acquaintances better, who they can then potentially spend time with in real life, when they may not have had the social skills to become good friends with that person in a typical face-to-face situation.

The features apply equally well to people scattered around the country, when viewed as an enjoyable way of communicating with people, instead of the purely utilitarian view of using it to arrange social events or to transfer information. At a risk of further butchering unnecessary buzzwords, it’s Chat 2.0, not Email 2.0.

The school alleged that Zuckerberg had hacked into Harvard house websites to harvest images of students without their permission, for profit.[citation needed] Zuckerberg stated that he thought that information should be free and publicly available. The action taken by the board, if any, was not made public. In 2004, Zuckerberg created Facebook and took a leave of absence from the college. A year later he dropped out.

Sounds like he was kicked out for unethical behaviour, but who knows? SNS are relatively new, there are lots of public relation disasters to be made. Younger people might not care, older ones probably do. Sites for personal communication that doesn’t allow you to delete your account and information complete never leaves me with a fuzzy feeling… Trust is hard to build, easy to kill. Putting so much personal information in one place is just a very very bad idea. The worst thing isn’t what you put in yourself, but that your friends describe you as well.

My guess is that a few business oriented sites will survive in their own niche and that the more personal sites will fracture as one size does not fit all, but that there will be some generic hubs that allow cross-site communication as others have alluded to is very probable.

Re: “I am unsure that the principle is applicable to life after that. But maybe I am just misled by my very non-local circle of friends and life.”

I’ve pondered that one a lot too — I can’t help but wonder every now and again if I’d be able to “get it” a lot better with these services if I instead had a life that caused me to stick around physical groups of friends a lot longer than I have so far, especially during those HS and College days you mention.

Whenever I do wonder, I can’t help but try to compare it with what we did back in those BBS/MUD days, where we had a group of anywhere from 15 to 50 people that got together every week for random outings. Online was very much a way to enhance RL connections even back then. Same thing? I honestly don’t know.

Of course, to look at the analogy from a 180 degree angle, I suppose the same could also be said for people who meet people primarily in MMOs or VWs, and also talk in SNS’es — Using somewhat-less-virtual SNS’es to enhance wholly-virtual lives.

Bottom-line, I think we tend to forget just how intensely local our lives are in high school and college; I am unsure that the principle is applicable to life after that. But maybe I am just misled by my very non-local circle of friends and life.

I strongly disagree; of course, I strongly believe in the significance of heritage. Obviously, you moved to San Diego. You weren’t born here. I was born here. This is where I live. This is where I work. Most of the people in my LinkedIn network are local. Almost all of the people in my Facebook network are local. And I’m involved in several local organizations to help local people connect and stay connected. The people who have moved away from San Diego want to come back, they want to remember, and they want to reconnect.

It’s never been easy to keep track of every individual’s e-mail address and phone number. It’s never been easy to contact every individual to learn about what’s been going on in their lives. That’s where SNS comes in. You need to remember only one address for your entire network. And you don’t have to call anyone to learn what they’ve been doing because they “tell” you by updating their profile.

Sometimes I wonder if replacing the need to contact people with the need to update a website is good or bad… I wondered the same about answering machines and voicemail and instant messaging. These technologies—I don’t think they “enhance” in-person interaction. What they actually do is make interpersonal relatonships more pointed.

Making contact with people is so easy that we only talk to people when we need to talk to them. The other night on television, I saw one of Bill Maher’s standup comedy shows. He was joking about how surprised people are when they call and someone actually answers. What do you do then? You just wanted their voicemail. They’re so rude to answer. Argh! *click*

That gives us breather room, but I think that space more strongly benefits the people who make the effort to contact people when they don’t need to talk to anyone. They make talking to people an artificial requirement of socializing and even of business. That’s what I call “cultivating meaningful relationships.” That’s “community relations.” That’s “networking.” That’s “just being friendly.”

In business, I think it’s very important to embrace the power of locality. Your brand doesn’t start growing with your first customer or the first person outside your company to hear about you. Your brand starts growing the first time that you the entrepreneur thought about your business. The people who are most important in the early stages of your brand are the people who grow up with it, so to speak, and those people include you and your employees first before anyone else. Everything begins from the center of a circle.

A small business usually doesn’t start out competing on the international front. A small business usually starts in a local market, surrounded by equally hungry local businesses, with local customers. Investments usually come from local friends and immediate family, not from venture capitalists hundreds of miles away.

With any business, I really believe that you have to “think local” and progress outward from there. I guess that’s really what the “think global, act locally” mantra really means, but I think the “big picture” should be about where you are and how you got there first before being about where you want to be.

Email can sometimes seem “too personal” and thats were social networking sites really help.